Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

As Barack Obama's inaugural address has had a day to sink in, there is a passage that has inspired me to think about how progress sometimes mean going back as much as forward:

"Our challenges may be new. The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true."

This inauguration and indeed this new administration has used new technology in fascinating ways. But as much as it has been forward-thinking, using all the newest in social media goodness, it struck me that this is also a return to the times of tribal councils and of campfire conversations. Technology is enabling conversational intimacy for the masses in ways we haven't experienced in a long time.

It's not just government of course, and it's not just what has been happening recently. Just look at where we have gone with storytelling in the past thousand years. It turned from the oral history of many to the written history of few. Slowly but surely the power to read and write came to the masses, and then with the internet we were able to share our stories. With Wikipedia and citizens journalism, we are writing history as a collective as it happens.

And it's not just our behavior, but it is also our technology. In a great post at ReadWriteWeb, Alex Iskold talks about how in a world that is increasingly becoming more digital, we are actually making a return the physical. Interfaces are becoming more natural and reacting to a familiar and yet new style of physics. Things bounce and slide, they fall and zoom, only no friction... it's effortless, it's better.

We are progressing and we are returning. And hopefully that will mean the best of both worlds.

Marta Strickland