What Happened To The "Ecstasy Of Gold?"
"The Ecstasy of Gold" is a song written by Ennio Morricone from the Spaghetti Western, 'The Good, The Bad & The Ugly,' and its popularity had a resurgence in the 90's as the heavy metal band, Metallica, would use it as the opening music to their concerts. This tune would start to fill the air and the crowd would practically eat itself knowing that the band was about to hit the stage. I was born of this metal militia almost thirty years ago and I can still remember seeing them walk out on stage each and every time.
That being said, I saw Apple tease a couple of weeks ago the release of something on iTunes tomorrow! "Cool," I said and then subsequently tweeted that they're "such a tease." That's in jest, really, as I love that some people are still taking the time to build anticipation. There's less and less of it anymore as we've made way for the expectation that one's social network is of such that whatever the trend in my interest will simply 'find me.' I guess I cannot blame the technology companies these days -- there's this hurricane of technology releases coming from every direction and none of them seem to be any bigger than the other. Facebook, today, released messaging surrounding their messaging services but it didn't feel special. It didn't make me talk, chatter or speculate what it could be.
Maybe Al Capone's vault or the lack of inspiration that was provided by the Segway just cast a shroud of apathy of building pre-buzz. What's going on? I mean, even DVD and game releases are having less and less pre-seeded expectation applied to them. Are we just to the point that we don't require anticipation anymore? Maybe I'm just so past my trending prime that I'm oblivious to these campaigns, but I don't think so. I [think] that we're just swimming in deliverables. There's a poster that I saw behind some technology executive (Facebook, as I recall) that said "Better Now Than Prefect", and while I'm coming to understand more and more that sometimes being first is better than being the best in the application/mobile market, it has a tendency to be a wash of technology, versioning and vague discussion that swirls into muddy noise.
I started this by saying that apple's doing it, but just for a day. Facebook seems to have a feature release a month and that's about as special as a new item on Cracker Barrel's menu. Maybe I'm just old, or maybe I want to be so excited about something that when I finally hold it I feel special to have acquired it. Christmas day, camping our for tickets to that one band you must see before you die or simply waiting to see a good friend. The art of anticipation seems to be a dying art. We're so connected to everything and news travels at blinding speeds that even word-of-mouth is too slow. I have dozens of friends and we all send each other sites, video and technologies to get our thoughts. And I find it amazing that I send the same file to two people on across the continent and I get "oh, I saw that an hour ago." It's something that is bitter sweet about technology, we get everything faster and faster but we seem to forget that sometimes it's just good to wait.
