November 17th, 2007
If you’re over 40 years old, you probably remember at least some period of your adult life when there were no cell-phones. And unless you were an IT professional (e.g., a programmer, database architect, etc.), you also probably remember a period of several years where neither you nor anyone you knew had an e-mail address. And if you’re part of that generation (or older), then today you probably don’t know anyone (except maybe your kids) with a Facebook/MySpace account, or a user-id on Twitter, Flickr, Dopplr, or half a dozen other social networks. Not only that, you’re probably proud of that fact: “Hrmmph! What kind of narcissistic idiot uses Facebook, anway? And why would you ‘Twitter’ someone, when you could actually pick up the phone and talk to them? And what’s Dopplr, anyay? Sounds like a pinko Commie pervert porn site!”
Think back 10-20 years, and you may recall the same thing being said about e-mail and cell-phones — and before that (at least in the U.S.) car phones and fax machines. You may have been the first in your office, or your extended family, or your neighborhood, to have a cell-phone; or you may have been just as grumpy and negative about cell phones then as you are about blogging and wikis and social networks now. “Why would anyone have a cell phone?” you might have asked, rhetorically. “Who you gonna call, anyway — after all, nobody else has a cell phone! So if you’re going to call someone at home, or in the office (i.e., on a “land line,” as we would now say), you could just as well use a pay phone. Pay phones are everywhere! They’re on every street corner! They’re in every airport! They’re everywhere! We don’t need no steenking cell-phones!”
And perhaps you had the same reaction the first time a business colleague gave you a business card with an email address on it (10 years earlier, we had the same reaction when someone was audacious enough to put their fax number on their business card). “What kind of narcissistic twit puts his email address on his business card?” you probably exclaimed loudly. “Why would anyone want to know your email address? After all, nobody else has an email address — or if they do, it’s only accessible to other people within the same company, in which case they can look it up in the printed phone directory on their desk!”
You may think I’m exaggerating, but this is all true; I remember the snickers and snorts I got from my business colleagues when I first started carrying a brick-sized cellphone in 1993 (which I did primarily because I had already seen what looked like everyone on the streets of Hong Kong and Tokyo carrying such devices, as far back as 1990). And I remember people snickering at me when I gave them business cards that listed a CompuServe email address, much the way (though for entirely different reasons) someone will snicker at you today if you give them a business card with an AOL email address printed on it.
But it took only a few years from the point where nobody else had such access to newfangled technological gadgets, to the point where 10-20% of the “early adopters” had it … to the point where the majority of people had such things … to the point where virtually everyone had it. If you want to communicate with a friend, family member, or business colleague today, and they tell you that they don’t have a cell phone or an email address, what do you think? I think the important point to realize is that you rarely think to yourself, “Okay, what kind of primitive communication technology am I going to use to communicate with this person?”
Instead, you’re more likely to think: this person is irrelevant. Why? Because this person has consciously and deliberately chosen to isolate himself from the world in which he/she lives. My late mother-in-law, for example, not only refused to have an answering machine in her own apartment in the 1980s, but also refused to leave a message on the answering machine in the apartment where my wife and I lived. I don’t know if it upset my wife, but my reaction was pretty simple: Great! She’s irrelevant! I don’t have to worry about communicating with her, except for those holiday dinners where we’re all forced to sit around a table and try to find something to talk about.
And so it is today with social networks. It doesn’t matter which ones you belong to; the point is that, to increasing degree over the next few years, if you adamantly and noisily refuse to participate in any of them, an entire generation of people who do use these networks will conclude: you’re irrelevant. They won’t bother trying to convince you or persuade you; they won’t object, protest, march, or complain loudly. They’ll simply ignore you. It’s okay with them — and if it’s okay with you, then everyone is happy. But if you wonder why fewer and fewer people are paying attention to you, there’s a reason …
I began to notice this a few weeks ago when I started sending out Dopplr invitations to friends and business colleagues — mostly of my own middle-aged generation — whom I would enjoy meeting up with while on out-of-town trips. Thus far, roughly one-third of the people I’ve invited to join Dopplr (which, of course, is free) have accepted; but two-thirds have simply ignored the invitation. One of them said to me, in person, “I don’t know what this is, and I don’t know why I would want to use such a service — and besides, it looks too complicated.” To which my response is simply a shrug: you’ve just become irrelevant.
