history

Our Gifts To The Historians Of The Future

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Well, Chris Brown got into a Twitter tussle with a comedienne.  Warning, strong language, and a reminder of what a sexist jerk he is, if you needed the reminder.

Meanwhile, The Complex put together a list of Donald Trump’s 50 stupidest tweets.  I rather imagine they had to pare it down a lot.

So now between Twitter, screenshots, articles, backup databases, and browser caches, this kind of moronicism is archived forever.

Think of the future.  Think of the historians who will go through this digital embarrassment festival and what they’ll do with it.  History may have been written by the victors, but these days history is written onto disk drives, waiting to be discovered.  Hideous secrets and embarrassing truths will be dug up again and again.

History a hundred years from now will not be the same.

You’re welcome future historians who read this.  Also, kinda sorry about this crazy.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

 

 

Books As History: Your New Sales Tool?

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So as we all know eBooks are selling like crazy.  Right now as we can read ebooks on multiple formats, on multiple devices, and save money, it's not surprising.  These eBook sales also bring up the usual question of what happens to print media (you know the one that comes up every few months)

As much as I love my Kindle and eBooks, I admit part of me wonders about the role permanence of the printed word.  A book can last.  A book can be read without a battery charger or a when locked out of an account.  A book is a record without strings attached.

So I'd like to postulate something that both sells more physical books and helps people appreciate them – something that may help you authors out there get your hard copies into people's hands.

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Frustration Friday: Applenesia

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Apple is on top.  Apple rules our world.  iI want my iPhone, my iPad, and my iSystem.

Sure there's some bumps.  Ping has spam.  Apple has higher prices than some.  There's concerns expressed by people about closed technology ecosystems that are very legitimate.

However, let's face it – Apple is on top.  Everyone talks about them, wants to be like them, praises them.

So, I'd now like to see some people kindly discuss why all the doomsaying about Apple that we've seen on and off the last twenty years was wrong.  Publicly.  In detail.

I'm not angry it happened.  In some cases the various Apple-will-die stories seemed relevant at the time.  However they all turned out to be dreadfully wrong, so can some of the journalists and pundits and writers please go back and explain why so many of us were dead wrong?

Would it be hard to stop the praise to look back and ask just what we were thinking here?  Maybe it'll help us get better at predicting and evaluating.

Would it hurt to explore what Apple did to survive all those many years?  Maybe we can learn some lessons.

Could we ask ourselves if the death-of-Apple stories were just a fad (much like the death-of-Twitter stories these days)?  Perhaps we can stop history from repeating itself, as it often does to our embarrassment.

So, please news pages and magazines, journalists and writers, take a moment and explore why Apple lived when there were many times its demise was predicted.  Give us books, or articles, or even blog posts.

You can even write the draft on your iPad if you want, to get you in the mood.

– Steven Savage

(By the way the title of this?  One of my lamest.  Seriously.)