Green, technology and people

For those of you who are football fans (the original meaning of the word football) it was hard to miss. This was the week of Lionel Messi. Four goals against Arsenal in a Champions League semi-final AND scoring against archrival Real Madrid to further secure first place in the Primera Division – I think you could argue you could have worse weeks than that. This remarkable performance immediately triggered discussions amongst football commentators and journalists whether Messi had now entered the elite group of world’s best footballers ever; Pele, Maradona, Cruyff. The hype was everywhere, people claiming that he had already won and proved so much at his age, surely he must be part of this group. Others were more cautious, stating that he still had a long way to go and what made the others great was their sustained position at the top of football. No doubt Messi is a world class player but he needs to be at the helm of international football a bit longer to really judge his greatness. I saw one analyst make a comparison with Ronaldinho who also was seen as the next big thing since Maradona but who blew up and proved to be a short (but impressive) bubble. Let’s hope Messi will do better that that.

This hype-driven journalism reminds me of the ‘next-big-thing’ hunger that also exist in the IT/tech industry. Bloggers, journalists and entrepreneurs are also always looking for the next facebook, the next twitter when even those companies still have a long way to go to see how durable and how sustainable their current success will be. In a sense, Twitter especially is like Lionel Messi. Everybody likes twitter and is convinced of it’s greatness and it’s place in our life and therefore in our economy. But we have seen many examples (like MySpace now on the decline, or Palm now being up for sale) that looked like they were on top of the world. Nothing would be able to threaten their position as the current next-big-thing. And yet they crumbled.

Our current capitalist (meaning extremely short term driven) media environment is the beast that feeds off the hypes. And with the media landscape ever expanding (this blog being an example), the feeding frenzy over new things is even getting bigger. The risk behind this is that hype takes over common sense and that certain players, companies and yes, alternative energy solutions are being bombarded to be the answer to all our troubles. This blurs our view on what needs to be done. The reality off course is much more complex than this. Especially in the field of sustainable energy. Nothing is clear yet, nobody knows which way it will go and those who claim to know are foolish on the one hand and also very needed visionaries on the other hand because they help us move in a direction – any direction. It is only history that will make the distinction between fools and visionaries. It is funny that we never look back on the success rate of our predictions of the future – my gut feeling says that of all the experts making statements about the future of technology, sustainable energy, or even football will be right in less than 1% of their predictions. Yet we keep making the, and worse, we keep believing them.

Hype-driven journalism (or even hype-driven society) is a bad thing because it will influence people and politicians to narrow their vision at a time when the broadest possible vision is needed. It is needed to look at all possible alternative solutions and make sure they get a chance to reach some level of development so we can truly let history decided which one of them proved to be the right one(s). Investors, banks and governments need to keep the pitch as broad as possible, to remain in football analogies, instead of steerning the ball into the centre funnel every time they attack.

Let’s remind ourselves to look at Leo Messi in ten years and see where he stands. Let’s hope he has given the world many more weeks like last week but let’s not rush to conclusions. Let’s allow companies like Twitter and Facebook to prove they are durable, that they can survive and grow in a changing environment. And let’s allow the different developments in alternative energy to run their course without hyping one of them out of proportion. This is how innovation happens. Competing solutions will sort themselves out but they need a playing field to do so. But in a world where the time to market seems to be measured in days rather than months or even years and where global media is following (and cheering, or booing) every step under a looking glass and where no immediate sight of delivering the answer to all our problems is pushed to the side – innovation is slowed down rather than accelerated.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 at 09:50 and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.