Clarity and Clarification

So...No title on this post, yet.

Maybe there will be one by the time I finish.
The problem that I'm having is that I'm not quite sure what to write about today...weird...I don't have a thousand opinions to yell at the top of my lungs...

Well, I do have those opinions--I just can't think of them right now.

It should be noted that, while I write this, the song "I've got too much time on my hands" by Styx is playing.
How appropriate.

Anyways, I think that I will start my little ramble by clearing something up about my last blog post--the one where I offended everyone in the world by calling them "old".

Well, here is my clarification:

The general theme of the post was my ranting about a guy who thinks that this new communication-technology and how he's totally wrong. Mostly because he's too "old".

I even go on to clarify that old people can be as young as 25 years old or maybe even younger!
So how can I say that such young people are too old and that they need to stop talking about technologies?

With age, sadly, comes responsibility. The more responsibility that one has--the less time one has to be free-spirited.
SO! What does this mean?

It means that old people are people who have responsibilities. So many, in fact, that they can't waste all of their time playing with new toys and tech-junk. It all comes down to time and energy. If someone is working 50 hours/week and raising three kids as a single parent, they probably wont have the TIME, nor the ENERGY, to fiddle around online and play with, read about, and fiddle around on every new Internet trend that shows up online.
They aren't able to be on that early-adopter's curve.

And there lays the distinction I make between "old" and "savvy" in the tech world.

Whether or not a user has the resources to be able to stay on the early adopter's curve.


There are generally three levels of adoption--

1) The early adopters-
--In this case, they are generally younger people. Tech students. Blog readers. The epitome of young and tech savvy. The Trend Setters, if you will.

2) The Majority-
--This group is occasionally broken down into what's called a "Early Majority" and a "Late Majority". This is where the people who are picking up twitter, today, are. In fact, I would say that, perhaps before this whole Iranian snafu, were the Early Majority adopters. And, since it's gotten so absurdly famous, worldwide, due to it's ability to share news, the people who are seeing it on the news and saying "Hey sonny, show me how to get myself one of them twitterer machining things!" are Late Majority adopters. They're still on the ball, they just don't get to tell all their friends about how savvy and hip they are.

3) The Laggards-
-- This group is, classically, that old guy who refuses to buy a color tv in 1999 because "after that damned Y2k crash the government is going to release some fancy new thing and you'll just start bugging me to buy that!" (this is a warning...If you think twitter is going to stick around...read my last post again...then get a twitter account so that you're not a laggard!!).


So yeah..."old' people are people who can't stay on that early adopter's curve. Basically-- People with real jobs.

Now, being "old" in this case doesn't necessarily imply anything bad. There are downsides to being on any part of the curve. It's up to users to decide which downsides they'd like most to deal with.
For early adopters? The downside is that, as a generality, there is a lot of wasted time, energy, and, most notably, money. People who accept new products before they're proven have to face the fact that many of the new products will fail. Of course, these early adopters can take some pride in knowing that they are essentially the prototypers of an entire population and that, if they pick up the right product, they could be seen as early adopters or, even more exciting, "innovators" (the super-bleeding-edge early adopters. In the technology sector, for example, innovators are generally college students who focus on or center their lives around technology...People like me). Betamax and 8track. Both failed at the early adopter level. And all of those early adopters who had gone out to purchase them? Well, they felt the cold sting of being an early adopter.
Another more recent, and much more expensive, failure is the HDdvd. Microsoft thought that they would be SOOO cool and offer this really expensive and fancy drive to couple with the Xbox360. They wanted to be the early adopter of this technology. Needless to say--Blueray won the race and Microsoft was left kicking themselves in the butt. I'm sure someone really important probably lost their job for that hiccup.

The pitfalls of being the Majority of adopters are really quite slim. The only thing that a majority adopter has to deal with is the shame they feel when the meet an early adopter and have to say "ohhh you've had it for years? Oh cool...I just signed up for it last week....cool....".

And of course, the Laggards have their own set of pitfalls which should be pretty clear.
They don't get the benefits of an extremely popular success and they have to deal with intense public ridicule until they rectify the situation...And then for many years on.


Where do I sit on all of this?

I'm a perfect early adopter. In fact, I sit right and tight on that little indefinable line between being an early adopter and an innovator. I started my first twitter account in late 2006, shortly after it's debut. The same goes with facebook. It's safe to assume that I was in the first 500,000(possibly as early as 100,000) users on each of these networks. Facebook now sports over 200 million users. So I think it's safe to say I was pretty early in that adoption curve. Unfortunately I deleted my original twitter account and, as such, can not verify exactly when I first sent my first tweet. Rest assured, though, that even though I restarted a NEW account, years later, I'll still probably be in the first 2-5% of users on twitter. Absurd, isn't it?


In truth, that last paragraph was to basically justify myself as an adequate judge of "age" or the extent to which someone is "old" in the technological realm.

Hopefully all of this was ALMOST interesting (or at least barely standable) and, moreover, hopefully it cleared up what I meant, so recently, when I declared that people of relatively young ages can still be "old" and basically offended my entire readerbase.

I hope everybody is doing well today! I'll be living alone for the next week so I'm sure to be awfully lonely! If anybody feels like calling or posting a comment or something to argue with me, by all means go for it! Regardless of the strength of my arguments, no one ever agrees with me because I'm just no good at winning over a crowd. Something about being too condescending or something. Anyways, I'll talk to ya'll soon!