Tendances

3.0, Anyone?

I was spring-cleaning my closet the other day, when a box of silver coated business cards fell on the floor. They were printed in ’98. Having just left the Media Lab, I accidentally found an investor in a next–seat neighbour on a flight to St Francisco. He proposed to finance my rather vague vision of online TV, though I suspect it may have been a tax right-off. Regardless, I quickly proceeded to buying a video camera and printing those cards, with an enormous “3001 Productions” in the center, and, in smaller type: “Have you thought about the next millennium?”

My only excuse for that rather adolescent antic is the fact that everyone was obsessed with the millennium turn those days. But as I squirm at my attempt to be cute, and shove the cards back in the closet, it gets me thinking of how sick I am of this millennium already.

It started, suitably enough, under the sign of everything turning 2.0. As guilty as anyone for sprinkling this horrid term indiscriminately on anything from PowerPoint slides to Investment Memoranda, I stand ready to testify that the sooner we can get to 3.0, the better.

I suppose I am a hypocrite. While working around the clock to launch a 2.0 website, and impulsively updating my profile on Facebook during work hours, I do write intermittently about the effects social networking has on our collective ego and lament the way it might democratize good taste to the point of extinction. Recently I have laid down my arms against TV ( which, in 98, I thought was the closest one can get to the lowest common denominator), only to turn them against Facebook, Twitter and future off-springs of the viral monster.

But I am fighting a losing battle.

Last summer I was told by someone in the know that Silicon Valley investors will only put money in start-ups with “community” stamped all over them. You think that crisis might have changed that? No chance. Social networking sites are still the toast of the town, a feast in time of plague.

This weekend a friend from my “3001” days offered 250,000$ to Twitter to add him to their list of top 20 “suggested follows”. “Why on earth would you do that?” I asked. His reply: “You would get 5-10m followers if you were on the auto-follow list. If 10-20% of them visit your website each month, that’s millions of visits.”

The other day, at the South by South West festival – a gathering which is supposed to be about new musical talent – a founder of yet another social network proclaimed to a gaping audience that community posts are about to become a more important communication medium than email. Or, to quote verbatim, they are becoming “email 2.0” (ouch). The hapless entrepreneur concluded: « What people want to do on social network these days is post status updates. We think it’s all people want to do. »

The wheel of 2.0 is not turning back, so fasten your seatbelts. Those of you who still wonder why someone would update their status to “making spaghetti” or “feeding the dog”, think again. The digital noise of mediocre thoughts and mundane platitudes is only about to get louder. So we better start thinking about 3.0, even if it might have to wait till the next millennium.

And now if you will excuse me, while I go post this on Facebook.

natalia@cominmag.ch

Ses brillantes études l'ont amenée à Harvard et au MIT. Depuis, elle s'intéresse à l'évolution de la télévision. Elle vient de lancer une chaîne musicale sur IPTV.

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