For probably the last decade I’ve been watching extreme sports(e.g. BMX, Skateboarding, FMX, and Inline Skating). These sports have developed rapidly and each has some large step of progression that come every year. In order to stay at the top of the podium you have to learn how to do these new tricks and do them very well(though not perfect). I was watching the Dew Action Sports Tour’s presentation of FMX and realized just how far these guys have gone in just the past 2-3 years; they’re whipping 250lb. motorcycles around 360 degrees, doing back flips with hardly any part of their body controlling the bike, all of this has come in just this short period. The first year a trick is introduced you don’t need to be perfect the next year it should be and then you have the new tricks that come along that year, also.
This is something that keeps the sports interesting, their always pushing the limits and perfecting what their doing, something I see media failing at. Media is something that stagnates and rarely see something that pushes the boundaries of what is possible. Newspapers haven’t changed in close to a century, movies and television haven’t progressed much either, just the technology that is used and the money spent on it, video games haven’t seen anything revolutionary in the last few years besides increase in graphics, the internet is still promising but has also began to stagnate.
Looking at the internet we’ve seen it grow from closed network to open network, basic text-on-screen to simple coloring and fonts, simplistic layouts of pages to divisible sections on a single page, and now we are seeing social media and web 2.0 for the past 5 years and it’s stagnating and spreading because it’s the new web fashion, and no one is stepping up to change this model. The way I see it is we need some form of progression, right now everyone is focusing on perfecting the web 2.0 model and no one is trying to make a step that shatters that boundary. Right now, the biggest step recently has been streaming live video and HD content. Everybody else is trying to perfect what they’ve already done by copying what their competitors are doing.
Nikola Tesla was decades ahead of his times with his innovative ideas that could have revolutionized the world in the early decades of the last century. We’ve seen a lot of what he had designed come to fruition but he doesn’t receive the credit, radar, radio, AC current, wireless transmissions of images, voices, and electricity, plus countless others. He was the Da Vinci of the late 19th and 20th centuries. What we need is a Tesla to come along for the Internet Age to renovate it’s stagnant models and provide the ground for future technological advances in the future. His progressions are finally being perfected for general use in our daily lives.
As you look around everyone is striving for perfection because they think that if something is perfect people will use it over their competitors. The problem is that you can’t steal people away with your perfect implementation because people will leave for something that has ‘progressed to a new standard’. You can try and provide the perfect solution but being perfect is absolutely unnecessary; try to be close to perfect by way ahead of the pack in what your doing.