There were for me two main things about the inauguration today, both of them unsurprisingly relating to technology.
The first was about Twitter, which I blogged about here.
The second was about the almost constant presence of technology in the new First Family. It’s manifested itself throughout the carefully orchestrated campaign. From crowdsourcing in supporting change.org and now change.gov through to the clever mobile application which Tom Armitage sagely pointed out was an MMO in disguise.
Today took things a turn further forward with some elements of the speech making me really overjoyed at their promise.
We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.
I loved the mention of science and digital lines, it felt great that these things, fixing the ecological issues and educating the next generation were at the forefront and not taking a backseat. I along with others was also overjoyed that curiosity got a mention. To someone who has been a scientist and is just fascinated in picking things apart and hacking something new, curiosity is such an important thing. It is the core of an inquiring mind and along with logic and serendipity it provides such an impetus to innovation.
Then something else wonderful happened, the TV showed one of the president’s daughters, Malia, filming the speech on a camera. Whether it was stills or video is unclear, I like thinking around the idea that Ewan McIntosh postulated.
If it was a video and she did put it on YouTube it would be the most amazing piece of first person historical recording I can imagine for the digital age.
The final thing which made me feel that the first family are geeks, or at least have some amazing advisors was the moment when it was starting to be mentioned on Twitter that the new whitehouse.gov site was being put up part way through the inauguration. I don’t know if this is common, but it had much similarity to the showmanship of an Apple Stevenote where the Apple Store goes down, people start to salivate and then just after the speech ends the new shiny wares are there for you to buy and eagerly wait for. It felt the same, part way through the speech you could see the new policies and even start to geek out over their use of tech like JQuery and the presence of Creative Commons licensing.
The revolution will be YouTubed and social, and hopefully the geek will inherit the earth in a Creative Commons crowdsourced shared ownership and use sort of way.
