The Rambling Insomniac
Tom is a 25+ year resident of Germantown and the surrounding community. He currently lives in Hubertus with his wife and two small kids on a hobby farm near Bark Lake. Tom's blog will likely not save the world, but hopefully, you'll get some enjoyment from his ramblings.
The Next Big Thing
By Tom White
Friday, Jan 4 2008, 08:46 PM
I was listening to National Public Radio the other day and heard an interview with the renowned American journalist, Daniel Schorr. Schorr, who is now 91 years old, was reflecting back on his career in journalism and talked about a job offer he received from CBS Radio back in the 1950’s. As part of the offer, CBS told Schorr that they would eventually expect him to do television reporting in addition to radio. Since television was so new at the time, Schorr had to ask CBS to clarify exactly what they meant by that because television reporters simply didn’t exist yet. To me, it’s mind-boggling that for some living generations, television wasn’t always a part of their daily lives!? But I guess that’s true about a lot of things. It seems every 30 years or so, something completely new and unexpected comes along and changes everything. Think of the evolution of automobiles that started in the early 1900’s….then television came in the 1950’s…..then came computers in the 1970’s and then came cell phones in the new millennium. All of these things are now so ingrained in our daily lives, it’s hard to imagine what we did without them.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could predict what the “next big thing” was going to be? I’m not talking about small things like Velcro, Starbucks, Bottled Water or Beanie Babies; I’m talking about things that actually change the world and they way we live in it. Something that 30 years from now my kids will ask me “How did you guys ever live without these Dad?” It would be easy to assume that the next big thing will be something in the computer sciences field, but that assumption wouldn’t necessarily be valid. Most life-changing items that have come along in the past century really had no predecessor to predict their popularity.
I’m a terrible typist, so as I sit here and type this blog, I think to myself that it sure would be great if I could simply transition the thoughts in my head to my word processor without having to physically type them. I also wish that I could just imagine a beer, and suddenly one would appear in my hand. And then I’d think about a particular song I’d love to hear right now, and it would simply start playing for me.
Sound crazy to you? Well, I bet they told Henry Ford that he was crazy when he built his first automobile prototype.
G’Night G’Town!
To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer. ~Farmer's Almanac, 1978
