stevenclark.com.au

The take-up of the mobile web is an interesting progression through self-doubt, confidence building potential and the realisation (with a tipping point at the iPhone) that brought the mobile web to mainstream users. But wasn’t it only a few years ago that anybody who said there was a future in web technologies on mobile phones became berated? The comment abuse that flowed from daring to suggest its potential was nothing short of passionate.

“Creeping Determinism” is a term referring to the way people who seriously don’t think an event will occur (for example, a win for the national team in a World Cup or the chances of a minor competitor getting a big contract) appear to be equally convinced after the fact – when they were wrong – that the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Somebody who absolutely said Obama would not be President but found themselves saying after the event that of course it was inevitable, America was ready for their first non-white leader.

Something happens in the wiring of our human brains which brings us past the brink of such events into the confidence that it was always inevitable. Perhaps its a way of reconciling ourselves to the uncontrollable hostile world around us.

So I wonder, as a blogger who actually used to rant about the mobile phone potential, what happened to this conversation and how much creeping determinism shifted as millions upon millions of iPhone enabled web users started rediscovering the World Wide Web? Its kind of crazy, but I know those people who believed so vehemently that small screen-sizes were too prohibitive on-the-whole believe that they really believed in the mobile web experience all along. Right from the start.

That conversation is so old and done now that nobody really believes that the Mobile Web isn’t important anymore. But its interesting to note that we employ creeping determinism all of the time. Instead of seeing it as hypocritical behaviour try to see it as our way of moving strong beliefs from point A to point B effectively.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 12:55 pm and is filed under business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.