Keeping Your Edge

I read constantly. I use the technologies constantly. And believe it or not, I watch other people constantly. In my kids' dorm rooms in their first years of college, I watched them play with their computers, and I noticed the things they did. I noticed, for example, the rise of the Napster phenomenon and of peer-to-peer sharing of files because they were doing it. I watched instant-messaging technology because they used it and said it would be killer. The kids keep these windows open on their desktops all the time, carrying on interrupted two-way conversations with a dozen or so people at one time, while they're sitting there doing their homework. That's a very different way of thinking about the world, and unless you actually see it happening, you don't know how it works.

You have to get out of your own environment. You have to watch what real people are doing. And you have to make sure you're drinking your own brew, that you're away from people who are like you. It's sort of like the story about Warren Buffett's wife: Find out what your spouse is doing, rather than thinking that the world is like you.

In the October 1878 issue of Scientific American, there's a story written by a very knowledgeable science writer of that time. It was the first month after the commercial introduction of the telephone from the new American Telephone & Telegraph Corporation. The writer talked about what he and the company thought the main uses of the telephone would be. I was dumbstruck when I read it. He thought the major application of the telephone would be managers of large companies talking to their employees on the assembly line, giving them pep talks and company information. The manager would be up on a balcony overlooking the assembly line, and each of the workers would have a handset. Or people would subscribe to opera, so they could sit around the phone in their home and listen to a performance, or to the broadcast of a baseball game during which they could chat amongst themselves as if they were in the stands.

What the article missed was that telephony was a brand-new means of private two-way communication that meant that two people who were not in the same room could have a conversation no one else could hear. There was no paradigm for this at all at the time. The paradigm that did exist was the new radio broadcast technology, so this new telephony idea was inappropriately shoehorned into that format in the speculations of even pretty savvy observers. Who would have thought back in the late 1800s that there would be billions of telephones in the world today? There was no way to think of that, no experience that predicted it.

What we often miss with new technologies is their eventual real use and importance. The way to stay sharp is not by studying journals, but by watching what people do - observing the sociological implications of technological change.