A few months ago a little known café in Devon England got worldwide coverage on the BBC for hiring a waiter. And yes in writing this article the Cantina café is getting more free publicity. But then they are a rare example of a leading edge business. Huh?? Well they did something that the world is going to have to do a lot more often in the near future: they answered an 89 year olds man’s advertisement that he wanted a job.
Joe Bartley did not need the money. He was not fussy about what job he got. Joe just wanted to do something, anything to break the boredom. In a world where most “developed” nations and nearly all others have an ageing population business, marketers and researchers have to get used to the idea that the future means finding more jobs for those of us over 60, 70 and yes over 80 years of age. And maybe the market research industry could be doing it’s part to help identify the reasons, opportunities and advantages to what will become an increasing “return to work” movement. Carry out a literature review on the subject and you won’t find a lot of data published studies around the subject. Quite simply it is not “trendy”. What has been written in recent years though is fairly consistent. There are (for example) five reasons why someone decides to return to work, look for a new job or a new career:
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And yes i am talking about THE demographic that any sensible and forward thinking marketer should be focusing on : the ageing populations of Asia.
I just wanted to finish off the year by thanking some colleagues who have helped me spread the word and a little truth about the opportunity that is an ageing world this last year. AND maybe suggest that marketers really reflect on what is possible if they focus on the populations that will grow the most in the near ( next five ) and long ( next 25 ) years. I have been lucky enough to work with many of you on various projects, articles, webinars and projects. I know that many of us are still a little frustrated and struggling to turn what we clearly see as the future in to a reality for marketers. But i have seen a lot more coverage and exposure to the topics at had over the last year. Certainly a lot of improvement from say 2011 when i started doing a lot more public speaking on the issue. In case you missed them a few things worth looking at, listening to or revisiting. if you are interested in or don’t know much about the huge opportunity that the ageing of the asian population in particular offers then you might find these references of use. Back in Nov 2015 WARC kindly ran a series of articles that i edited on Ageing Asia. Thanks to Kim Walker, Gill Walker ( not related ), Florian Kohlbacher, William Hall and Kunal Sinha for some great articles. WARC then arranged for Kim, Florian and I to do a webinar on the subject that i think worth listening to as we share experiences in how to explain opportunities to marketers …. https://www.warc.com/Content/ContentViewer.aspx?ID=151b048b-5bb2-4d79-a868-1738d2d91b7e&q=ageing+asia&CID=A106367&PUB=WARC-WEBINARS&MasterContentRef=151b048b-5bb2-4d79-a868-1738d2d91b7e At the beginning of 2016 my friends Matthew Oliver and Grace Hung at CLSA published a longer report i wrote on “ New Life Builders : Ageing Asia offers opportunities” and set up about 12 days in cities across Asia, Australia and London where i ran sessions for their clients. If you want a copy of the report I can get it a copy for you…. some details are in this Linkedin post … https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/worlds-biggest-growth-market-over-new-life-builders-media-mccaughan?trk=mp-author-card Florian Kohnlbacher and Michael Prieler had a new book published this year “ Advertising in the Ageing Society : Understanding representations, practitioners and consumers in Japan” ( published by Palsgrave Macmillan ) and kindly asked me to write the ( rather long ) foreword. If you want details check this … https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/frustration-light-understanding-advertising-marketing-david-mccaughan?trk=mp-author-card As I hope you know my good friend Kevin Gray and i have this launched a series of podcasts called MR Realities. Each of the 20 episodes looks at a key issue in the market research / marketing world and involves a 40 minute discussion between Kevin, i and a special guest. Earlier in the year we got Florian to again join me in talking about the shortfalls and mistakes many marketers make in understanding the ageing asia population… you can download the podcast here … https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/you-still-need-me-conundromd-marketing-seniors-mr-david-mccaughan?trk=mp-author-card Probably also worth having a read of this piece i wrote for Research World Connect https://rwconnect.esomar.org/65-and-out/ thanks to Research World for publishing my article on “taking the long view” https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/taking-long-view-its-ageing-world-footnotes-media-people-mccaughan?trk=mp-author-card so maybe, maybe .. this will inspire a few more thinking marketers to refocus in 2017 and look at where growth will really come in the next couple of decades and rethink their strategies for the 60,70,80 plus populations ... it is where opportunity lies "we live in a world CMOs with a life expectancy of two years or less, and of brand managers who may last three years. Of advertisers/PR/communication agency reviews happening annually. Of a belief that media is in a constant transition and therefore brands need to be constantly re-evaluated. The discussion around fad terms like mobile, digital, big data, all emphasise the need for re-evaluation. while much of this may be hype and angst suddenly it seems the "long view" is really not so long."
