The Washington Post had an article about RFID tags yesterday. It's the usual stuff about the potential of RFIDs to improve business and the worries of privacy advicates. But the thing that jumped out at me as an absolute classic misunderstanding was this:

'"If you know quickly who is in the area, you can customize their experience," said Paul McKeown, who heads IBM's global smart-card efforts. McKeown said he was inspired by an experience his mother had in her small town in England, where for years she was banking at the same branch and one day wasn't recognized and was challenged by a new teller.'

If ever there were folk "who didn't get it" about technology, it is people with this kind of attitude. The whole point about the small town where the banking staff knew and cared about the customers was that people were put in touch with and cared about people. No amount of technology facilitating a "customised experience" can bridge the unmeasurable qualitative difference between treating a person as a person and treating them as a customised number to be processed in accordance with the instructions on the employee's screen.

As Cory said in his DRM speech at Microsoft, "New media don't succeed because they're like the old media, only better: they succeed because they're worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at." I'd like to offer an extension to this - new methods and technologies do not succeed because they are like people only better, they suceed because they are worse than people at the stuff people are good at (caring) and better at the stuff people are bad at (rapidly processing and moving around billions of bits). Try not to get confused about that. It's important.

The thing that makes my own organisation, the Open University, so unique and special was that we put people in touch with people. We recognised, 35 years ago, that the way for open and distance university education to work for students with no prior qualifications was to put good people (vast numbers in the OU) in touch with good people with unrecognised potential (our students) and that we could be all-inclusive. We've had well over a million graduates since then, many of whom would never have had the opportunity to take a university degree.

The thing that makes the Internet so special is that it puts people in touch with people. Sure it is a bottomless sink of information and a useful communications infrastructure for commerce but the key is that it is a many to many communcations medium putting people in touch with people.

I'll stop there lest I be accused of becoming too evangelistic...