As the saying goes, “those who don’t know history tend to repeat it”.
I should have titled this blog, “the art of reinventing the wheel” as I saw familiar patterns reemerge everyday.
Avatar for instance. For a moment there, I thought I was watching Jurassic Park and Never-Ending Story put together.
Lady Gaga takes Madonna’s slot, Raquel Welch– Sophia Loren‘s.
And BP in the Gulf now the new bad guy after the Alaskan Exxon accident.
Matterhorn just painted a more vivid portrait than hasty Apocalypse Now (which in itself was Joseph Conrad‘s fixer-upper).
And Madoff was just reinventing Ponzi and recent ball field crashers just reinvent the 60’s running strippers (except for the being Tasered part).
I must admit, when the Oscar for Best Director went to the first woman ever (Hurt Locker),
all bets were off (in itself, it could be seen as a repeat of Broke Back Mountain‘s Ang Lee.
By challenging our presumptions, these people were given awards. Once again, Need to Know, the show, tries to follow
Bill Moyer’s footsteps. The new “disrupts” the old (Amazon’s free smart phones) And society – or customer – benefits.
I hope there will be more google-like companies to unseat the incumbent (at least we got choices now between BING, Yahoo Search and Google).
( Bill Gates and Warren Buffett both said that five years from now, there will be another break through, and another five years after that etc…)
For instance, automated Search will be less random and based on our search profile, it can “recommend” and even make more sense than we could articulate .
Can’t wait for Semantic Web to come around. Now, that’s pattern recognition at a personal level: our digital shadow on the wall.
Keep clicking. And pack away those black and white ancestral pictures. Our descendants can always access “us” in the cloud, where they will learn about us more than we could ever selectively tell them. It’s good that each of us can be proud to have left not only our DNA strains, but also our 1-and-0 (not B/W) portrait i.e. our digital footprint.
The machine is the mirror. You might be looking at it, but it will eventually reciprocate. We forget, but it won’t.
Thang Nguyen 555 