for Research World i have just had published an article that puts the case that in both a short term world ( the 2 years a CMO has to make a difference ) and the longer term ( where the whole world is moving ) targeting and prioritising New Life Builders, my long time name for people between 60 and 100 year old. you can find the article in the March/April edition of Research World by subscribing https://www.esomar.org/publications-store/research-world-magazine.php or let me know and I can provide a copy FRUSTRATION! but there is light in understanding advertising and marketing for our ageing world.28/3/2016 ( the following is the Foreword I wrote for the just released book " Advertising in the Ageing Society : understanding representations, practitioners and consumers in Japan" authored by my good fiends Michel Prieler and Florian Kohlbacher and published by Palgrave Macmillan ... available on amazon.com )
Frustration. It’s the only word that describes the whole subject of marketing to the world’s aging populations. Not with the over-65s of the world themselves. They are a dynamic group of people who are breaking all preconceived rules about what “getting old” means. The frustration has been with my colleagues in the advertising, market research, marketing world, and the journalists who cover it and have been so slow to realize a simple truth: any reasonable analysis of the limited available data suggests that if you want to grow your business in the next few decades then you need to understand the “greys,” “silvers,” “seniors,” “aged,” “new life builder,” and “old.”I said limited data because it is also true that through combinations of lack of foresight, prejudice, and myths, most organizations have done little real investigation of how to talk to, research, market, and advertise to the 65+ age cohorts that are booming and blooming in so many countries. None more so than Japan. So any new study of how these age groups are represented in advertising is truly welcome.From 2003 I had the joy of spending a decade leading the Strategy Planning division of McCann Worldgroup in Japan. A joy because the experience of working in the advertising industry in that country is so different and thought-provoking. It did however have its frustra- tions and to my surprise the aging demographics of the country was perhaps the biggest of them.To provide some background, I first became interested in aging demographics and its impact on advertising in the late 1980s in my native Sydney. At the time the Australian Bureau of Census issued some reports discussing the potential aging of the population in the twenty-first century. I wrote a summary briefing and distributed it to the management of the McCann offices in Australia who in turn distributed it to clients. The next week I found that it had caused an unexpected stir. One of our clients was a famous manufacturer of toy automobiles who told our account director that they would now need to reconsider their future in the market if the population was going to get old. After all they made toys for kids. Of course we managedto explain that there would be decades before real aging took hold. More importantly I put together a scenario to explain what we now take for granted: an aging population means more living grandpar- ents and a greater ratio of adult relatives for each child which will mean spoiled boys and girls getting more gifts. And that high-end toy cars should do well.The new One Child Policy in China at that time was to prove that theory correct in that by the late 1990s there were numerous reports of how “kids” categories that took a higher-end approach were doing really well with the “let’s spoil our little emperor” scenario. A scenario we were to see repeated as families across many Asian markets began to voluntarily shrink the number of children per family. In a place like Japan, by the turn of the millennium, having just one child, who would be invariably spoiled by doting grandparents and great- grandparents, became the norm.More importantly the toy car story sparked my real interest in misconceptions about aging populations and what that might mean to advertising and marketing. I was fortunate over the subsequent years to lead a number of research projects across the Asia-Pacific region looking at how different generations reacted to a wide range of issues. In the course of these studies I paid special attention to what I called “New Life Builders,” those people aged between their mid-50s and early 70s who were getting close to retirement or had already retired, whose children were leaving or had left home, who unlike their own parents’ generation were likely to live for another 20 or 30 years and were realizing they needed to look forward to their future. A big change from the traditional view of retirement as “waiting for death” and a new stage of life for the new and devel- oping middle classes of Asia.Of course there were clients paying attention. Slowly and quite obviously some marketers started to notice the aging trend: the “usual suspects” of insurers, health service providers, retirement homes. Ask anyone in the industry to this day “which clients are benefiting or targeting the older population” and that is the answer you get.When I moved to Japan