It’s this time of the year… New year’s trends lists are the currency of the moment, and every blogger and his sister compile a knowledgeable trends list for 2010. The world doesn’t really need another one from me.
So instead I’d like to talk about one trend which we should try to avoid in the next year.
Please can we stop killing things?
Over the last few years we’ve been all guilty of new-technologies sensationalism. Our response to the overwhelming pace of change made us believe that emerging platforms and technologies will categorically and dramatically kill everything that was before them. Search for “TV is Dead” on google and you’ll get over 2million(!) results. But is it? really? (That clever dude who wrote a book on the death of TV advertising also founded a new agency that specialises in marketing in Second Life. No, really!)
What else have we had?
Twitter is killing blogging!
Widgets will kill the homepage!
Second Life is killing Real Life!
Digital is killing advertising!
Yahoo pipes will kill the browser!
Google is killing Microsoft!
iGoogle is killing Newspapers!
Gaming is killing the cinema!
Books are a thing of the past!
Google Wave will kill Facebook!
Facebook is killing email!
Twitter is killing Facebook!
And now, the most recent hyperbole, straight from Twitter’s (AKA The Pulse) oven, I give you….
Streams are killing the web page.
Guess what. it turns out that when human evolve and construct culture(s) they have some time-attention-alchemist-like qualities whereby old things are not being replaced with new stuff, they add to them. Sometimes they compete and sometime co-habit and complementary and together they evolve and we evolve. Honestly, we’re like every good parents - when we have a new baby we don’t stop loving the older one, we find time and make room in our hearts for both…;-)
True, there are some casualties (DVD did kill the VHS) and natural selection (e.g. closure of few magazines and channels), some people make less money, some people make loads new money. Things do expand and contract, evolve and change but reality is more complex and is no where near the new-technologies massacres we read about every day.
So for 2010, let’s try to avoid the trend of killing old things in favour of new things and live happily ever after…
Peace 
Comments 2
Asi Sharabi, you make me smile.
Posted 09 Dec 2009 at 9:40 am ¶Ha. Nice on Asi. Especially like the sentence “Honestly, we’re like every good parents - when we have a new baby we don’t stop loving the older one, we find time and make room in our hearts for both…;-)”
You’re right, people should stop moaning about the death of this and that and just get on with it. Darwin’s theory exists for a reason.
Posted 09 Dec 2009 at 9:49 am ¶Trackbacks & Pingbacks 1
[...] recently read a great post over on Asi Sharabi’s blog. Asi wants to avoid one trend in 2010: killing things. He reckons there’s a sick amount of [...]
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