Getting It
By Michael Swaine
Spiritus mundi means something like Jung's collective unconscious, a shared hall closet of concepts and images that we keep around because they may come in handy someday; or, more literally, the spirit of the world; but not, as I once thought, how you feel on Monday.
These days, though, the spiritus mundi flickers like a magic lantern show, and it begins to make sense to distinguish the spiritus mundi Monday from the spiritus mundi Tuesday.
Already cluttered with lyrics of Barry Manilow songs and images of Pez dispensers, the spiritus mundi is now swallowing the concept of the World Wide Web. As must we all: Anyone who doesn't grok the essence -- not just the technology, but the true meaning of the Web at this unconscious, intuitive level -- just doesn't Get It. And Getting It is the thing. You gotta Get It. If you don't Get It, you're out of it. Big companies don't Get It. Apple doesn't Get It.
IBM wouldn't be expected to Get It. Microsoft didn't Get It, but then Got It, but in a deeper sense doesn't Get It at all. State and national governments really don't Get It. Most companies putting up Web sites don't Get It. Newspapers wanting to go online don't Get It, nor do advertisers wanting to Get a piece of It. Purveyors of push say that the defenders of client-side control don't Get It, and vice versa.
Dave Winer (www.scripting.com) says technical journalists only know three stories (Apple is dead, Microsoft is evil, and Java is the future), and concludes that they just don't Get It.
