Voices
STEVEN
STRAUSS
HUFFINGTON
08.26.12
How Revolutionary
Is Social Media?
“We wanted flying cars,
instead we got 140 characters.”
— Peter Thiel, Founders Fund
WE LIVE IN AN AGE of rapid
change. Amazon, Apple, Facebook,
Google, Twitter and many other
innovators have changed how we
work, communicate and live. But is
this a new industrial revolution?
Twenty-some years ago, a large
bookstore might have had 100,000
books available. Today online retailers (e.g., Amazon) have millions of
books to sell. Similarly, there were
no smartphones two decades ago—
just simple mobile phones and land
lines. Social media then consisted
of email and listservs; now we have
Facebook and Twitter. A 1990s personal computer had only basic capabilities (word processing, spreadsheets, and a few others). Now an
iMac has the power of an earlier
generation’s supercomputer.
ILLUSTRATION BY ANDY MARTIN
Revolutionary? Well, it depends
on what we mean by a revolutionary innovation. I propose that: An
innovation is revolutionary if it
so changes society that going back
to the pre-innovation technology would be catastrophic. By this
Steven
Strauss is
an Advanced
Leadership
Fellow at
Harvard
University for
2012.