Technologies that will soon all be forgotten
After some deliberation on whether to start a blog or not, I finally started one (this one) a month or so ago. This week I read in the local newspaper that blogging was old fasioned (sooo 2008) and being completely replaced by micro-blogging. Fortunately I recently started to use twitter as well, so I’m not completely worried about my digital affinity. On the other hand, until now I still try to find out what’s the advantage of Twitter over MSN, ICQ (a technology from the mid 90’s) or even an ordinary IRC channel (early 90’s). To me until now it doesn’t seem more than a slow group chat. It actually looks a lot like a big newsgroup discussion (first introduced on digital bulletin boards in the 80’s).
If I am to believe the numerous articles on Twitter, “this technology is here to stay”. It’s gonna change the way we spread news, it’s gonna change the way we use the internet, it’s going to change our lives. Surprisingly, this is exactly what I read about traditional blogging a few years ago. Did it really change our world? No, not really. Not surprisingly, it’s especially the companies that have interests in these technologies that spread these words first. And they are frequently copied by the early adopters.
I have decided to stop believing this kind of statements. Nearly no new technology is here to stay. (No reason not to enjoy them of course.) There might be exceptions, like perhaps the wheel, but even there I’m not sure yet. In practice it’s naive to think that any new technology will not be succeeded and eventually replaced by a newer technology sooner or later. And newer technologies rather sooner than later. In the mean time, I’ll just keep blogging.