With the avalanche of change that has infected our lifestyles “That was so five minutes ago,” has apparently become the new statement of status among the earliest of early adopters.

This was told to me by MSI’s social media team led by Maureen Brennan, which is quickly changing the face of MSI and energizing us with a new zeal to be in the vanguard. (I am now on Facebook and Twitter, and am blogging. Hello?)

If you think of 70 years as one generation (it has been attainable throughout recorded history…Cicero’s wife lived to 103 after he divorced her) then only three such generations ago, nothing much had changed from the previous 4,000 years.

Caesar when he was in a great rush could travel 50 miles a day, sometimes a little more, and George Washington almost 18 centuries later rarely did as well.   It wasn’t until the high pressure steam engine emerged in the early 1800s that living conditions for the average person really began to change, starting with travel.  And that change accelerated with all the new things that followed including electricity, the telegraph, flight, industrialization, radio, television, new medicines and the computer, to name a few. But that took place over a period of about 150 years.

Now it seems that every month, or even every week we are jolted with something new, and some of us can adapt to it better than others.

It appears that like all human characteristics, our ability to accept change can be placed on a simple scale of one to ten.  The ones of the world will only change their lifestyles on the threat of death…and that might not be enough. The tens have anxiety attacks if they can’t get the very next thing right now.  Most of us are somewhere in the middle of the scale, with the younger demographic, I suspect, well above the six level.

There is an evolutionary theory that helps explain this.  Those who are low on the scale who fight change bank their status on what they know.  If they give into change they believe they lose status because now they are following the crowd.    Those high on the scale bank their status on being the earliest of early adopters. They can’t wait to tell you what they are doing that’s new. And believe me, they’ll tell you.

This is definitely not the time to be near the bottom of the scale if we want to engage life as it is becoming.

What’s really mind boggling is trying to conjecture what activity in the year 2050 might be described as that was so five minutes ago.  If you are ever sitting alone in a bar staring at your drink, this is a good subject to ponder.

Tags: david weiner, early adopters, Facebook, social media

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 at 10:31 pm and is filed under Marketing Plans, Mixed Nuts, Online Media, Social Media, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.