Newton’s famous quote is one of the things that jumps out on reading the opening of Jeff Jarvis’ Private Parts, is how we live in an era of pretty shells that catch our attention and obsess some of us.
While we play with those pretty shells, we ignore much of what is happening around us. Those glittering social media and cloud computing tools are fun to play with, but what do they really mean?
The winners from the early stages of the industrial revolution were people like Josian Wedgwood and Robert Stephenson who saw how to apply the inventions of the time to create new products and markets, later they were followed by people like Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford who developed the industries of the 20th Century.
Right now, we’re making shiny trinkets out of our technology tools, Business Week’s It’s Always Sunny in Silicon Valley makes this case well and Eric Schmidt’s bubble quotation above comes from that.
We see lots of applications for finding coffee roasters, sharing music files and plugging into the social media platform of the day; all of which are the concerns of middle class white people trying to maintain last century’s consumer society.
Somehow we’re missing the bigger picture, but gee those sea shells are pretty.