Alexander Chalkidis

Month: March 2013

  • The so called tablet revolution is about my fridge

    Some of you might remember the “smart fridge” idea.  More than a decade ago some companies had made horribly expensive fridges which had built in computers and a touch screen.   You could surf the net, watch movies and generally do most of the things you ended up doing with your laptop parked on the kitchen table.

    There is a fine line in understanding New Media which most people get wrong.  New gadgets should not be viewed like Swiss Army knives.   It isn’t about what they can do.   Much like the top of the range Swiss Army knife, you know, the one with all the extras…well you can’t really carry that around in your pocket.   Which sort of defeats the purpose as you leave it in the car all the time “just in case”.  For all our Twitter, news aggregations, Google search intelligence, mobile apps and different ways to get to these things the correct way to understand all the different technology, all the hardware, the software, the apps, the search engines, the databases is as the ingredients of a very special personalised menu in our brains.

    It is a menu we all make up as we go along.   We consume media via our own understanding of the different options.     When you are about to fry an egg to eat you might think “hey, I wonder what is happening in the world?”   You then turn that need into an action which depends on what you have available and how you perceive those options.   It would have been a transistor radio.  Then a TV in the kitchen or – worse still – a very loud TV in the lounge that you just listened to while annoying everyone else in the house.  Then that laptop in the kitchen streaming your a TV channel for news.  Or your favorite news aggregator, Facebook updates or Twitter timeline.   Most of us missed the futuristic $5000 fridge with the touch screen and now people are getting to tablets.

    A tablet is essentially a smart TV.  Mainly for consuming information as passively as possible.  When they perfect the systems that detect eye movement you won’t even have to scroll up and down those Facebook status updates manually.  So just give them better way to attach them to a fridge and we can call it a day.

    The so called tablet revolution was essentially about how to stick another screen on my fridge.

  • Communication lessons from Afghanistan

    These days in Greece we celebrate independence from Ottoman rule.  It was in essence guerilla warfare.  Greeks have a tradition of sorts in this type of war.  But of course the true and proven modern masters are the Afghans.  The greatest powers of the world have tried their best to conquer the place and failed.

    In corporate communications and especially in selling ideas, we often emphasize the need to coordinate messages.   We try to aggregate them or centralize the sources.   We try to get disparate groups to converge around a single “authorized” source.   We do our best not to let some stray independent voice confuse the information market with conflicting views.   We want to be able to react quickly and without noise when necessary.

    But that is not how the Afghans fight.   One of the main advantages they have, from the time they fought the British, to the Soviets and now the retreating Allies, is that they are not coordinated.   You can’t easily agree something with one of the tribal leaders and expect him to get the others nearby to follow him.     You will have to find your way through the mountains, risk getting shot by an AK47 and locate the next tribe yourself.  Then figure out the leader, then start a whole new conversation.   And – even if he agrees with your proposal – there is no way to guarantee that he will communicate to others in the way you want him to.

    This is an encouraging and useful as a model for certain types of idea propagation.   Interest groups, from environmentalists to anarchists, often lament their lack of resources to create big communication machines similar to the multinationals or government agencies they are fighting.  They try to centralise information flows using social media.

    But maybe it serves better to think like an Afghan warlord some times…