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.