Can you hear me now?
In 1843, Samuel FB Morse transmitted his famous ‘what hath God wrought’ on a telegraph wire.
In doing so, he kicked off the start of an electronics/communication revolution that we are still experiencing daily.
Prior to Morse, the fastest anyone could communicate information with anyone else had not changed since the days of the Roman Republic – a man on a fast horse. After Morse, the world would never be the same.
But Morse’s telegraph was expensive to construct. It required miles and miles of wire. It was essentially a business tool, or used by government or the burgeoning press.
No one put a telegraph in their kitchen to dot and dash the latest family gossip to friends.
When Alexander Graham Bell converted the long dots and dashes to voice he also saw this as a business tool. The telephone was certainly easier to use than Morse Code (you didn’t have to learn a thing), but like Morse, Bell saw the phone as only for business. In fact, the notion of ‘regular people’ tying up the phone lines for hours with their dribble was a source of continuous irritation.
As technologies get both more powerful and less expensive (and easier to use) there comes a moment when the formerly expensive private machine crosses into public everyday use, and in doing so, the nature of the technology and its impact on culture changes rapidly.
The automobile was once the purview of the very rich, the military and the government. That everyone might own a car was considered insane, and impossible. They were far too expensive – a bit too complicated to operate. When Henry Ford smashed the price of cars and made them accessible to everyone, he set off a revolution that is with us to this day. The car begat highways, which begat Holiday Inns, Levittowns, MacDonald’s and Walmarts, just to name a few. None of those could have happened until the price of the average car crossed the ‘average person’ barrier. Once that happened, everything else changed. Think then, of MacDonalds as merely an ‘ap’ for the automobile.
When Thomas Watson headed up IBM, computers were the size of a house (OK, a shed), cost a fortune and were incredibly complicated to operate. (Anyone here know Morse Code today? Anyone here know Fortran?)
The arrival of the PC crossed the barrier, one that even Watson and the IBMers had a hard time imagining. All else that followed (like eBay and Google) were the MacDonalds and Walmart of the personal computer era.
Now we have iPhone4 which has both an HD video camera and iMovie editing software. It is, essentially, a complete TV production studio packed into the ‘palm of your hand’
And, for a world that already spends 4.5 hours a day watching TV (and 8.5 hours a day staring at screens), the next step is fairly obvious.
What Henry Ford was to the automobile, Steve Jobs is now to video. (And apparently you can also get them in white, so I hear).
It is not so much now the ubiquity of video production that is so revolutionary (which it is), it is rather the spin-offs that will now follow. As Walmart and Levittown and MacDonalds followed the automobile’s move from corporate tool to ‘everyone has one’; as eBay and Google followed the computer’s move from corporate tool to ‘everyone has one’; now too television producing area about to pass form the realm of the Corporate to the realm of ‘everyone’s got to have one’.
And what will happen when everyone in the world has a studio in their pocket?
What killer ‘aps’ will this revolution spin out?
Odds are you are not going to become the next Henry Ford or Steve Jobs…
But….
the door to becoming the next Sam Walton or Samuel Levitt is just opening.
