By Devon Dickau (’15)
During my first graduate program, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I studied the potential of leveraging media and technology to spark social change. Along with my exploration of television and film as tools for activating people around important social issues, I studied the Twitter revolution in Egypt and the uncanny popularity of YouTube, integrating philosophy, sociology, education theory, and technical knowledge to develop my new understanding of how the world works — and evolves — in a new digital age.
My most poignant takeaway from my time at Harvard: The key to creating change is the ability to keep up with change.
Constant waves in new technologies do the best job of illustrating this phenomenon. For example, any successful marketer today must understand the new technological tools that customers use to communicate. In this way, studying technology from the outside is nearly impossible; as soon as we have a grasp of a technology’s presence and impact, technology has evolved once again.