Nowadays, our lives are digital-drenched. Actually, we are a fundamental component of the digital world ourselves. However, we still cannot exploit digital technologies as much as we should. And, considering that humanity learnt how to use fire in the blink of an eye while it took years to invent the engine, how long will it take digital technologies to express their full potential? Read it in Italian.
In the past, it was newspapers that spread news. Today, every kid in the world can do it by using social media, and even blogs like mine can easily circulate news. Once, if you wanted to sell goods, you needed some sort of organization, a shop, a market stand, whereas now you just need a computer. Even in Italy, where only 74% of the population uses internet.
I and a friend of mine, Silvio Meazza, founder of MC&Saatchi, have tried to paint a portrait of the current situation in the book “People are media”, which will hit the physical shelves and the virtual ones on Amazon on November 14, 2017. Together, we have analyzed the main tools which are currently available thanks to new technologies, such as online retailers, chat rooms, social media, and big data, also trying to explain how they have revolutionized our existence and, more importantly, how they are bound to shape it and re-transform it in the years to come.
We are all digital citizens, but we are also the new media. The way we communicate with one another through chats and mobile phones has changed, thus canceling the physical distance among continents. We have turned Crm upside down, adapting it to the one used by Amazon and we have got used to returning wrong purchases, to the point that 90% of people are happy with what they buy online. But we are also the ones who leave behind huge quantities of data, thanks to which marketing companies make big money; so much for our privacy.
Each chapter we have written is divided in several parts: how we have been modified by the digital information society and how companies have been reshaped by new tools, how we are expected to evolve even further to adapt to new fades and technologies, what companies can do to better exploit such technologies so as not to put their own existence at risk.
We have found out a lot of things while writing the book, and we have shed a light onto several aspects of a situation we live every single day in our lives but which, when put together, actually look very different. We have also agreed on one thing: it is true that businesses may close down if they refuse to keep up, but what about people? Would they really risk being left behind by a world that runs so much faster than they do? Since, obviously, the type of turnover that applies to companies cannot apply to human beings.
Our book entitled “People are media” is neither a manual, nor a conversation between experts dedicated to those people who are already familiar with these concepts. It is an objective analysis of our lives and our work, aiming at opening up our eyes on how we have changed over the years, along with the world that surrounds us. It is also a tool to be used by companies to keep up and decide how and where to invest their money to survive.
By the way, among all such questions we have also found an answer: the future is ahead of us. I realize it every morning when I wake up and, in less than an hour I have already been informed about what has just happened on the other side of the world and I have found a tutorial to prepare the cocktail I drank the night before. We may decide to fight the future, but we will not be able to put it off, anyway. Actually, it is already here!
You can buy the book here and then tell me what you think of it by tweeting @agostinellialdo
