Technology is never the story
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“Nothing is so obvious that it’s obvious.”
—Errol Morris
As a kid, I was a fan of science fiction because of how it presented the future as a promising place where hard things were made easier with a lot of neat ideas.
I bought into the idea that technology was always the story.
It was only with age that I began to understand how science fiction tells us far more about the present than it does about the future. It’s less predictive and more reflective.
In other words, it turns out that technology is never the story.
The story we tell—no matter the setting—is both defined and limited by what we choose to see in our environment. And in the science fiction stories we tell, we tend to choose to not see a lot.
Take one of my favourites, Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” As art, it’s a masterpiece. The film’s sets look fantastic even by today’s standards. They thought through a lot of the problems of space travel. You could also make the case that the filmmaker and set designers correctly predicted flat-screen tablets and video calls, along with computers that get more capable while getting smaller.
But that movie is half a century old now. And today, it’s almost laughable to see how Kubrick and his team were either unaware or flippant about things that seem glaringly obvious to us now, including the lack of female characters in the story and the apparent society-wide marginalization of anyone who doesn’t look like the story’s two heroes.
Watching it today, we rationalize all of that by saying “well, that’s the 1960s for you.” It’s telling us a story from a point of view that no longer makes sense to us.
And that’s my point: we only see what we want to see.
You can apply that lesson to the way we try to solve design and marketing problems today.
All of us are prone to the belief that what worked before should work today. It’s why so many marketers fail. They treat technology—and automation in particular—as a solution to a problem we have, when it’s just a tool.
It only works well when it doesn’t look like technology.
I regularly make notes and perform copyedits on a tablet with a stylus. I spend zero minutes thinking about the fact that the pencil alone is a powerful mini computer. The designers of that device correctly understood the advice of PARC’s Mark Weiser: “A good tool is an invisible tool. By invisible, we mean that the tool does not intrude on your consciousness; you focus on the task, not the tool.”
We need to apply that same insight to the way we connect with our customers and our readers.
If it looks like technology, we have failed.
If it looks like sincere, authentic conversation where we are listening with intent and speaking with empathy, then we do better.
Very best, Patrick
P.S. CreativeBoost now goes on its annual December hiatus. See you in early 2019. Thank you to all of you who regularly forward this email to a friend. It helps a lot. Do that now.
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