• by September 30, 2009

Do we pick the next technologies or do they choose us?

There's an old maxim that says we always overestimate the changes we expect to see within five years and underestimate those we'll see within 20.

Five years always seems such a long way off, but of course, it's not. If you think about the big shifts in the media industry that we talk about now, they'd all started five years ago. Blogs and citizen journalism were on the rise, as were video sharing and social networking sites. The sites were different - iFilm and MySpace rather than YouTube and Facebook - but the technology was in place, and people were using it.

Yet those technologies were nearly unimaginable in 1989. We'd barely started using pcs on a large scale at that point, and Tim Berners-Lee didn't write the first proposal for the World Wide Web until March of that year.

All of which goes to say that any predictions are likely to be completely wrong. But what can be fun to dwell on is the question of whether advances will be painted by the whims and genius of technologists, or just the desires and pleasures of regular folk.

The notion first struck me when I visited the design lab of electronics-maker Philips in Holland in 2001. The high point of the tour was an installation called "The Home of the Future," displaying a range of fancy electronic devices in mocked-up rooms. One of those devices was the interactive TV. (This was a few years ago now, but at the time, interactive TV was still considered a natural entertainment mash-up.) But when we asked our guide why the concept hadn't made it to retail, he replied that people don't want to interact when they are watching TV. I liked that - the invisible obvious. When people watch TV, they are generally in the mood for passive entertainment, and when they are in the mood for more active entertainment, they use the computer or read a magazine or play a game.

Which is the cart and which is the horse? No matter how whizzy a technology might be, if it conflicts with natural human tendencies, it is unlikely to be adopted on any kind of scale.

An article in The Atlantic a few months ago challenged that assumption. In one of the best cover headlines I've ever read, they simply asked, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The contention was that the Internet and its search function had created a generation of grazers rather than deep readers. People had difficulty concentrating on long passages of text because their neurological pathways had been altered. "Pancake people," as one commentator referred to them - or, more precisely, to us.

It's a believable hypothesis. But I had to remind myself that it's still a hypothesis. The long-term studies that would be needed to validate this have yet to conclude anything. So right now there's nothing more than anecdotal support for the idea that media is rewiring our brains.

On the other hand, I was reminded recently that Twitter, the media brand from this year's class most likely to succeed, has an entirely organic and user-based product-development platform. They don't ever introduce technology because they can - only because their users have asked for it. If a group of the Twitterati finds a function of the service particularly useful, then it is expanded upon. Otherwise, it's left alone. They even assign the lack of a business model to that dynamic, stating they haven't found a way to monetize the service because users haven't come up with one yet.

Craigslist operates on the same basis, which is particularly interesting given that it is being credited in part with the demise of the newspaper industry.

So, overall, you'd have to conclude that we, the people, are the horses that lead the media cart. And I'd go a step farther and suggest that the media that will be the most successful in the next five years, or in the next 20, are those that best reflect and respect our quirky, illogical, weird, nonlinear, brilliant, irrepressible humanness.