As a result, I find myself slowly building a new network of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances … and slowly leaving behind a much larger network of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances I’ve built up over the past 40 years of my adult life. It’s not that I dislike any of my old friends and colleagues … but it’s almost as if they’ve consciously chosen not to have an email address, not to have a cell phone, and not to have a fax number. Hey, that’s fine; Western Union and the Pony Express are out of business, but if I have to write a snail-mail letter to communicate with my old friends, I guess I can do it once or twice a year. But in the meantime, there’s a younger generation that’s learning how to communicate, collaborate, share ideas, and keep track of each other’s travel plans, and day-to-day activities through a variety of new networks.
As for the increasingly irrelevant set of old friends: good luck, have a nice life, and send me an annual Christmas letter to let me know if you’re still alive …
November 17th, 2007 at 10:29 pm
nice article
November 18th, 2007 at 12:59 am
Before 5 years, I was like you Mother-In-Low
But now I become normal
Nice blog Ed.
November 18th, 2007 at 2:49 am
Yeah, that’s true, but I still can’t find hardly anyone I knew in school on these sites (or even with Google, for that matter).
I think that’s why Facebook is getting the kind of attention it’s been getting, because it’s the only network where there’s a real chance that just about everyone might be on it, some day.
November 19th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
Hi Ed –
Enjoyed your blog!
Just wanted to drop you a quick note to say that although Western Union is no longer sending telegrams, it’s now the world’s largest money-transfer company (with revenue of $4.5 billion in 2006).
(If we’re out of business, I’m in trouble …
November 20th, 2007 at 9:13 pm
While I agree to some extent with the general sentiment…isn’t “irrelevant” a bit extreme – particularly given that Dopplr is not exactly a mainstream network. Is there a danger that you will lose contact with your “middle-aged fuddy-duddy friends” because of what could be regarded as a subjective fondness for Dopplr?….and now that I think of it…surely the Dopplr invitations would have been sent to them by email…hmmmm. Maybe they’re not so fuddy-duddy after all. From their viewpoint maybe you’ve gone overboard on Web 2.0…and lost “real” connection. Is their irrelevance more to do with a general changing of interests? You’ve raised an interesting issue….food for thought.
November 21st, 2007 at 1:00 am
Roger,
The point is that I can’t be bothered to remember which friends I should explicitly notify about my travel plans, nor do they remember to notify me … but to the extent that we’re all on Dopplr, it takes care of itself. Sure, we could accomplish the same thing through traditional email — but the point is that we don’t do do so …
November 21st, 2007 at 1:02 am
Kristin,
Okay, that may be true of Western Union … but I never did depend on them to transfer money, and it would never have occurred to me today. I realize, of course, that it’s an important mechanism for people to transfer funds from the U.S. to various developing nations (I hope that’s a neutral way of stating it)
November 26th, 2007 at 6:44 am
Ed, hate to disagree. I am in that demographic and relatively “cool” by your definition. I write 2 blogs, participate in some Google groups and wikis, have had a LinkedIn account for years and a Facebook account…but do not accept invites to most new services and have an inactive FB account
…not because I am being anti-social but because the messaging mechanism has become more important than the message. It is what my teenage daughter lives in. She emails some one, then calls to make sure the mail was delivered, then uses SMS and IM and her chess chat room…and of course, FN and other web services – and the message is usually the same – the messaging mechanisms have proliferated
98% of folks who are my LinkedIn contact have never contacted me in the past year or ever…I am a “scalp” in their network…
take the other POV. As privacy becomes so difficult with data losses every day, some people do not want to share things like travel details a la Dopplr. Whatever happened to opt-in? It’s only for spam? There is so much social pressure to join specific web services…
,,,so till some rules of etiquette emerge around our social networks I cannot blame your and my fuddy duddy peers for not joining in…
oh and btw my teenage daughter wishes us fuddy duddy’s stayed out of networks like Facebook -)
December 9th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Vinnie, you LOVE to disagree! Although it’s possibly a little early to call “irrelevant” on those OTHER middle-aged people, I see it coming. I don’t disagree with Vinnie that there is still some work to do with etiquette (I prefer “norms”), identity and privacy – but pioneers always had to deal with inhospitable terrain and wild animals. Those coming after the early adopters (the “net natives” like our kids) will have both a different perspective on privacy and some better tools for managing identity and interaction on the web … courtesy of the current trials. Oh – and both my daughters friended me on Facebook, as have a number of their friends …
November 5th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
I came upon this site trying to research if people became more cold and callus around age 40,myself included.I had a lot of long time friends who are very willing and able to discard friendships,families and relationships more easily then I can give up an old pair of running shoes.Not to worry though,most have about 200 or more face book friends as well as a sense of entitlement to change there top ratted friends and family for better ones at any given time.I lot of people That I talk to in person have less attention span then Homer Simpson,maybe I should text them.
