No Time Like the Present

For a New Beginning

Things change. That’s obviously true. But as has been observed many times before, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Above we see Rydal Caves in the Lake District of England. I stumbled upon them, by accident and in the rain, early one morning a couple of years ago. I hadn’t fully appreciated where I was, or where I was wandering, until it started to dawn on me that I had been there before. Many years before. Like 30 years before.

This occasioned a reflection on what had changed over those years. Needless to say, a lot had changed. The magnitude of the change was thrown into relief by the fact that the caves themselves, and indeed the weather, had not changed. At all.

It turns out that I feel something similar when I consider the state of technology in 2026. In many ways, it is almost unrecognizably different from where things stood when I started to work with computers in the 1980s. I remember doing punch cards and manually loading programs into devices using cassette tapes and weird magnetic strips. It’s probably best not to dwell on this too much. Still, some things have not changed. At all.

What hasn’t changed is the fact the people need to converge around a shared understanding in order to realize technology, put it to some good use, and then to evolve it as everything around it continues to change. It is this shared understanding that interests me — human knowledge and the physical forms that we give it so that it can indeed be shared.

Even sharing is an interesting concept. Obviously we share our understanding with colleagues, the stakeholders in the technology and in its use. In fact, and in most cases, we share in the task of articulating that understanding. But we remember that we are also sharing with the future, with the people who will come next and even with people who may encounter and use the technology in a different context and who may set about using it in ways we never considered. Perhaps we also share with the past, when we add our new understandings to what was articulated in the past and then find that, through that activity, something quite new and unexpected emerges.

I have been quiet for some time. And during that time, the sands of the digital landscape have shifted under my feet. I should add that I have not been idle. Far from it. I have been applying myself elsewhere as will quickly become evident.

Now while my back was turned, much of what I had maintained as an online presence, such as it was, faded away. My blogging platform, for example, up and disappeared. I had been posting, over a 20 year period, on topics ranging across history, philosophy, business, management, and most particularly the concept of content (its design, use, and management). I did have a digital backup and I was actively using it to train, and argue with, an AI chatbot, so the disappearance of my blogging platform did not amount to the disappearance of my content. There are some who will be less happy about this than others.

This inaugural post can be taken as a declaration that I am back. What I had worked on in the past will find a safe place to rest and, more importantly, I will push ahead into new things. And I will be following the trajectory that forms an arc from my past endeavours to land somewhere that is yet to be determined. One thing is true, this arc has formed, a bit like a rainbow, into a multi-coloured unity where my many pursuits, professional and academic, come together. This is a good thing, if only for my own sanity. It is a gift.

Human knowledge in the age of the smart machine is in many ways the same as it always has been. In other ways, it is profoundly new. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

So watch this space.

And follow along. Such a journey is best done together. Indeed it is the only way for such a quest to proceed.