Television will never catch on – cyber-egos however, they just might

Television will never catch on. Who’s going to want to sit in a dark room to look at a small black and white picture in the corner? Of course the technology improved, the reasons got better, and we now all have a screen the size of Wales that has a great picture even with the sun shining on it.

CB Radio will never catch on. Who’s going to want to speak to people they don’t know in a 5 mile radius where most of the conversation is about what the weather is like five miles away? Of course the technology improved and became mobile phones. Mobile phones allow us to talk to anyone in the world; cleverly filtering the service so that we talk to people we actually know and want to talk to.

E-mail will never catch on, it’s a weird tool only used by academics who think an address ends with ac.uk!

Then suddenly, almost overnight, everyone has an e-mail address, every company has a web site, and Microsoft begrudgingly accept that maybe the internet is here to stay.

Texting will never catch on. Who’s going to want to send a short text message using a keyboard requiring multiple pressings to even get an ‘e’ to someone using a device primarily designed for talking to people? Of course it not only caught on, it prospered and so began the end of the conversation and the start of the statement that doesn’t want a response, except to like it and pass it on to someone else, the start of the cyber-ego.

Facebook is the simplification of everyone having their own website (other cyber-ego centric sites are available), and the preposterous extension that the rest of the world wants to look at your web site, and pictures of you on holiday, and down the pub making weird faces. If no one ever wanted to look at your holiday pictures when they were 5 by 4 photographs being passed around, or even worse, the dreaded 35mm slide show, why does anyone think people are interested when they are on Facebook?

Glory be, now we have Twitter, combining real-time statement based texting with the distribution abilities of Facebook aka the internet. We have real-time messaging that Dan Dare wouldn’t believe was possible and we use it to tell the world what we had for breakfast, or we missed our bus, or maybe something trivial. Why do we think anyone cares? Because our new improved cyber-ego tells us that all our followers (hundreds of our closest friends) are hanging on every word we say. We massage your cyber-ego and in return you massage ours. We ‘like’ and re-tweet you and you do the same in return. Suddenly there is no trivia any more, everything is equally important. You used to have to remove the wheat from the chaff. There is no chaff to remove anymore, everything is wheat. Now there is something to tweet about.

The big advantage is that now that I know everything about you, your date of birth, your mother’s maiden name, where you go on holiday, and when you go on holiday, I needn’t bother you with the chaff of applying for a credit card or a loan on-line, I have your wheat, I can do it all for you. I’m even willing to spend the money for you; after all I am one of your closest friends.

Rod Pugh is MD of First Cyber Security, manufacturers of bogus wheat detectors.

The irony of this being a blog has not escaped me – Rod