Over Is So Over As Passe Tech Refuses To Die

So many people are using so many types of technology that nothing is over. Not even MySpace.  JL

Jonathan Margolis reports in the Financial Times:

“Over” online technologies have a habit of reviving. The number of people consuming technology is so big it can accommodate pluralism. Almost anything technically redundant — vinyl records, valve amplifiers, photographic film, typewriters, even, dare I say it, printed newspapers — can thrive and have a commercially significant following.The increasingly elderly population in much of the world helps to feed this.

A daughter is visiting and wants to show her mother something. My wife’s head is in her laptop. “Just a moment, I’m writing an email,” she says.

“God, it’s like 1996 round here,” says daughter. This is an (almost) fully functioning person who nonetheless once FaceTimed me in New York to ask how far from the corner of an envelope you stick a stamp if you want to avoid seeming weird.
None of her friends even uses email, she claims. Young people (and those who like to appear young) message only on social media.
I have been hearing for 10 years that email is “over”, but it is still with us. I was on a train with a young venture capitalist the other week; he apologised for spending 20 minutes attending to emails. “I’m surprised you even do email,” I said.
He looked puzzled. “I live on email,” he said. Hadn’t he heard it is over? “Vaguely,” he said. “But nothing’s ever over, is it? I even heard somewhere that handwritten letters are making a comeback.”
In the past few weeks, I have seen Facebook, Twitter, eBooks, websites, apps, phone calls, smartphones, desktops, laptops and TV written off as “over”. Manifestly, they are not.
I confidently predict that in the next year, the current tech hot-picks — tablets, smartphones, VR, Instagram, wearable tech, the internet-of-things, Snapchat and self-driving cars — will be pronounced by someone as over.
Then, one by one, they will be proclaimed to be “back”. I confess I have done it.
The essayist and former trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb has called this “neomania”, arguing that technology that has been successful for many years will probably continue to be many years into the future.
The number of people consuming technology is so big it can accommodate pluralism. Almost anything technically redundant — vinyl records, valve amplifiers, photographic film, typewriters, even, dare I say it, printed newspapers — can thrive and have a commercially significant following.
The increasingly elderly population in much of the world helps to feed this. Not to forget those mindful young seekers after obsolescence, the WG Grace-bearded hipsters.
But technological pluralism is not merely the province of the ageing or the achingly chic. I mentioned ham radio — the global version of citizens band, or CB — in a column a couple of months ago, only to discover it is experiencing a modest boom.
Other fields that technology should have destroyed just keep going. High-street travel agencies should have gone the way of the phone box, yet two big travel agents have opened in the past year in Richmond, my south London suburb.
“Over” online technologies have a habit of reviving. The early social networking site and talent showcase, MySpace, is almost a paradigm for over-ness. Yet I met a man last week who has effectively reinvented the idea and may have the Next Big Thing on his hands.
Ricardo Porteus, from Blackpool, England, has left his job as head of marketing for Pacha Group, the Ibiza-based nightclub brand. Last year, he put £250,000 of his own money into developing Bleep.me, which allows 16 to 20-year-olds to showcase their passion for music as well as such talents as modelling, tattooing and crafts.
Bleep.me pulls all their social media streams together, helping give them what amounts to a free, constantly updated website.
“Websites are dead for artists,” Mr Porteus says. “Facebook is dead as a creative space. And Google’s dead. Young kids hang out on Snapchat and Instagram,” — sentiments that may strike some as ironic coming from the guy making a new version of MySpace.
Mr Porteus, 36, has 5,000 established artists using Bleep.me, 30,000 hopefuls, and has on the board an ex-Yahoo CEO and “top guys from Facebook”.
He is working on raising a further £500,000 now, then plans a £5m funding round next year, aiming for a £15m valuation in 2017.Capturing the attention of a generation that has grown up with technology is an ever-changing task

“People always make the comparison to MySpace and see it as a negative, but for me it’s flattering. Every dog has its day. Its day was six to eight years, which in tech is a lifetime.”
So what, I asked him, is Bleep.me’s life expectancy?
“I’d say for cool people, we’ll have a three-year peak, and in five years, we’ll peak corporately,” he says — an impressive case of a company planning for its own over-ness.
And yet no one would be amazed if Bleep.me were still around in 15 years. “Over” is over. Or should be.