(A retrospective look at the ripples of what changed, how it changed and how it will continue to change)

I finished my marketing degree just in time for everything I had just learnt to start changing. The world we all knew, the world we all thought we knew, was having the rug pulled from under it. Social networking as we know it was just beginning to catch on, Facebook was only months from being launched and at the beginning of my degree the twin towers still made their presence felt in New York.

All in all the world perception was that we were in a good place. Al Gore’s movie, about global warming,”An Inconvenient Truth” had not yet been released and we were still riding the wave from the economic boom of the 90’s and somewhat celebrating the fact that we didn’t grind to a halt because of the infamous Y2K millennium bug!

What was happening though was a series of very unfortunately timed global events that will forever change the way we think, the way we trust and the way we invest both our time and our money.

The early 2000s saw about the beginnings of a recession that economists had been predicting for years before, the 90’s economic wave couldn’t last forever and Facebook hadn’t begun to distract employees yet either.

“Some economists in the United States object to characterising it as a “recession,” since there were no two consecutive quarters of negative growth.”

On the terror front, Osama Bin Laden had laid out his dastardly plans and executed them to a precision that was terrifying enough next to the true horror of watching a passenger plane slam into one of most revered world landmarks of the modern age, not once but twice! And a third attack being thwarted by the bravery of a few passengers.

Travel & security as we knew it was gone and so was the trust and cosy living we had all gotten used to in the decade before. So the world was about to change and as we know, thanks to François de La Rochefoucauld is that,

“The only thing constant in life is change”

It is, however, the rate of the coming change that flipped the world on its head and caused people to start thinking, “Hang on, wait a minute!” and as I said earlier Facebook is coming and with it the wealth of social networking that will bring about the dawn of the information age as we know it today!

The problem with “Hang on, wait a minute!” is that while hanging on and waiting minutes a new world will pass you by. In the information age the world has access to all of the world’s knowledge and so ideas spread quickly and solutions to new problems can be solved quickly.

How often has someone said to you “just google it”?

The irony of this is that it can be a problem as well, for those who haven’t been aboard the train to digital connectedness or had their heads in the sand hoping for the winds of change to just blow by and let them carry on doing what they have been doing all the years before.

There is no doubt in my mind that we are in a new renaissance, a “Digital Renaissance” and just like the renaissance of centuries ago it will bring about change in the form of a revolution, not an industrial revolution but an “information revolution”, a “virtual revolution” and a “revolution of new perceptions & philosophies”.