INNOVATE THIS:ANY TEAM that strings together more than five passes during this summer's World Cup will be automatically compared to Pele's Brazil team of 1970. This is part of an immutable law of football punditry that sees 1970, in football circles at least, as "a great year".
Likewise, film buffs proffer greatness on 1939 (when The Wizard of Ozand Gone with the Windwere released) and 1976 (the Oscar nominations for best film were: Rocky, Network, All the President's Men, Bound for Gloryand Taxi Driver). In the music papers, the cultural gatekeepers get three bites at the cherry: 1966 for the release of Revolverby The Beatles and Pet Soundsby The Beach Boys; 1977 for the "cathartic rise of Punk"; and 1988 for bringing house music and rap to a mainstream audience.
It’s all nonsense of course, a lazy journalistic shorthand that amplifies a tiny number of events and ignores a mass of contradictory evidence. But this is how cultural history is written.
The flip side is also true. Some years are inherently “bad” or represent some other useful negative marker. Much of the analysis of the financial crisis was based on the notion that 2008 was 1929, when the world, or both worlds, teetered on the brink of economic catastrophe; the official end of the good times and the beginning of the New Austerity/Great Depression, delete as appropriate.
In the same way, I’ve always harboured an irrational fondness for 1969, which has come to represent the end of things, a shorthand for the death of optimism. “They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworth’s, man. It’s over,” said Danny the drug dealer to Withnail in the classic “1969 as end of an era” film. I don’t think I’ve heard a sadder sentence anywhere.
Coverage of the tech sector has its own rules; its own good and bad years. Much of the coverage is based on a premise we are currently living through some geeky version of 1967’s summer of love. This narrative substitutes free access to websites for drugged up San Franciscans running around with flowers in their hair: not much of a swap but as close as a computer programmer will get to naked hippie chicks.
But what of 2010? How will it be treated by tomorrow’s historians? Which issues will be seized upon as representative of the tech sector today?
As we approach the halfway point, it could go either way. My bet is two separate but connected issues will yet come to be 2010’s defining features. These are Rupert Murdoch’s decision to charge for access to his newspaper’s websites and the launch of Apple’s iPad tablet computer.
Soon a paywall will be erected around the websites of News International's titles, including the Times, the Sunday Times, the Sunand the News of the World.Every other media owner in the world will be looking closely at the results. Given Murdoch's reputation in the industry and the strength of his media brands, this feels like the stick or twist moment.
The pessimistic view (2010 as 1969) sees this as the beginning of the end of the free-love era of the internet, when governments and global corporations started to close down the freedoms that defined the web’s existence thus far. For all their insistence that social media allows them to better engage with their customers, there remains a feeling that given half a chance they’d close the whole thing down.
How long can big, selfish companies live with the era of radical transparency, sitting by while Twitter and Facebook all but destroy Toyota, arguably the greatest brand of the late 20th century? In the UK, the government’s Digital Bill, shamefully rushed through ahead of the election, is a charter for anyone with the will, motive and money to reduce people’s liberties online.
Second up is the iPad. The answer to all our prayers, or the greatest marketing mistake ever made. Having had a go recently, I was oddly underwhelmed. This means nothing of course, but I’m struck that each of the previous Apple products has wowed me, by taking a need and building on it, The iPad, for now at least, feels like a wonderful solution looking for a problem. What if it doesn’t find one? What if, rather than being defined by what it is, it becomes defined by what it isn’t: it’s not a phone, it’s not a camera, it’s not a TV, it’s not portable, etc, etc.
I know they’ve already sold a zillion of them. But what if they’re wrong. What if the iPad is this generation’s Ford Edsel or New Coke. What if its failure brings down Apple, the tech sector’s greatest dream machine, and with it the hopes of the global media industry?
That would be a really bad year’s work.
