Risky is the New Safe Read Online Free PDF Page B

devices.)
    Things are moving at breathtaking speed from the Internet to mobile apps. In the very near future, if you were to force a person to choose between giving up their favorite apps versus their favorite websites, they will likely keep their apps. Meanwhile, broadcast networks are trying to figure out how to compete with cable; cable networks are trying to figure out how to compete with the Internet; websites are trying to figure out how to offer themselves via mobile; and mobile sites are trying to figure out how to do apps. They’re all like the wagon train under attack. They’ve circled the wagons, but they’re all shooting inward.
    This isn’t about broadcast versus cable, or Apple TV. Consumers don’t care about a company’s turf wars. They just want to be informed and entertained. They want to sound like they know what they’re talking about when the subjects of politics or their favorite sports team come up. And most desperately of all, they want to be distracted and entertained every waking moment of every day.
    There is now a whole generation of people who are tethered electronically, 24 hours a day. Suggest to them that they should leave their cell phones at home when they go to the opera or church, and they’ll look at you like you’re eating spiders. The very concept is so alien to them they can’t even process the request.
    They’ll argue something about how necessary their phone is in case of an emergency, disregarding the 5,000 years of human history we survived before the cell phone. The real reason that they need to take it everywhere is simply that they have become addicted to their electronic pacifier.
    We are more connected than ever, yet we are lonelier than ever. The average person is bored to death, insecure, and can’t stand to have a moment alone in quiet thought. People need to be BUSY all the time. So whether it means sending and checking text messages while eating dinner with their spouse, replying to emails while they’re in line at the checkout counter, or watching cat videos during a red light, they want content—and an endless supply of it.
To Vid or Not to Vid
    Now, this raises the issue about video. We are definitely a visual society nowadays, and we’re becoming even more so. Radio continues to exist, but only in the shadow of television and movies. Pretty much everyone under the age of 35 is part of the Internet/texting/TV/video game generation. That’s a nice way to say they have the attention span of a gnat.
    You have to figure that video is the best way to capture their attention. My friend and bestselling author Brendon Burchard predicts that 95 percent of everything on the Internet, including email, will be video within a couple years. Now, Brendon’s a clever fellow, so I’m inclined to agree with him, but as a critical thinker, I have to assume everything will be video—unless it isn’t.
    Personally, I hate getting video emails. The lighting is usually dreadful, they take too long to watch, and I can’t start to reply to questions without stopping the video and having to replay it from the beginning. I’m old enough to remember a time—specifically, the fifth grade—when people talked about video telephones as though they were the stuff of science fiction. This was something you’d see on The Jetsons . Now we’re in 2012, the technology has been available for years—and no one wants it.
    Turns out that not all women want to answer a videophone when they have curlers in their hair. And most guys don’t like to answer the videophone naked and wet from the shower. I usually do four or five Skype conferences a week, and about 90 percent of the time, they’re done by audio, without the video. (Although little kids now use tablets to call each other, using apps like FaceTime. My friend’s four-year-old talks with all her friends using her iPad, screen within a