Article Contributed on: 6/24/2009 9:31:58 AM
I guess we are improving. We aren't quite as dumb as we thought we were, apparently. All through the nineties, we were constantly reminded that it was OK to be dumb.
We had the DUMMIES GUIDEs, which told us (at nearly painful levels of 5th grade English) how to do simple things like use word processors, and computer software (without ever actually telling us how to do the hard stuff we really wanted to do), and these guides were so successful, they eventually expanded out to every single area of our lives. Like the old sci-fi product Ice-9, which turned everything it touched into Ice-9, publishing turned everything it touched into fodder for dummies, including (I'm not making this up, as Dave Barry would say) "Addiction and Recovery for Dummies," "African American History for Dummies," "Alternative Energy for Dummies." "Arabic for Dummies," "Baby Names for Dummies," "Bond Investing for Dummies" (this may explain a lot), "Second Life for Dummies," and hundreds and hundreds of others. And we bought these books, (profits estimated at $120 million according the online Brittanica) so we must have figured we were the Dummies in need of assistance.
Move over Dummies, there's a new schtick in town. We've suddenly become SMART.
SMART Cars:
www.smartusa.com (fit two people and save energy)
SMART Bus:
www.smartbus.org (transit program)
SMART Recovery:
www.smartrecovery.org (alcohol and addiction recovery)
Science, Mathematics And Research for Transformation (SMART):
www.asee.org/SMART
National SMART Grant: http://studentaid.ed.gov/PORTALSWebApp/students/english/SmartGrants.jsp
Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology:
www.esa.int/esaMI/SMART-1/index.html
Project Vote Smart:
www.votesmart.org
Smart Growth:
www.smartgrowthamerica.org
www.smartgrowth.org
Smart Guide:
Basements Homeowner Projects
Smart Guide:
Alternative travel options on Cape Cod
Smart Guide:
"technologically advanced electric toothbrush" feature
Smart Guide to Kid's TV :
www.aap.org/family/smarttv.htm
Smart Guide: On Sludge Use and Food Production:
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
Smart Grid: computer controlled energy distribution
S.M.A.R.T - The SMART Guide to Getting Results with Groups (book)
Animal disaster rescue:
www.smart-mass.org
Smart Communities Network:
www.smartcommunities.ncat.org
and even a book called "Smart Mobs"
This new trend hasn't quite caught on (after all the Dummies books had an entire decade to spawn), but it's on the way. I guess now we are figuring after we read all those Dummies books, we've gotten pretty smart, so now we need advice for smart folk. Or, if you look at it from a marketing perspective, now that we're sick of being dummies, we're willing to spend on SMART.
It remains to be seen if we are smart enough to actually see past the marketeering and decide on our own if calling something SMART actually makes it so.
We may be Voting Smart, but that group has voting proponents perfectly willing to consign our votes to less secure Mail-in Ballots and proprietary voting machine software to serve the goal of making sure as many people as possible vote (we hope that won't include the cemetary residents).
SmartGrowth is a movement designed to remove the "middle class" in property, that large component of our country that lies between "urban" and "agricultural." It's been cunningly re named "sprawl" to demonize it, so that individual property rights can be ground under the wheels of the will to cluster, in the belief that environmental disaster is imminent. The movement has stolen much the resilience from our economy, but it sounds good, so we keep clinging to it.
The Smart Grid, as anyone with even minor computer geek tendencies knows, will be the biggest target the computer hackers have ever seen, terrorist or not. That probably bodes well for those of us on the Internet who would prefer they target someone else (think of it as a sacrificial crop, like radishes, to steal all the little bugs away from the rest of your garden), but whether we have the security skills (dubious at this point in time) to keep such a grid free from disaster is still an open question.
At least we can see which way the marketing/ad folks are moving, and maybe if we're looking for book titles for a book we want to publish and really want it to sell along with the rest of the books in this new trend, we can jump on the bandwagon and make a "Smart Guide to Community Journalism" or something, but. really, if we could spend the millions of dollars that we spent (and continue to spend) on Dummies books, how smart can we be?