What If There is No There There?

Dain Schult
Chief Executive Officer of Global Entertainment Technology, Inc.
www.globalentertainmenttechnology.com

What If There is No There There?

Anybody out there who remember Gertrude Stein?  Of course not, but you're probably googling her name right now.  She was a character before being a character was fashionable.  She was her era's Lena Dunham without the social media buzz to create celebrity.

Ms. Stein is best known for her pronouncement, "There's no there, there" which is interesting because she was deriding her hometown of Oakland, California.  I would have to disagree with her if only because the Tower of Power came from Oakland so something good did originate there and the band did put the city on the map culturally if nothing else.

Yes, we've all been places in our life where there was no there where we were there - does that make any sense?  I spent year one afternoon in Chunky, Mississippi, so I have some clue to all this, but that really isn't the point of this.

This is.  What if there really isn't a there in the Frankenstein monster that is the mixing of a gazillion forms of social media with raging, never stopping digital technology development?

Then what?  Instead of just changing underwear every day, we'll be needing to swap out smartphones or notebooks every day too?

What about how one gets musical entertainment now?  

With somewhere north of 700,000 Internet radio stations and digital outlets screaming for attention along with YouTube and everything else on the net plus terrestrial radio and (here's something novel) vinyl records, it comes to the point of how many songs can you listen to at once?  Like how many watches can you wear at one time? Or pairs of shoes?  Or anything else?

So when you get "there" it's not that there isn't something there - it's too much of everything there, so, in essence, there is no there then.

Gertrude Stein was right.