Just had a notification through. Somebody's started following me on Quora. Don't know what Quora is, but I suppose I'm going to have to find out. Tumblr keeps sending me lists of blogs I'm going to like, and LinkedIn just can't stop offering me a free trial of its paid-for premium service.
One characteristic of mine that has survived the time-machine jump from chronological 1984 to the current draft is a resistance - can't help it - to this kind of push selling. They're ever so slightly desperate, aren't they? But they live on a kind of conformity as well. Got a text yesterday from the utility company that does my mobile phone. "Hi William," it began, and went on to remind me not to miss a football match.
If you can't see it, I'm not going to spell it out. Heard a very good talk recently by Douglas Rushkoff, author of 'Throwing Rocks At The Google Bus' and other titles, in which he raised the subject of growth. It is ridiculous, Rushkoff argued, to expect companies endlessly to grow. My example would be Twitter, which is useful to its relatively limited constituency but losing advertisers, backers, et cetera, because its numbers aren't constantly growing.
Thinking about the talk afterwards, I wondered about a possible analogy. If the present business model of social-media companies is constant growth - thus, desperation to attract late adopters like me as well as to offer treats (football matches) to existing subscribers - then it's unsustainable. One version of history is that President Reagan ramped up defence spending, thus forcing the Soviet Union to follow suit, until the Soviet Union ran out of money and collapsed. If they don't keep on ramping up the numbers, social-media companies...
Word beginning with C. Should have titled this post "I'll raise you."
One characteristic of mine that has survived the time-machine jump from chronological 1984 to the current draft is a resistance - can't help it - to this kind of push selling. They're ever so slightly desperate, aren't they? But they live on a kind of conformity as well. Got a text yesterday from the utility company that does my mobile phone. "Hi William," it began, and went on to remind me not to miss a football match.
If you can't see it, I'm not going to spell it out. Heard a very good talk recently by Douglas Rushkoff, author of 'Throwing Rocks At The Google Bus' and other titles, in which he raised the subject of growth. It is ridiculous, Rushkoff argued, to expect companies endlessly to grow. My example would be Twitter, which is useful to its relatively limited constituency but losing advertisers, backers, et cetera, because its numbers aren't constantly growing.
Thinking about the talk afterwards, I wondered about a possible analogy. If the present business model of social-media companies is constant growth - thus, desperation to attract late adopters like me as well as to offer treats (football matches) to existing subscribers - then it's unsustainable. One version of history is that President Reagan ramped up defence spending, thus forcing the Soviet Union to follow suit, until the Soviet Union ran out of money and collapsed. If they don't keep on ramping up the numbers, social-media companies...
Word beginning with C. Should have titled this post "I'll raise you."