As I was walking my dogs with my friend Ken the other night, I was explaining to him the latest technology miracle that has entered my life.
My kids and I recently made the transition from BlackBerry to iPhone. My daughter is currently a counselor at a sleepaway camp in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and at around 9:00 that night, we “Facetimed” each other. As I explained to my buddy, “I was in my family room and Ally was 250 miles away in her camp bunk, and not only was I able to call her on my iPhone, but using Apple’s FaceTime I was able to see her, in real time, on my smartphone. No delay, picture clear as can be. Her iPhone to my iPhone.”
His response was simple but right on the money: “We are the Jetsons.”
I thought about that for a minute and responded in kind. “You know what, we really are the Jetsons.”
For those of you a bit too young to know what I’m talking about, The Jetsons was a 1960s cartoon that was all about life in the future—in 2062. George Jetson lived his futuristic life as a motivated employee of Spacely Space Sprockets, working full-time, 9 hours a week! Jane,
his wife, would grab all the money in his wallet despite him offering her a few spare dollars, and “daughter” Judy and “his boy” Elroy would tool around town in their 21st century outfits.
(If you’re not already humming the tune yet, you can start now.)
Thinking about the Jetson’s surroundings, and where we are today, I think we’ve finally achieved the Jetson crossroad. Remember the TV screens in their kitchen and bedroom, where Mr. Spacely would appear for a dinnertime phone call? Well, if any of you have used Skype, or the aforementioned FaceTime, we’re there now.
Remember Rosie, the Jetson’s robotic housekeeper who would beep messages to the kids as she cleaned up their rooms. Well, what do you think your iRobot vacuum cleaner is? A glorified Rosie.
Remember George walking their dog, Astro, at the end of the show (“I rove you Rorge”). Impossible for us back then, but how many of us now have treadmills that could serve the same purpose?
How many times was Elroy playing video games with his friends? Back then it was beyond our comprehension. Now, using Xbox or PS3, your kids can play video games in real time against a like-minded 14-year-old gamer in Moscow.
The point is, technology today is pretty much what we recognized as science fiction only 40 or 50 years ago. Who needs encyclopedias when you can go to the Internet and get the answer to just about any inane question you can think of in a matter of seconds? Who needs the U.S. mail when you can send just about any message (or image) via e-mail, where a person can receive it only seconds after you hit the send button?
Yes, we are the Jetsons.
I remember when all of those time-period titles captured our imagination, keeping us wondering how far off our reality was from fiction. Remember George Orwell’s 1984? Or the classic 2001: A Space Odyssey? They might have been a little off the mark, but truth be told . . . we are the Jetsons.
The Internet, and especially wireless communication, has so far advanced us from where we ever dreamed of being that there’s really no such thing as science fiction anymore. It’s all real.
The scary part of this is that our kids (and future generations) will have no real perspective of how it once was. What was television like without remote control? (Have we caused the childhood obesity epidemic by not asking them to get up and change the channel?) Remember when you made an error on your IBM Selectric and had to pay for your mistake by using Wite-Out instead of the backspace key? Did Noah Webster ever think about “spell check”? With GPS now available on our smartphones, will our kids ever learn how to read a real map? Phone books? Gone! Rabbit ears? HDTV with fiber-optic cables. Farsighted? Lasik surgery.
And what about our imaging world? Poor exposure? In-camera autoexposure correction, red-eye elimination and sharpening tools. Out-of-focus people? Not with face detection. Forgot to smile? Can’t take the picture with smile detection on.
Our “Jetson status” has forced us into a new realm. If you’re still holding on and harkening to the “good old days,” you may as well give it up already. If you haven’t embraced technology and truly taken advantage of what’s out there, then you’re not positioning yourself for success, because you are not where most of your customers are living today.
Yes, you might understand the incredible capabilities of digital imaging. But to be where your customers are going, you have to move beyond our world of imaging technology. Embrace Facebook, one of the greatest marketing tools of the 21st century. If you have a flip phone, toss it away and buy a smartphone. Upload a video to YouTube. Share photos on a Flickr account. Send out a few tweets to see what it feels like (trust me, it doesn’t hurt a bit). Check into your next restaurant with Foursquare. Download a movie using Netflix. Read your next book on a Kindle or Nook. Buy an app. And, as much as you might hate to, take a picture with your iPhone and send it to a friend.
George Jetson would probably be perfectly comfortable in today’s world, if not even a little left behind. But you can be Elroy. If you live technology, you can talk technology. And, more important, you can sell technology.
