Kilroy Is Here!

Kilroy is here!

Like it or not that's the reality.

Stolen from the soldiers of WW2 by graffiti artists 50 years later, "Kilroy was here" sent a message to the enemy during the war that, like it or not, you had to deal with guns (and spray paint). "The medium is the message," as Marshall McLuhan said. The medium in this case, being a picture of an apparent lost soul with a sausage nose, eight fingers and tiny eyes…or any number of images painted on bridges, buildings, or subway cars.

To me, Kilroy is the always-in-your-face technology revolution that requires our attention 24x7 and is impossible to hide from. At one point in my career, I carried three cell phones and multiple email addresses. I have determined, or convinced myself, that to monitor all of the activities I am involved in, I need to be reachable in multiple mediums simultaneously. Social uprisings in the Middle East and Africa are being described as the Twitter revolution. Good guys and bad guys alike are making themselves heard using a ubiquitous, free technology that, has no physical boundaries. Making sense of all of these emerging technologies is a difficult task. While I try to stay on top of all things new, I find myself gravitating to a handful which consists of LinkedIn, Waze, Keeper, Apple, Google and Microsoft. I simply can't handle much more.

While I am a Facebook user, it is not central to my life or work. Facebook's roots are in finding pretty girls at colleges so it seems to me Marshall McLuhan has turned over in his grave as the message has become the medium. What a difference between now and when he wrote that in the 1960's. Or is it? McLuhan wrote at length about "Objects of Desire" and the effects advertising had on the psyche of men and women. He concluded advertising was used to create desire and desire lead to the selling of products that helped create the desire. So perhaps the medium is the message after all.

So Kilroy is omnipresent in the form of insatiable technology that we’ve created ourselves. We will just have to deal with it. Staying on top of and narrowing your focus to a handful of technologies that improve your life is a shared desire I believe many have. If you read this post and have another 30 seconds please list your top few favored technologies to share.

My best, Chris