This is the second and last extract of my upcoming book Back to the Future of Marketing. I was overwhelmed by your reaction to the previous post on the same subject so here is one more. Next time you hear from me on this will be when the book is ready...
Let’s go back a
few decades when my aunt, in her 80’s today, held a job at a state-run
telecommunications company as a telephonist, a job title so antiquated that
even the Microsoft spellchecker on my PC doesn’t recognise it. Yet, back in
those days, thousands of women across Europe and the US, in the industrialised
world, were working as telephonists connecting cables to little colourful sockets
and casually eavesdropping into conversations of people totally strange to
them.
What happened to her job? Technology happened, that’s what. In the case of my aunty, who is still very much alive today, it was
her marriage to my uncle, God rest his soul, that took her out of the misery of
possessing gossip nuggets no one was interested to consume; however many of her
then colleagues’ careers were shattered once technological advances rendered
telephone centres redundant, and with them, many aunts the world over.
As I alluded to
earlier, the data my aunt was listening into during hours of eavesdropping
filling her nails (I wasn’t there, I am just imagining this), was relevant to
nobody either because no one was interested in gossip about people they don’t even
know, or because my aunt had no archiving means, no information gathering
mechanism and systems that would allow her to make some reasonable use of all
that data either for personal fun or commercial
gain.
Simply put, back
then technology wasn’t conducive to making chatting appealing. Which, simply put
again, this isn’t the case anymore. Because chatter in social media is the king
of all content, or the route of all evil, depending on whose side you are with.
Is your job at peril because of the advent of technology?
poly kalo!
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