The Contextless Generation – what a mouthful and sadly, this may be what we are generating. A world where context becomes created artificially rather than naturally.
This was brought home when, over the holidays, I was watching a group of friends engage (of many different age groups) in that great social past time of food preparation. Directly behind them was a large shelf of great cookbooks from the real greats, Mrs Beeton included. (Here is a lovely piece on her.)
But a quick visit to the iPad – actually, I lost count of the number of times during this evening in the kitchen because the focus of how to address recipes and cooking questions was answered through the iPad. It was quick, it was easy and it was without context. Then someone asked how to make a particular common sauce. Everyone stared blankly at each other until an elder member of the team went to a book and pulled out the reference.
(Pictured left: Timothy O’Neil-Dunne)
It struck me at this point that we have created a generation of people who have no context for the work or play they are engaging in. We are so eager to get to the “meat” that we lose the context of the value.
The generation of my parents and before had the context of understanding the exact experience. War, Peace, Famine, Hardship, Joy and Heartbreak. The time when we didn’t really know the answer to the “why” question and we took things on faith (not necessarily the religious kind).
For context today, we go to our “social network,” Google, Wikipedia, or heaven forbid we actually speak to one another. For me – perhaps I am becoming old fashioned – nothing beats first hand experience via word of mouth.
Recently I have started to notice that “Context” has re-emerged as a relevant and very important component in dealing with our info-glut. Indeed the 2013 PhocusWright Conference (an industry marquee event) actually glorified the term through its theme “The Cult Of Context” .
However I believe that there are no short cuts to learning and understanding. comprehension requires context. Without it – we can make some really bad mistakes and miss the relevance.
For travel on the consumer side – there is no way that YouTube will replace actual experiences. The serendipity of accidental discovery is a real joy. For technology creating and managing context is REALLY hard.
In my current area of interest, I have several teams trying to figure out how to implement relevant results from huge data sets. Some call it personalisation but for me it’s simply being able to help the consumer make his own decisions and do so faster and in an actual pleasurable way. I can tell you that this really is a hard thing to do.
The quick and dirty approach is usually to just edit out large amounts of possible data to make the job of programming easier. Consumers have in general an innate sense of what is right and wrong. Right now they don’t trust intermediaries or direct sellers to tell them the truth. So what do they do?
They keep searching and searching, trying hard to develop a sense of context for the results that they see. We have better tools now through Big Data services – in all 3 areas – Data capture, Data management and Data analysis/synthesis.
Make no mistake this will be a big part of the changing nature of our world. Can technology truly provide the answers in context without creating false positives or editing out relevant and important results? Indeed a conundrum.
I hope that we can all work towards building a world where there is true (not artificial) sense of context. After all, isn’t that a real part of the joy of travel.
