Here’s a trend technology might not disrupt
An antidote to the overwhelming technology hype cycle.
Having grown up with an early adopter Dad, I’m a believer that technology is, on the whole, a force for good. But having worked in the marketing / innovation space for a decade, the echo chamber of hype can make you feel like a rabbit in the headlights. It can be just a little stressful managing that feeling that you might not be running fast enough.
Let’s take the beautifully done Hype Cycle from Gartner each year. A stunning piece of curated tech-culture, rating technology maturity from early stage through to wide-scale adoption.
When you’re designing new experiences and services for customers it’s easy to feel anxious that you’re not riding the next big wave. Whenever I feel this way on a project, I remember one of the most profound social experiments I’ve ever come across. I’d like to share it with you.
Think of it as a kind of mental sorbet when you’re feeling tech motion sickness.
How is the world feeling today?
The year is 2005. Two university friends, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, decided they had a question they wanted to answer. How is the world feeling today?
They set to work building a crawler that scanned the internet every 10 minutes searching for any sentence, on any English language blog across the world, that contains the words “I feel”.
They captured the blog’s location, the gender and age of the author and the sentence containing “I feel….”. This got thrown into a database and in 2006 they launched a project called wefeelfine.org.
What emerged was an utterly unique census of the world’s population. With a sample size of over 12 million feelings, Jonathan and Sep were able to build what they referred to as the “Almanac of Human Emotion”. And it’s beautiful and profound in equal measures.
We Feel Fine.
The book is where you want to head. They start pulling out data trends that show how reported emotion changes by country, city, gender and even time of day. They break down different emotions and give these beautiful snap shots of people at the coal-face of that particular feeling.
What blows my mind more than anything else is how emotion changes over the course of our lives. Using a database of over 12 million reports of human emotion, they were able to build a picture of how we tend to express how we feel at across every chapter of our lives.
Spoiler alert! Here’s how most lives play out.
There are some beautiful data visualisations in the book but the most profound for me is what they call “A Life Sentence”. This is a single page representation of the most common emotional themes we experience throughout our lives, broken down by age. Remember, this is a sample of 12 million reported emotions. Take a deep breath and enjoy.
It turns out, your story is probably going to turn out pretty well.
So it doesn’t matter how fast technology changes, how much society shifts or how unstable things can feel — one thing is certain about the future. You’ll still be selling to people. And the chances are, those people are experiencing a story not too dissimilar to the one above.
The question is, how could your product or service help make the story better?
If you’re interested in the book, you can grab it here.
Let me know what books blew your mind in the comments below.