in 2003 I was well aware of it having the oldest demography. I had helped do enough studies to know that the Japanese market was starting to come to grips with knowing it had a “problem” with the possibility of an aging, shrinking population and not many answers. However, I was both surprised and disappointed to find that rather than seeing this as a big opportunity, marketers there were still looking at having a burgeoning older population as a problem. Just like their peers around the world over the previous 40 years, they were focused on “targeting the young” because of misconceptions about developing lifetime loyalty and habits. Misconceptions because the constant change that had happened in Japan in the previous four decades, the constant availability of new products and services, and the fast adaptation the Japanese had made to new technologies had meant change was more a norm than consistency in the behavior of potential consumers of any age. And certainly no less for the about-to-retire.Think about that. The experience of the typical 60-year-old in Tokyo, Osaka, Fukuoka in 2003 is certainly that of amazingly hard- working, dedicated, and passionate savers. But also the genera- tion that had lived with the rise of SONY, the introduction of the most advanced robot-driven manufacturing, the slickest transport systems, the leading edge of adopting new personal technologies. Forty years of the most advanced convenience stores in the world offering them services you still can’t get elsewhere and a constant flow of new products at a rate not matched in any other country. These are people who have spent their whole lives being trained by the world around them to try new products.Yes, there were Japanese companies actively targeting those over 60. But they were mostly of the usual cohort of industries: insur- ance, retirement funds and homes, healthcare. Some categories were making an effort in areas such as skincare and cosmetics. But these were more an adjunct of the old approach to aging. Products to “help hide the cracks, grey hair and deterioration of youthful looks.” In other words, marketers still saw aging as something to run away from and hide. Or something that meant preparing for a long, slow decline.That was doubly disappointing. In part because at the same time there was plentiful research indicating that the upcoming retire- ment of Japan’s equivalent to the baby boomer, the dankai, would make them healthier, wealthier, and more aware of their potential longevity than previous generations. And in part because they had a different attitude.A few examples involving music provide a great illustration. In 2006 we were conducting interviews and focus group discussions with men and women who were approaching retirement or had recently retired. Among those men who had retired in recent years – remember at the time the retirement age was 60 – we occasionally heard about their buying or taking up playing instruments and especially guitars again. Subsequently, in 2007, when the first of the dankai retired, it was reported that one of the fastest growing categories of sales for the year was again guitars. And in the years that followed there was a lot of reporting about men retiring, getting hold of a guitar, and re-forming bands that in many cases had been dormant since they graduated university: rock bands, cover bands of every genre of pop music popular in their youth in the 1960–1980 period.Should it be a surprise? Sure, these guys had given up their bands and instruments in their mid-20s to spend three and half decades as dedicated salarymen. However, they had also spent an awful lot of corporate bonding time pursuing their music in the form of karaoke nights. So why should marketers be surprised that this new “aging population” were actually rock ‘n’ rollers in their hearts?And for the next couple of decades at least many have money to spend on their passions. The current dankai generation who began retiring in 2007 and is tailing off over the next year or so managed to save a lot, and while they do retain a propensity for cautious invest- ment and want to pass on a legacy to their children and grandchil- dren, they are also more than happy to invest in the present, on enjoying retirement, and the next 30 years of their lives.I did start to see changes among marketers who realized they had to start talking to this new market. As Tokyo Disneyland put together plans for its 25th anniversary, the key focus was to get people to come back. For two and a half decades just about every family in the country had visited the park as parents and young children. So how to get people to return? What about the grandparents? As young parents they had brought their children a quarter-century ago, so how about getting them to return and relive the experience? Campaigns were developed to encourage grandparents and grand- children to come together. A different spin on the “toy car” story and the inevitable result of wanting to spoil the one or two grandchil- dren. But what was surprising was discovering that being re-introduced to Disney led to retired couples visiting on their own, to relive the memories or maybe just to have a little adventure.We noted too a growing trend for mother/daughter vacations. Adult