Old people are often given a lot of flak for being nostalgic about the past. They tell loving stories about how much rosier children’s cheeks were in the 1950s, and how cars these days look like undifferentiated blobs. While it’s true about the cars, it’s definitely wrong to suggest that the past was better than the present; clearly it wasn’t. Those who spent their youth taking literal flak in the Second World War, or being napalmed in the jungles of Southeast Asia a generation later, can’t really look at the nineteen-year-olds of today and say “things were better when I was your age.”
Whatever the silliness is of making the past all rosy, the young today have an annoying habit of being nostalgic about the present. The pace of technology and social reform seems to be conquering obstacles to the development of humanity at a remarkable rate. This will change nothing. The things that matter to each of us are still the same as they were 50,000 years ago. Our world is shaped more by the primordial architecture of our brains than by social or technological advances.
This is why we still need things that are called “agencies.” PR, marketing, and advertising exist because we are still basically bags of meat and bones making decisions with a grey mass of cells between fleshy things called ears. Big Data systems can now make hundreds of thousands of calculations per second, but whatever conclusion they spit out will still be ruminated over by a CEO distantly related to a ruminant (and an arugula for that matter). Effective communication inevitably involves these human and mammalian elements which cannot be understood by the machines. The world we live in is no better or worse than the stories we tell about it.
So if you’re a PR, marketing, or advertising agent, take comfort in the knowledge that while one day the data-centers of Kansas will be systematically unearthed by archaeologists with little brushes and hammers, someone will still need to be there to write the press release.