i just saw this great post, don’t hire an internet person, that touches upon the (mindnumbingly frustrating) misconception that an internet strategy could be considered so separate from the rest of the whole campaign concept that delegating it to an isolated individual–“the internet person,” who will inevitably end up getting shoved in a closet–is actually deemed appropraite.

i wrote a response that, unlike with any other medium, there isn’t really a good understanding of where the distinctions between the internet’s functions are drawn. you wouldn’t get a telephone technician to develop a telemarketing strategy, you wouldn’t get a tv commercial director to develop the whole campaign concept, yet with the internet there’s not the same understanding of the separation between where the technical or design-related ends and the strategy begins. i mean, in some places whole thing is still just called “the new media” dept. really.

and just after i was done, i got the picture at the top of this post sent to me by a friend who was joking that he’s in the market for a new computer; maybe he should get the one pictured in the photo, and i realized something.

while we’re spending so much time being frustrated by the lethargic pace at which the general understanding of the use and value of this “new media” is catching up with its potential, this is but a little blip on the radar. an awkward adolescent phase where everything looked all gangly and weird, and everyone felt hopelessly misunderstood by the parents. but internet puberty is not a permanent state, and eventually–maybe by the time everyone making decisions can no longer say they were alive before the internet–will become maturity.

at that point everyone will understand. they will even understand more than we do. more than we could. and will we look back then, on all this, like on old high school pictures, and reminisce?