I have some good friends and relatives{not 200},when I’m with them,the computer and cell phone and irrelevant.
January 27th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
This sad thing here is the loss of personal contact. Electronic networks aside. It is a society in decline where people no longer want to meet face to face to communicate anymore.
April 5th, 2009 at 2:57 am
I am not so sure that that is true, Edward.
If you cannot write, Twittering and facebooking will make you look foolish. You and I can write, but there are many illiterate and aliterate people who have important stories.
At the other extreme, many readers of Internet media see complex syntax and instantly decide not to read the post, thereby forming a wrong idea of the poster.
In the old days of American data processing, highly intelligent programmers who could write well (of which in my experience there were many) were misunderstood because they thought their expertise would give them a forum in the typical American, and American-influenced, business meeting.
They did not realize that American businessmen are not fond of the English language, having failed to read Alexis de Tocqueville, or Edmund Wilson on the culture of Ford Motors in the 1930s, despite their intelligence.
They were counseled and mentored, ably and well enough, by such as you and Gerald (Weinberg) to learn “effective communication” as a skill apart from content, but as Dijkstra believed, and I believe, this is foolishness.
Today, their blog is unread, both because of traditional American anti-intellectualism, and because language skills are in rapid decline, not so much because of the Internet as the deliberate destruction of public education in the name of tax cuts.
Was Dijkstra irrevelant? He refused to blog before his untimely death.
April 5th, 2009 at 3:06 am
Edward! I see,on Facebook, an “Ed Yourdon” in New York City! Is that you? No picture! You middle-aged fuddy duddy!
I’ll send a Friend request. I think I’m relevant, since after I turned down a job offer from you in 1980 which I should have taken (teaching methodology in Latin America) I had all sorts of fascinating adventures in computing. I’ve left the field and now I’m a teacher in Hong Kong.
I hope to see you soon.
April 10th, 2009 at 10:44 am
Ed Nilges,
Yes, I’m on Facebook … though I rarely update my status there. Most of my Web 2.0 communications are on Twitter (where my Twitter-id is “yourdon”). And my Twitter “network” seems to be a different set of people than the Facebook “network” — one is mostly business/professional colleagues and friends, while the other is family, relatives, personal friends. So while I previously implemented an automatic cross-post of all my Twitter tweets to Facebook, I’ve recently turned it off…
As for the larger question of whether Dijkstra was relevant: as I recall, he died in 2002 or thereabouts, before blogging was widespread. In any case, if he were alive today, his refusal to blog/Twitter/FB would make him irrelevant — at least in the short term — to many younger members of the IT profession. For better or worse, Marshal McLuhan’s statement that “the medium is the message” is a reality. A substantial percentage of the Gen X/Y generation, for example, gets its news about politics and current events from Jon Stewart on the “Daily Show,” not from Brian Williams or the other prime-time news anchors.
Ed