Is the end really near?

In a marketing position, you are always looking for new ways to deliver ‘the message’. Any way that you can insert a description of your good or service into a stranger’s subconscious is a plus. Over the last few years, online commerce has (supposedly) taken off to the extent that everyone is doing it. I have yet to define ‘everyone’, because to me this number appears to be about 7 customers and 100,000 companies trying to sell, but perhaps I’m wrong. My question is a simple one: Why are they doing it? Is it because they simply cannot be bothered to go outside, meet someone else, check for comparison prices, or talk to someone that works in retail? Is it because eventual control over the purchasing process, and the possibility of a good financial deal is the be all and end all of every buying decision? I think that we are being sold faulty goods, here: Let’s drill down a little. I shall be 50 years old this year, and I spend a lot of time online. There are many reasons for this, but in the mid-nineties when I was introduced to online worlds, I found it interesting in an anonymous kind of way. You could say and do anything online (or watch it.), and no one really knew you were doing it. It’s a childish emotion, I know, but it was fun for a while. My attention span has never been truly measurable without a micrometer, but that’s just me. Being adolescent-minded, it was obvious to me at the time that the pioneers of the Internet were ones that would interest kids that would grow up with your website, so their thought processes were aimed a certain way, anyway. But what happens when Internet users don’t grow up? Because that’s where we are at. There has been a lot of fear over the death of newspapers, lately. Does anyone read anymore? Not the internet generation, that’s for sure. The answer isn’t a lack of knowledge about this generation, it’s a case of newspapers not talking down to their readers (Obvious exceptions accepted.). It’s the case that to read the entire newspaper, you have to have an interest in politics, international diplomacy, business, spots, pop culture, fashion and the workplace. That’s a little dry, when you have the choice of reading about Johnny Depp’s love life. If you don’t have an interest in what someone else is thinking, you aren’t going to educate yourself. If you are more at home just doing what you want, and reading about what is interesting to you, you aren’t going to find much interesting enough to hold your attention. For the last 70 years, we have been beholding the end of some medium or other: Newspapers were going to be killed by the movies; movies by radio, radio by TV, TV by cable; cable by the net, and we are all still enjoying all of it. Why? Because everyone learned to adapt, and offer something different. What we aren’t going to change is the infantilization of the current generations mid-thirties and below. While they are still stuck on celebrity website gossip, the remaining 10% in power are reading newspapers and are making decisions that affect all of us. They are manipulating exchange rates, organising the fall of governments, and the price of oil. The only thing anyone can do is to try to educate themselves about what is happening. How the real estate crisis in the States has resulted in a generation in their late fifties having to work for five more years. How the continuing rise in oil prices are due to the peak of easily accessible supply that means that it will run out about 3 years after the US social safety net runs out of money. At this time, the 4-500 miles either side of the equator will be uninhabitable thanks to global warming, and about a billion people will be shoehorning themselves into the rest if the World. When I was growing up, we paid a license fee in order to be able to watch TV. That fee ran the national broadcaster that allowed it to broadcast all that boring stuff that you should be watching. I DID gain an interest in business and cricket, I didn’t in Opera and ballet, but it was there if someone wanted it. What is wrong with defining a piece of the 500-channel TV universe and multiple radio offerings?  If we are to have any hope in our race, it is those in their twenties right now that will have to right these wrongs within the next 20 years. What a pity that the majority of these are tweeting about their underwear, rather than learning how to fix the place.

High Gas Prices – The Roll of the Dice

During coffee on the smoking patio of my local ‘Blenz’ last week, I eavesdropped on a conversation. Not tough to do, either, given the volume of what turned out to be a lecture along the lines of: “When I was a lad….”. Among the butts, discarded cups and peeling steel tables, this guy began with the history of gasoline prices, and the exact and only reason why we have fuel prices that very soon will have to be mortgaged, to be afforded.

This caffeine-guru’s answer isn’t the point for this Post (But, in case you are interested, it was Oil Futures traders -Bastards!), but rather how odd that there has to be one answer. Ever since I have lived in North America, I have been disturbed by this logical way of looking at life. In sports, the MVP (Or Man of the Match, as we used to call it in the UK) in any sporting occasion, is simply the guy that throws the winning ball, or makes the winning score. I am used to unsung heroes being MOTM: The plucky midfielder whose runs into the other half of the field were undefendable, or the hard-as-rock defender that held up the opposing strikers enough to put the opposition out of position on every possession. Over here, though, there has to be one reason why your team won, and this is it.

Likewise, Elections are called way before the final ballot is cast, so that everyone can see the result in Prime Time, instead of waiting until tomorrow morning. It is instant gratification that, therefore, can be pegged to one reason, one moment, one state, that someone won and someone lost.

I miss my British all night, overnight parties that we held to see who was going to be called winner around breakfast next day. They were exciting to see the tides turn gradually, then sweep back again in a vast organic tide, like a pile of autumn leaves blowing over your driveway. Made up of thousands of individuals, it sweeps back and forth as one, fawn, wave.

I often have fun looking at the build up of soccer goals, to see where the ‘killer touch’ occurred in the move – the clever fake, the short pass, the misplaced defender, looking at the scorer as a part of a team effort, not an individual – still, that’s the Socialist in me, I guess.

Oil prices are this high for many reasons and, while I blame the society that let Futures traders get so out of control, we aren’t also counting in the rise of the middle-class in developing countries, the loss of the ozone layer, greenhouse gases, the inability to make and sell a car in the US that does all the right things, rather than one that sells only on gut reactions of shape, colour, and speed.

In fact, it’s almost like rolling a hand of poker dice. You are only going to count three out of five, but it is the array of all five that you are looking at, and the decision process becomes way more complex very quickly.

I have thought for the longest time that coincidence is much more of a primary mover of human affairs than anyone thinks. When I look at the string of situations that led to me flying to Los Angeles 20 years ago, it makes my heart beat faster to think that one change somewhere along the way, and I wouldn’t have got a look in. Recently, my wife and I were shown ‘The Secret’, and it says mostly the same thing: It’s all going to hit the fan, no matter what you do – just get out of the way and keep your head down.

For an outlandish and entertaining look at this subject, Leonard Mlodinow’s book on the illogical turning of our World and universe: “The Drunkard’s Walk” . It is a revealing, and very entertaining look at how we cannot look at one answer for every single situation in out daily lives. Just as molecules fly through space with all the wayward grace of well-oiled drunk, so too, do we stagger through our uncertain world mistakenly believing in cause-and-effect, purpose and direction.

There are lots of reasons for every situation in life that we can now look back on and unravel like a troublesome knot in a skein of wool. The trick is to learn from these disparate strings of chaos to ensure that they don’t happen again.

It’s a pity that our own need for transportation highs over the last 150 years in Europe and North America have trumped the sensible voices for restraint that would have helped us get out of this knotty oil situation long before this.