daughters in their 20s and 30s going on trips with their 50–60-some- thing mothers. A chance to bond, a chance for the daughter to go on a more expensive journey often paid for by the mother, a chance for the mother to go and do something different and live young. A chance to learn from each other. It was a trend that became an impor- tant part of planning campaigns for most travel-related companies. It was a theme that we used in campaigns for MasterCard, Cathay Pacific, and others. As this book is published there is much reporting of the success of cruise-liner companies again targeting the dankai. We have also seen that where the tradition upon retirement had been that couples would take a short stay in Hawaii, the dankai are being more adventurous. They are now looking at destinations for post-retirement vacations spreading all over the world, with more culture and adventure variations and multiple trips being planned and undertaken.An older generation who actually want to travel and explore. That signaled a change in mentality. Further evidence came in the beauty world. Shiseido, Kanebo, andothers have had success not by focusing on delivering advertising that said “cover up the problems of aging” but by emphasizing “you can continue to bring out your real beauty.” We have seen in recent years more campaigns feature 50-to-70-year-old women who empha- size their continuing vibrant personality as much as their being happy with continuing to express their own ongoing beauty.Of course “old” people and celebrities had always played a major part in advertising in Japan. The use of the celebrity endorser has always been very common, according to some research the biggest in the world. The image portrayed in Lost in Translation by Bill Murray of aged Hollywood stars making gratuitous commercials was and is still true. To this day Audrey Hepburn remains perhaps the most sought- after endorser in the country, decades after her death. However, that too is changing.Perhaps one of the most successful, and certainly talked about, campaigns of the past ten years has been for BOSS canned coffee and the use of Tommy Lee Jones playing the part of a stony-faced alien come to Earth and somewhat perplexed by the natives. Butthis was not a case of choosing the actor for his age, or even his fame. Indeed, when the campaign first came to popularity our own research found that among those of all ages who said they liked the advertising less than a third knew the star’s name. He was seen as having a “unique face” and character rather than as being an old, well-known endorser.In the past few years I was fortunate to persuade some clients like Johnson & Johnson to start really investigating the new dynamic of aging. We undertook a number of research studies, often unique in asking people 60–90 years of age to participate. And many of those clients are now actively undertaking the development of new prod- ucts and marketing campaigns to re-address the Japanese new life builder.But the frustration remains. Perhaps best summed up by my friend Toru Shibata, ex-president of Johnson & Johnson Consumer Japan, who complains that it is so difficult to talk to his market research suppliers, his advertising agencies, his own marketing departments about targeting 70-year-olds when they are all staffed by people in their 30s and 40s. To those “young” professionals talk of advertising to a 70-year-old seems like talking about their grandmother, or great- grandmother. A beloved relative but a boring and misunderstood target audience.And that is perhaps why we still see so much stereotyping in adver- tising use of the older generations. Stereotypes are hard to break. Getting marketers and their agencies to rethink the opportunities is hard. For example, understanding that rather than products and images “to help the feeble” it might be better to suggest that those same products that are good for those in their golden years are good for all is a concept slow to get started but with unlimited potential.With all that said, it is such a pleasure to have helped in a small way with the project and knowledge in this volume. As mentioned above, the amount of research into the habits, the beliefs, and the actual representation of older Japan, and older populations anywhere, in marketing communications is very thin. It is only in the past few years that national polls, tracking studies, and any form of general research even asked people over 60 to take part. As such, any addi- tion to our understanding is a big gain.I began by describing my frustration; let me end with hope.Japan is in a unique situation. Having the “oldest” demography on the planet it has the opportunity to lead the world in the understanding of how to incorporate an aging population into its active society, how to market to it, how to rethink the messaging that today’s modern retiree will find attractive. Personally I have long advocated that the aging population is Japan’s biggest opportunity. Let’s look forward to great marketing communication taking advantage of that possibility. SOCIAL MEDIA AT 14,40,400,4000 : TIME TO RETHINK ? Footnotes on media, marketing and people25/2/2016 relearning is the most powerful of tools .. just turn things over and look again at what has happened.
