May, 2004

Hey Ron Frailly, as publisher of the Marion Star, I figure you owe John Jarvis and the other Star reporters a hefty increase in pay.  After all, they are all international news correspondents now.  That’s right.  You thought you had a stable of local reporters who would cover Marion City Council, accidents, school news and the comings and goings in and around Marion for those of us who buy the paper.  That was then.  This is now.

Since the Star began publishing on its Internet site, the audience is now world-wide.  Now, the words uttered in a Council meeting on a Monday night are available to anyone with a laptop in, say, Bangalore, India Tuesday morning.  Of course, it’s not just the Star.  With a laptop, or even a cell phone with text messaging, virtually everyone has the ability to publish their thoughts and amplify their voice to, theoretically, the whole wired world.

This is, at once, amazing, exciting, convenient—and, unsettling, scary and unpredictable.  As I write this, I am sitting on my sofa, typing into a laptop computer that is tapped into a high speed internet connection through a wireless link.  Through that link, a San Diego blues station is filling my headphones with funky guitar riffs unavailable in the local radio market.  And when I tire of that, I can flip to jazz from London with a tap on the mouse pad.  Wow.

I was talking to a friend recently about a book review in the New York Times.  Before the conversation was over, he pulled the review up on the web and had the book on the way from Amazon.com--all in about three minutes. 

Routinely at CAN DO, we’re talking to prospects, making pitches, sending photos and trying to bring investment and jobs to Marion through e-mail and the web.  Documents are exchanged over thousands of miles with a point and a click.  We’ve had to adapt the traditional sales process to the new paradigm required in a wired (and wireless) world.

As a child of the 1950’s, I can remember the thrill of hearing the fuzzy voices of grandparents over long distance telephone lines.  It was a rare treat.  Today, of course, Yahoo chat and instant messaging make long distance communication routine.  Today’s teenager, I’m convinced, could not function socially without AOL instant messaging.

As with most things, there is a down side to the communications revolution.  It hit home recently when I heard from a company we’re working with.  Routine coverage of a public meeting that, in a previous day, would have been buried in the paper’s archives the day after it was published, now was posted on the World Wide Web—for, who knows how long?  Forever?  A trade publication that apparently combs the Web for keywords found the Star article.  In an instant it was cut and pasted it into the trade publication’s magazine and website.  Now, what was intended as local coverage to a local audience, has become an item in a specialized industry publication that could tip off competitors about a company’s plans.  Information meant for local consumption is now instantly available to anyone with a laptop and a Google search. 

And it doesn’t go away.  I just did a Google search of my name.  In a tenth of a second, 1650 entries were immediately available.  I discovered, for example, that one of these columns had been reprinted in the Marietta Times last year and that things I’d written about a decade ago are still out there, available in cyberspace. 

The lesson is, today you can’t assume anything written or spoken will go to a specific audience.  In a wired world, knowledge is available instantly to anyone, anywhere.  Could that fact chill companies’ willingness to share information?  And in doing so, chill future growth?  And wouldn’t that be ironic?  That the system of ultimate information freedom becomes the instrument of more guarded communication?

The arrow of time is forever forward.  The Internet is here to stay.  But, as with any technology, we need to learn how to use it properly, so that it is we who harness the tool—not the tool that harnesses us.