Wandering Wandering Star

Dismissing an idea is so easy because it doesn’t involve any work. You can scoff at it. You can ignore it. You can puff some smoke at it. That’s easy. The hard thing to do is protect it, think about it, let it marinate, explore it, riff on it, and try it. The right idea could start out life as the wrong idea.

With education, social status and income – the three major calling cards of the analog snob – now under pressure from the relentless digitization of the world, what is there left to be snobbish about these days?

How about technology?

As Google Chairman Eric Schmidt pointed out at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, what’s emerging is a new social class stratification where the primary determinant of your status will be your access to, and use of, technology. As Schmidt points out, technology-fueled society is coalescing into three distinct tiers: the hyper-connected digital elite, the well-connected middle class and the aspiring majority (who don’t have any real access to technology). According to Schmidt, a small privileged group within society will become the new Digital Snobs:

“The privileged few, the hyper-connected, are likely to face a future that will only be limited by what technology can do. They will have access to unlimited processing power and high-speed networks in most major cities. In Schmidt’s vision, this group will soon be represented by robots at multiple events at the same time while sitting in your office. For them, technologies that once looked like science fiction, will soon be available. Driverless cars, for example, will soon reduce accidents. At the same time, though, technology will actually become much easier to use and ideally just disappear.”

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.