Facebook is our Spinning Jenny

James Hargreaves inven­ted the Spinning Jenny in 1764.

He was a weaver and a car­penter, and he put his skills into invent­ing the auto­mat­ic weav­ing machine to make his work easi­er. The res­ult was the Spinning Jenny, a device that sparked the indus­tri­al revolu­tion in England.

Imagine for a second that Facebook is the Spinning Jenny of our time, a his­tor­ic­al mark­er of change in a shift that reshapes how we relate and communicate.

The Industrial Revolution changed our way of life by restruc­tur­ing how we form soci­et­al groups. We became less depend­ent on a loc­al com­munity to provide for our needs and more urb­an. The digit­al revolu­tion has brought us a shift of sim­il­ar mag­nitude — nev­er before have groups formed and dis­solved so rap­idly and so free from demo­graph­ic­al boundaries.

Of course, the indus­tri­al revolu­tion wasn’t only due to Spinning Jenny, just as the digit­al revolu­tion wasn’t only due to Facebook. James Hargreaves and Mark Zuckerberg just happened to cre­ate some­thing that demon­strated to the world the poten­tial of new tech­no­logy. The chances are that future his­tor­i­ans will use Facebook as a sim­il­ar sym­bol for change, just like we refer let the Spinning Jenny illus­trat­ing the Industrial Revolution.

If you, in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, happened to be in the tex­tile industry, you would be a fool to ignore Spinning Jenny. You would be a fool not to invest in some auto­ma­tion. And you must be smart about it; you must make money through­out the trans­ition while invest­ing in new ways to make money. 

If you weren’t in the tex­tile industry, maybe you had some “extra” years to pre­pare before your line of work became indus­tri­al­ised. Some used those years to design and invest. Others didn’t. They couldn’t bring them­selves to accept the inevitable.

Two ques­tions for you, dear read­er and fel­low PR pro­fes­sion­al, to med­it­ate on as I stitch this thought together:

1. Imagine your­self in busi­ness in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, and someone came by and described the Spinning Jenny to you. How would you react? What actions would you take?

2. Despite being such a dis­rupt­ive inven­tion, you’ll have to go to a museum to find a Spinning Jenny now. What will the world look like when your digit­al tools are a thou­sand times more potent than Facebook is today?

Now, be smart about your Facebook strategy.

PR Resource: The Electronic Age

Enter: The Electronic Age

Human cul­ture is often described based on our access to pro­duc­tion tech­no­lo­gies (e.g., the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age).

According to Marshall McLuhan and the Toronto School of Communication Theory, a bet­ter ana­lys­is would be to view soci­et­al devel­op­ment based on the prom­in­ence of emer­ging com­mu­nic­a­tions technologies.

McLuhan’s Four Epochs

McLuhan sug­gests divid­ing human civil­isa­tion into four epochs:

“The Gutenberg Galaxy is a land­mark book that intro­duced the concept of the glob­al vil­lage and estab­lished Marshall McLuhan as the ori­gin­al ‘media guru’, with more than 200,000 cop­ies in print.”
Source: Modern Language Review ¹McLuhan, M. (1963). The Gutenberg galaxy: the mak­ing of typo­graph­ic man. Modern Language Review, 58, 542. https://​doi​.org/​1​0​.​2​3​0​7​/​3​7​1​9​923

As a PR pro­fes­sion­al and lin­guist, I sub­scribe to the concept of the Electronic Age. I firmly believe soci­ety is unlikely to revert to the Gutenberg Galaxy.

Read also: The Electronic Age and the End of the Gutenberg Galaxy