Ben Metcalfe’s rant about working with people who just don’t ‘get it’ struck a chord.
I guess it’s unfair to expect that the Internet exists as part of the fundamental fabric of everyone’s life in the same way it does mine. However it’s equally frustrating that concepts such as remixing content, tagsonomies, user generated content, collaborative filtering and so on could not be bought into the debate because most of my fellow participants were unfamiliar with even simple examples of them (eg Flickr). And the few that did viewed them as frivolous follies that would not form mainstream interests and behaviours.
It’s a absolute fact that most people I discuss these ideas with have no idea what I’m talking about. Showing them the various tools makes them interested, but not yet committed. Slowly, minds are changing, but there are many out there up and down the heirarchy to change.
However, reading the article immediately bought to mind a cartoon from the Metro that has been put up on my desk since I saw it last week – it just sums up some days.
And of course the ingenious IBM commercial. 🙂
Well, it seems like Ben is living is a universe very parallel to my own, so I understand exactly what he means. To me the frustration is not the unfamiliarity of others with new ideas and concepts – everyone has to learn of something new from somewhere once. It’s the blank stare that comes when some are confronted with an idea or a technology that so clearly changes everything! And deep down you know it’s not actually about lack of ability to understand the concept, it’s about the unwillingness to accept change, the absolute terror some see in the unfamiliar or the untried.
Hell knows how we ever made it to the Moon.
The Moon was on plan…everyone knew where they were going. Today, there’s no predictable path of where we go next, ot moves to fast. And we’ve had the dot com boom…haven’t we???? It didn’t work….or that is a perception I see people have. They’ve got the web, and it does not suit them, so they carry on with the old mental model. Meanwhile the world carries on and comes up with new things every day, leaving them behind.