...human needs and preferences are remarkably stable, even as the technologies for meeting those needs change. From smoke signals to the written letter to the pony express to the telegraph to the landline phone to todayâs smartphone, the âjobâ of conveying information over long distances has hardly changed at all, even as our abilities to get that job done have completely transformed.
Related Quotes
The process of convincing someone to buy and use your product needs to respect the customer, needs to understand their needs at different points of the user experience. You canât just shout your top ten features at people in a billboard and a website and packaging just like you canât simply hand someone your rĂ©sumĂ© at an interview, then lunch, then on a date. Sure, youâre giving them important information, but different moments in the journey
require different approaches.
Your message needs to fit the customerâs context. You canât say everything everywhere.
Since then, the kind of stability that Durkheim imagined would eventually settle in following industrialization has come to resemble just another infinite aspiration that slips frustratingly further away whenever it seems to be nearly in reach. Instead, as energy-capture rates have surged, new technologies have come online and our cities have continued to swell, constant and unpredictable change has become the new normal everywhere, and anomie looks increasingly like the permanent condition of the modern age.
For these reasons changing values has particularly great significance from a longterm perspective. Looking to the past, we see that such changes have had an enormous impact on the lives of billions of people. Looking to the future, if we can improve the values that guide the behaviour of generations to come, we can be pretty confident that they will take better actions, even if theyâre living in a world very different from our own, the nature of which we cannot predict.
Advances in communication technologies are making remote work much more common for jobs in business, media, education, and other industries, and an always-on mentality threatens to make workersâ home lives into an extension of the work sphere. To say the least, a consideration of how these changes have affected our social fitness has not been a top priority. And yet the state of our relationships is among the most important factors in our health and well-being.
In general, hardly any effort is expended on considering what kinds of communication channels should be maintained to allow the population to express its views to the government, or at least, not from an information engineering point of view. It seems quite clear that different arrangements might have different characteristics â a proportional election system should be capable of carrying slightly more information than a first-past-the-post one, a monthly opinion poll has a shorter lag than an annual one, and so on, but this isnât how theyâre thought of; elections are simply horse races with executive power as the prize, and opinion polls are rarely used as more than a sort of racing form to predict the winners of the next race. The channels seem to be designed to carry very few bits of information.
The only kind of communication that such a constrained channel can carry is a scream: the signal passes through the levels of control and announces that something has gone wrong which threatens the integrity of the system itself. This is why there was a family resemblance between the âpopulistâ movements that sprang up in the 2010s. Narendra Modi in India, Beppe Grillo in Italy, Donald Trump in America, Nigel Farage in Britain or Recep Tayyip ErdoÄan in Turkey instinctively realised that they were on the same side; each of them, in their own culturally specific context, was acting as a communication channel for a population which wanted to convey a single bit of information: the message that translates as, âHELP! THE CURRENT STATE OF AFFAIRS IS INTOLERABLE TO ME.