So lately we have been reading about Twitter problems ( too early to talk demise but in this "every day is a crisi world" that is the way it is discussed ). That got my mate Flavio Souza and I to start talking about the inevitable needs all media have to rethink as they age. so we put together this post ... https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/social-media-turns-14-40-400-4000-still-learn-flavio-souza?trk=hp-feed-article-title-share and by coincidence today i read on these hallowed pages articles about the also inevitable learning that all of the current digitally driven social media make that to get awareness good old TV helps. well it is only part of the mix. But all comes back to the same point i make in the post above : in the end people prefer pictures ... easy to understand pictures ( and it helps if you know lots of others are seeing them as well ). more on all this to follow we are all bibliosexual PURPOSE DRIVEN COMPANIES : very worthy, just ask Konosuke : footnotes in media, marketing and people11/1/2016 " why is this company necessary?"
" and the answer - that the enterprise exists to benefit people and improve society - should be the same for all businesses that are involved in supplying goods and services. A manager who fails to recognise this purpose of management will never be truly successful" makes sense right ? certainly the trend of the last year or two to talk about "purpose built companies" and the need to "give back" and "do good" suggests businesses are aware of the need to be a good citizen. marketing gurus talk a lot of the need for a brand to be driven by a greater purpose to in some way help society. as always nothing new. unpacking books in a new apartment always reminds us of treasures that have slipped our mind. if you really want a great book on management and brand building go read " Konosuke Matsushita : His life and management philosophy". Yes that would be the Matsushita who built one of the world's biggest technology brands ( and it's foreign names like National, Panasonic etc ). Lot's wisdom from the 1970s. He was a real guru. Yes you are about to start week 2 of the new working year. all the resolutions I suggested last week are valid but in reality the excitement has gone and the reality of the long year ahead is sinking in. But among all the "2016 trends" phallacies you have been reading one is true. Storytelling matters.
Just as it always has. Ogilvy knew that. Bernbach knew that. My old companies founder King McCann certainly knew that ( "truth well told" beyond the jokes is a magic formula for developing stories ). But please do me a favour ... Make 2016 the year you actually think about what a story really is. Over the holidays I had the good fortune to catch up with three ladies I went to library school with and a couple of old mates from my ten years working at Parramatta Public Library in Sydney back in my twenties. Yes I am qualified librarian who mostly worked in public libraries doing children’s story telling work for near 12 years before I got into advertising. Some ask me “ wow how did you cope with that change ?” to which I answer “ what change?”. Libraries and advertising agencies are actually very similar places. And they are at least in theory all about stories. Both those librarian reunion lunches inevitably led to discussions of stories read and shared and suggested. Just like the marketing trend for “personalization” ( not a trend , it has always been there ) when you work in public libraries you actually do a lot of personal marketing. People come in looking for a book and you would be amazed how many want a recommendation : “ I have an assignment on Egypt ? can you tell me where to find the right answer ?”, “ I read Harry Potter, who writes books like that?”, “ I read a book once about a guy in a war hospital who falls for the nurse .. have you got that ?” ( try Hemingway for the answer ). Very unique requests for very unique service. Hmmm sounds like what the marketing press writes about as an ideal. But like all good retailers librarians know that service is everything. But in truth you also get a lot of time to kill, and access to a lot of books. So you read a lot. I once spent near two years at a small suburban branch library with hours to kill everyday. I was 19. The other person I worked with was lovely chain smoking woman about my mums age. She just told me that all that spare time was actually time I should use … to read stories. All kinds of stories. So I did 2,3,4 books a week during work hours. Zane Grey to Barbara Cartland to Hemingway to Asimov. Best education you could have. I like stories. Of all kinds. My best Christmas present was a relatively new dissection of the Iliad. That and my daughter buying me a John Wayne collection. Great stories. they have a beginning and an end. Their is a : protagonist, a threat, a challenge, a struggle, a reward. That is a story. The problem with all the fashionable discussion of "storytelling" in most of the marketing comms media today is it is not storytelling. It is an announcement. A justification. Maybe a fact. I remember in my library school days reading all about the "seven story structures". The theory that in all history, across all cultures there are only a limited number of stories. everything else is just an adaption. Walt Disney got that. all his stories , all his brands stories are the same. But they tell you a story that engages, enriches, satisfies. So here is the thing. when you are talking about your brand story, or creating promotional or product stories check that you have that really basic structure : protagonist, a threat, a challenge, a struggle, a reward. and have a great year. A great sunday morning read : http://blog.longreads.com/2015/08/20/loving-books-in-a-dark-age/
