Steve Jobs, Facebook and the viral legacy that lives on...

Well sad news hit us all with the pass­ing of Steve Jobs a lit­tle over a week ago now, and I like many of you observed some­thing truly amaz­ing. As with most break­ing news, I heard about it not from a tra­di­tional media source so to speak but eerily as with the pass­ing of Michael Jack­son I was first noti­fied about his sad demise on Face­book, a com­pany that in many ways embod­ies the prin­ci­ples that the man him­self held dear and inspired in others.

Whiling away a few free hours I was sud­denly inun­dated with sta­tus updates wish­ing the dearly departed a swift and speedy ride heav­en­wards and more­over an out­pour­ing of Apple fans mak­ing updates and sta­tus posts of per­sonal thanks to him. I only acquired my first iPhone recently after much debate as to whether I really needed it or just wanted it and I finally suc­cumbed after real­is­ing that maybe it didn’t really mat­ter as to which was the more preva­lent moti­va­tion and maybe that more than any­thing else was the genius of the man; he helped to sin­gle hand­edly merge the line between desire and neces­sity in the tech­no­log­i­cal arena and made func­tion­al­ity for want of a bet­ter word, sexy.

He pressed within us all emo­tional but­tons with a device that on paper is the lesser to many other smart phones out there but that in some mag­i­cal, mys­te­ri­ous way bypasses the ultra ratio­nal parts of our minds and taps directly into some­thing far more fun­da­men­tal within us, the basic human desire to con­nect.  With oth­ers, with our own inner child and in a way as yet unsur­passed with the ubiq­ui­tous tech­nolo­gies we now find our­selves unable to even con­tem­plate liv­ing with­out.  It’s more than just a log­i­cal assess­ment, the iPhone truly is a device greater than just the sum of it’s patent laden parts.

A phone is no longer just a phone. A phone is a friend.

We play with it, talk to it (not just through it) and we mourn it’s loss with all the stages of grief at our dis­posal (though mit­i­gated some­what with the right insur­ance pol­icy tucked away in a drawer somewhere.)

You see for my money what Steve Jobs was, was the mas­ter at pack­ag­ing people’s beliefs and desires, aspi­ra­tions and ambi­tions into a fully fledged, func­tional and fab­u­lous friend.

Like a kind of Tam­agotchi 2.0. with addi­tional angry bird.

A num­ber of things came together in those first brief moments on Face­book after the news of his demise broke. What started as a sim­ple for­ward­ing of news links from the BBC and the like, then increased expo­nen­tially from a small but steady stream of a much more per­sonal nature to a vir­tual tor­rent, a vis­ceral out­pour­ing of grief and praise. Steve Jobs touched not only people’s lifestyles but lives. In short he inspired far beyond the reaches of sim­ply the Apple afi­ciona­dos out there to the sec­u­lar wider world at large. Even peo­ple who had never touched or had any desire to touch an Apple prod­uct felt that some­thing truly note­wor­thy was hap­pen­ing. A brief moment in his­tory when we actu­ally felt his­tory was being made. In years to come I can’t help but won­der if peo­ple will hud­dle together in secluded bars and speak in hushed tones of where they were, what they were doing and with whom when they first  heard that “The Apple guy” died, much like J.F.K or Diana, Jack­son etc. It was a moment and you couldn’t help but feel it. Some­one once told me…

“I don’t watch the news, it depresses me, I’m sure if it’s impor­tant enough I’ll hear about it sooner or later.”

Well in the days after his death, if you were con­nected to the inter­net you cer­tainly heard about it, hell even the God­fa­ther and gate­way to the mod­ern net paid homage to the metic­u­lous man in a suit­ably min­i­mal­ist style.

How many would weep or feel moved to write con­do­lence mes­sages for the death of a wash­ing machine designer? Or an elec­tric tooth­brush man­u­fac­turer? In their own ways these devices have con­tributed as much if not more to human­ity in prac­ti­cal, prag­matic and poten­tially life chang­ing ways and yet does a wash­ing machine or tooth­brush inspire us? Grat­ify us so fully? Engage us on such an emo­tional level? I think not.

That steady tor­rent of well wishes was expressed in a mul­ti­tude of ways, places and forms. From sim­ple sta­tus updates with his name fol­lowed with or pre­fixed by the min­i­mal but heart­felt expres­sions of R.I.P, to graphic design­ers the world over putting together ever more elab­o­rate and elo­quent mon­tages, info-graphics and videos.

Peo­ple within the com­mu­nity of Apple devo­tees he inspired and on the periph­ery of it were aware that some­thing momen­tous was hap­pen­ing and that some­one of note not only directly for the con­tri­bu­tion that they had per­son­ally made had passed but for the legacy that they were leav­ing behind that peo­ple were wit­ness­ing the birth of.

It also struck me that Mark Zucker­berg had not only been influ­enced greatly by Steve Jobs on a per­sonal level but that his ambi­tions for Face­book were in many ways directly in tune with that emo­tional vein that Steve Jobs had so mas­ter­fully mined within the world. The desire to con­nect and share seam­lessly, effort­lessly and ubiq­ui­tously util­is­ing devices that we not only engage with on a phys­i­cal level but more and more­over on an emo­tional one.

To that end only time and Time­line will tell how suc­cess­ful Zucker­berg and the Face­book team are at achiev­ing that ambition.

Men of vision see not only what is here but what is to come. Men of ambi­tion and apti­tude have made those dreams real.

Mark Zucker­berg recently became the man of the moment with his own fledg­ling Law in the foot­steps of Moore many years before him with this assertion…

“I would expect that next year, peo­ple will share twice as much infor­ma­tion as they share this year, and next year, they will be shar­ing twice as much as they did the year before.”

It seemed to me poignant that on a social net­work whose founder seemed so per­son­ally inspired by Steve that his was one of the most shared sto­ries I’ve ever seen in my time using Facebook.

I myself made a lit­tle trib­ute to him as while I’ve only had an iPhone for a while I now can’t imag­ine my life with­out it and I know many oth­ers did besides but it was still kind of nice to see that peo­ple joined as a way to express their thanks. Social net­works are almost uniquely designed as a way to bring peo­ple together in times of joy and in times of grief, in times of rant and rave and some­times at their best in times of sim­ple thanks to those amongst us whom we feel have added to and improved our lives in some small way.

Within days there was even this lit­tle gem going viral bring­ing together some of my favourite things; coun­try music, come­di­ans and com­mem­o­ra­tion; not to men­tion the fall of capitalism.

The genius of Jobs was to see tech­nol­ogy not just as some­thing func­tional but as some­thing fun, some­thing that we should flirt with, court and then fall in love with; totally, utterly, absolutely, madly and pas­sion­ately in love with.

He was a match maker between man and machine and left behind him a legacy of love.

Here’s to the crazy ones, the mis­fits, the rebels, the trou­ble­mak­ers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things dif­fer­ently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, dis­agree with them, glo­rify or vil­ify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race for­ward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.  ~ Steve Jobs