This may not seem like an important statement, until you factor in that my current job is Director of Interactive Strategy.  You’d think being obsessed with the latest gadget and every new feature Google rolls out would be what I live for and it was.  I had an epiphany on the bus this morning, though.

Quite simply — I’m bored with technology.

What excites me is people.  Why do people do what they do?  Why do some people favor Twitter over Facebook?  Why do some people swear by their iPhones and others are perfectly happy with basic phone that makes phone calls.   The iPad in itself is just not interesting.  Okay, it’s kind of interesting — but the interesting part is how it may change the way people do things or understand something.

The Kindle (still one of my favorites), is interesting because it finally created a way that mainstream people began to accept digital books.  The gadget is not what’s important.  Even Amazon proves this point by providing Kindle Apps on all kinds of platforms.  This seems to baffle people.  Why would Amazon create a Kindle App for the iPad when that may doom their gadget?  Frankly, it’s because Amazon seems to get it’s not about gadgets.  It’s about people reading.   The Kindle provided an experience that was so similar to reading a print and ink book that it was comfortable.  But, like the iPod, it allowed you to carry your entire library around with you and shop from anywhere.  Even the much maligned design of the Kindle illustrates this ethos.  It’s not about the gadget.  The gadget should disappear when you read.  It’s about the words on the page.  Why is there a keyboard?  Because people like to make notes in the margins of their books.

As a marketer, I don’t care about the technology.  I care about the people I’m trying to reach.  I care about how they use technology to communicate.  I care about ways to create experiences, which technology makes a lot easier.  I love articles like these from Mashable because they show ways we are using technology to rebuild community experiences that time, distant, a crappy economy and a ridiculous lack of work/life balance have begun to remove from many of our lives.  These are things marketers should be looking for, especially pharma marketers.  What do people already do?How can we help with that?  Another great example is from the world of law enforcement (again via Mashable).  This is not about cops thinking, “we should be using Facebook.”  They saw that technology offered new ways, possibly more efficiently, to do things they already needed to do.

I’m bored with technology unless we’re talking about what you could do with it, what you do with it, and why you do it.

I want to talk about you.

You are interesting.