Has the Geek been Disinherited?
‘The Geek shall inherit the Earth’. As jokes go, it was never really all that great, but about 5-6 years ago, it really seemed to fit. We were entering the Digital Age, which perhaps more than any which preceded it split the cognoscenti from the layman.
Either you could ‘code’, or you couldn’t, and if you couldn’t you were excluded from having a right to an opinion about all sorts of things. Suddenly, the geek was king and your 30 years of experience in sales or marketing didn’t matter at all, grandad.
And so, for much of the past decade, it has been. Funders, dazzled by the glory and promise of the Web, lost their senses and began funding things like mass-digitisation, which a few short years before they would have sent away to write a proper Business Plan. Technology became the industry which earned its keep by promising more than it could really deliver.
But recently, things seem to have changed. We have lived with the new generation of web tools (which don’t require you to do anything more than drag and drop - check out Weebly if you don’t believe me) for long enough that technology just doesn’t hold the same kind of terror for non-geeks anymore.
Suddenly, the old world of common-sense and supply and demand seems to be reasserting itself. I say this because in the past few months I have encountered a new breed of policymaker. The PlayStation Generation is coming into its own and they’re seeing through the glamour of technology. we can’t say to them ‘you don’t get it’ because they do, they just don’t agree that IT is the universal panacaea it was once presented as being.
Evidence? The Semantic Web has gone very quiet. Politicians are suddenly talking about funding infrastructure not websites. Senior, important people are saying things like ‘couldn’t we just build that in Wordpress?’. People have stopped talking about a ‘Digital’ agenda as an end in itself, and have started talking about cross-platform multi-channel marketing in which the Web is just one of many components.
Welcome to the Brave Old World!
March 12th, 2009 at 10:11 am
Everyone can be a programmer geek with Scratch: http://scratch.mit.edu/
Even 4 year olds.
And they will inherit the Earth. Hopefully.
March 13th, 2009 at 4:26 pm
Perhaps the problem didn’t lie so much with the geeks (though some definitely took advantage of others faith in their ability to guide them through this complicated new world) but with the people who understood it just enough to be dangerous, but not enough to really understand the new possibilities?
But I’m possibly just a geek who’s watched at least one too many dot-com boom bust cycles spin up around her…
March 13th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Btw, the semantic web has apparently become ‘web3.0′ (if you’re a ’social media expert’; it’s quietly appearing as ‘linked data’ in other ways). Iit’d be interesting to plot it onto Gartner’s Hype Cycle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle).
March 13th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Semantic Web is anything but quiet. Its just not going to get a big public facing killer app anytime soon. Stuff like searchmonkey, google social graph api (XFN / FOAF), twine etc show that its happily moving along and becoming part of the scenery and the plumbing.
It may not hold ‘terror’ for the non-geeks, but they still often completely misunderstand it, so the geek can show them how to be ‘agile’ and collaborate - win win!
April 9th, 2009 at 5:01 pm
So maybe we need just to cut ourselves some slack - the last generation of projects delivered good stuff and created knowledge which we couldn’t have anticipated beforehand. Sure, some of the outputs were completely lame, but collectively, progress was made and good things happened.
Perhaps the impetus to mass-digitise wasn’t to create a critical mass of access, but a critical mass of supply, in the hope that this would trigger new forms of demand.
I never *got* the Semantic Web, I freely admit, but Linked Data, that I get. Maybe it’s the same thing - maybe this is about marketing?
April 27th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
Totally. Linked Data is (almost, for geeks) selling the sizzle, not the sausage - and that’s what this needs.
Of course, as Mike L says, it’s going to happen behind the scenes anyway. With any luck, the cultural heritage sector/MLAs will be part of that.
April 27th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
It’s always seemed to me that the killer app for museums and libraries is auto-completion of documentation - or at least partial auto-completion or ‘assisted cataloguing’.
Like preditive text, you start entering data and it uses linked data to draw an informed extrapolation of your intended meeting. Then, when you correct it, it gets a little bit smarter and adds to the total fund of knowledge.
Better, your resource base for connecting knowledge to objects suddenly goes from the 50-100 people you can afford to employ to the 100m people publishing data on the web.
I think we can do more than be part of linked data - I think we should be using it to enrich it with the historical record - like Google with a memory.
June 28th, 2011 at 4:27 pm
wonderful post, very informative. I wonder why the other experts of this sector do not notice this. You must continue your writing. I am sure, you’ve a great readers’ base already!