Viewpoint: The Techno-Refugees

By Bruce L. Paisner, the president and CEO of the
International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences

I was having lunch with a friend—a longtime partner in a major law firm, and a very smart man. He leaned toward me across the table, as if sharing a deep confidence, and said, “I feel like I’m a refugee in the 21st century.”

Lately, it seems, he feels overwhelmed by the flood of communications options he doesn’t understand and doesn’t particularly want to use. Like all of us of a certain age and media savvy, he knows that there is a global army of 10-year-olds who are infinitely more conversant in the ways of the digital world than he is. He doesn’t know Facebook from MySpace, Flickr from YouTube. He’s never been to an app store. He doesn’t know how to text from his cell phone. He has no GPS.

He is nettled by the fear that if he doesn’t get on the train soon, he will be left behind, standing alone on the platform, with his printed newspaper, his hard-bound book and his prime-time TV schedule.

In response, I borrowed a quote I saw on the wall of a programmer: “Relax. It’s only ones and zeroes.”

The circuits and code of consumer- information technologies might be beyond comprehension for most of us. But they have something in common. They service basic—and timeless—human needs. And that’s the ultimate comfort zone for my friend, and all the rest of us at a transformational time.

The deepest need is for information. Ever since the Mesopotamians gave us libraries, we have been traveling to get our information. The Internet changed that. It allowed us to make the information come to us. It created a vast, virtual library, with everything the world has to tell us right there on a screen.

The problem: all the contents of that library were spread all over the floor. Then search technologies came along and put all the information back on the shelves for us.

But what has changed in the motivations that have driven that 5,000-year progression from clay to digits? Nothing. It’s still just people in search of entertainment, ideas, answers and things to buy.

The same is true for social networking. Humans need community. Social-network sites are another step in the journey from communities of place to communities of interest. They have added a new world of electronic connection to the ancient need to gather.

Some charge that iPods are creating a nation of people sealed in self-created isolation. No, we would find other ways to disengage. If any art is lost, it may be the ability to pretend you are listening. Are BlackBerrys making us work-obsessed and rude in a crowd? No, obsession and rudeness have been with us forever. Does texting while driving cause accidents? Yes. But so does eating.

The trick, I told my friend, is to stop obsessing about the wiring, and start concentrating on the personal advantage it creates. I can’t really tell you how an airliner gets off the ground. It just does. So I use it.

It is not our job to relate to information technology. It is media’s job to relate information technology to us. And it relates to us successfully only when it meets our very basic needs—things that we value, delivered with the diversity we expect.

What is so exciting, and mind challenging, is that the opportunities are now boundless, even infinite. You used to write a note to one person; now you can Twitter to millions. Facebook takes the concept of a high school yearbook light years beyond the ones stored in our attics. But the driving human motivations are the same.

All media is new media. Injecting digital into the mix changes everything for everyone—from the oldest newspaper to the newest website. It’s not what technology replaces, but what it adds—the ability to re-create the world on the consumer’s terms, where, how and when.

The endless possibilities of technology-driven choice in matching media and motivation is the reason that the International Academy takes such a wide view of delivery—Internet, mobile and things still in the labs. It is why our mission is not just to promote excellence in programming, but also to help people in our business understand, cope with and manage a changing world.

And the world can change in unpredictable ways. Many assume the embrace of technology breaks neatly along generational lines. It doesn’t. I’m obsessed with my Kindle—a whole world of books, downloadable in seconds to a screen I can tuck in my briefcase. My kids—the generation that is supposed to be fleeing print—don’t get it. When they read a book, they want to hold it. They want to turn the pages. But for me, going back to words on paper would be like going back to rotary phones.

But that’s the thing about this new age of information technology. It only works when it meets your needs—and anyone can make it do that.