To be honest I can't remember where I saw the link to this originally. Had a bit of a getaway weekend with my wife, Manuela, at our favourite hotel, The Sukhothai in Bangkok. Ate too much, drank sufficiently and while sitting by the pool on saturday was downloading different "looks interesting" articles from various Linkedin posts, most of which proved less than satisfactory. This one however was terrific. I great read over an very long and indulgent breakfast on Sunday morning. Thanks to whoever originally posted it. A chapter from a new book about reading in the European Dark Ages and in particular about one of the really important innovators of media in history, the Venerable Bede as he has come to be known. Of course most of you may not have heard of him, and those that have probably know him as the writer of the first general history of what is now England. But beyond being a sixth century story of velum and ink this is a great story of the development of one strain of social media ; the reading of books. AND IT IS GREAT. Apart from being well written and having the desired effect of getting me to go on-line and look at buying the full book from which it is extracted. Apart from being full of little facts about the contribution Bede made to the written form as we know it. Apart from a really easy to follow introduction to the roles the English and Irish monastries played in keeping knowledge alive after the fall of the Roman Empire this is the story of the copyists and commentators and writers and readers of the latest information on things that mattered. Hey that sounds like us, you and I , the people who populate Linkedin with copying and pasting ( most posts ), sometimes commentating on the post. Personally folks I get annoyed when people just copy an article without any commentary ... tell us why you like it. Or then there is the great majority who just read what others have shared and then the real minority, those that write original posts. Read the chapter of the book and you will be amazed at how much it sounds like Linkedin ( or some other digital "social medium" ). And that is because the book was the great social medium for a millenium and a half. And just like it's 21st century social medium brethren the book of the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, Reformation, Enlightenment etc was read silently. It was only around the time of Bede that punctuation and grammer as we know it was invented and therefore made reading aloud plausable. Read the chapter for more on that. The BIG point is that just like this post, and your FB updates and the tweets that keep interupting you WE READ SOCIAL MEDIA IN SILENCE AND ALONE !! What a contradiction? It's "social" but we imbibe it in silence, well maybe a giggle at the latest Minnions cartoon on FB, or a groan at yet another "professional" posting about the importance of big data, or a tweet of Donald Trump's latest idiocy. Because in one sense social media is anything but social. It's something we share alone and in silence. The legendary soap box speakers of 19th century Hyde Park in London were more social than you and I right now. I sit here writing in silence and, I hope, there is someone in the following days sitting at a screen reading this in silence. "Solitary media" might be a better term. And that is where it is just like the book, or rather the book as it developed in Europe in the 5th-7th centuries, and then was industrialised in the 15th. Books were more than the words in them. They were the ultimate gift, the way of gluing people and ideas together, of spreading news, of socialising thoughts. We have the impression that back then the book was just years of hand copying by poor desk bound monks. Yes they were. But those monks were the social media contributors of the day. They way they copied and what they copied, the notations snuck into margins , the choice of colors, inks and graphic design in illustrations, not to mention the commentaries produced by those like Bede ( just like in today's social media the real minority who share original content rather than just copy the latest fad ) meant every book was unique, each a reflection of thoughts produced and shared. We get very carried away with what is new. Especially the broader marketing world who like to think each time there is a new "media revolution" that all binds with the past are broken. But this sunday morning read reminded me once again that in the history of media nothing is new, just updated, modified and re-launched. Thanks Venerable Bede for being the Larry, Mark etc of the first millenia. A great sunday morning read : http://blog.longreads.com/2015/08/20/loving-books-in-a-dark-age/
