Why the Ark Royal doesn’t feature in social media presentations

HMS Ark Royal sails into the Clyde for the last time

I am rather a sceptic about some of the excitable points which are made about how, particularly thanks to social media, the world is meant to be changing in an unprecedented and accelerating way.

Previously I’ve pointed out how fifteenth century technology is still hanging on despite repeated predictions of its demise and how, despite frequent claims to the contrary, the iPod’s rate of take-up compared with that of radio is actually very slow and small.

And then there’s the Ark Royal – the name given to five ships central to the British navy over the last five centuries. Yet look how many years it took from being laid down to being commissioned into service for each of those ships:

1586 – 1 year
1913 – 1 year
1935 – 3 years
1943 – 7 years
1978 – 7 years

Not exactly a tale of a world speeding up is it? As with many other projects, though technology has speeded up individual tasks, the projects have got bigger, more complicated and slower. All in fact the opposite of the social media hype clichés about smaller, simpler and faster.

Of course many things have got smaller, simpler and faster – but the next time someone paints a world picture about how that is the way everything has gone, will go and must go just think “Ark Royal”.