To be honest I can't remember where I saw the link to this originally. Had a bit of a getaway weekend with my wife, Manuela, at our favourite hotel, The Sukhothai in Bangkok. Ate too much, drank sufficiently and while sitting by the pool on saturday was downloading different "looks interesting" articles from various Linkedin posts, most of which proved less than satisfactory. This one however was terrific. I great read over an very long and indulgent breakfast on Sunday morning. Thanks to whoever originally posted it. A chapter from a new book about reading in the European Dark Ages and in particular about one of the really important innovators of media in history, the Venerable Bede as he has come to be known. Of course most of you may not have heard of him, and those that have probably know him as the writer of the first general history of what is now England. But beyond being a sixth century story of velum and ink this is a great story of the development of one strain of social media ; the reading of books. AND IT IS GREAT. Apart from being well written and having the desired effect of getting me to go on-line and look at buying the full book from which it is extracted. Apart from being full of little facts about the contribution Bede made to the written form as we know it. Apart from a really easy to follow introduction to the roles the English and Irish monastries played in keeping knowledge alive after the fall of the Roman Empire this is the story of the copyists and commentators and writers and readers of the latest information on things that mattered. Hey that sounds like us, you and I , the people who populate Linkedin with copying and pasting ( most posts ), sometimes commentating on the post. Personally folks I get annoyed when people just copy an article without any commentary ... tell us why you like it. Or then there is the great majority who just read what others have shared and then the real minority, those that write original posts. Read the chapter of the book and you will be amazed at how much it sounds like Linkedin ( or some other digital "social medium" ). And that is because the book was the great social medium for a millenium and a half. And just like it's 21st century social medium brethren the book of the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, Reformation, Enlightenment etc was read silently. It was only around the time of Bede that punctuation and grammer as we know it was invented and therefore made reading aloud plausable. Read the chapter for more on that. The BIG point is that just like this post, and your FB updates and the tweets that keep interupting you WE READ SOCIAL MEDIA IN SILENCE AND ALONE !! What a contradiction? It's "social" but we imbibe it in silence, well maybe a giggle at the latest Minnions cartoon on FB, or a groan at yet another "professional" posting about the importance of big data, or a tweet of Donald Trump's latest idiocy. Because in one sense social media is anything but social. It's something we share alone and in silence. The legendary soap box speakers of 19th century Hyde Park in London were more social than you and I right now. I sit here writing in silence and, I hope, there is someone in the following days sitting at a screen reading this in silence. "Solitary media" might be a better term. And that is where it is just like the book, or rather the book as it developed in Europe in the 5th-7th centuries, and then was industrialised in the 15th. Books were more than the words in them. They were the ultimate gift, the way of gluing people and ideas together, of spreading news, of socialising thoughts. We have the impression that back then the book was just years of hand copying by poor desk bound monks. Yes they were. But those monks were the social media contributors of the day. They way they copied and what they copied, the notations snuck into margins , the choice of colors, inks and graphic design in illustrations, not to mention the commentaries produced by those like Bede ( just like in today's social media the real minority who share original content rather than just copy the latest fad ) meant every book was unique, each a reflection of thoughts produced and shared. We get very carried away with what is new. Especially the broader marketing world who like to think each time there is a new "media revolution" that all binds with the past are broken. But this sunday morning read reminded me once again that in the history of media nothing is new, just updated, modified and re-launched. Thanks Venerable Bede for being the Larry, Mark etc of the first millenia. |
As an ex-librarian Dave loves to leave references for further reading. Here are a selection of articles and posts you might find of interest.
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