Informationalists vs. Industrialists

Informationalists vs. Industrialists. How different are these two genres of people? From an industrialist’s or informationalist’s standpoint, most likely VERY different. But is this the case? Are these two types of people really THAT different? 

No.

After hearing and reading the quote “You’ve got to dig it, grow it, or build it; everything else is just fluff.” By anonymous a few times I started to think deeper about it… Industrialists and informationalists are one in the same. You may be thinking that that is a crazy notion, but let me explain. 

Industrialists are firm believers in (of course) the industry. They believe for something to be great and for it to “exist,” it needs to be, as the quote says, “dug up, grown, or built.” Things need to be tactile for industrialists. Whereas informationalists are more tech savvy, but don’t informationalists like tactile objects just as much? They are more than happy playing on their smart phones and coming up with new innovative apps and games which leads me to my argument: informationalists are digging, growing, and building things just like their industrialist counterparts. Let us take the app Snapchat for example. 

Co-Founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy created Snapchat together. They have created a phone app used by millions of users and although industrialists may say that it is “fluff,” it isn’t. This app was dug up, grown, and built just like anything in industry. 


Snapchat wasn’t even a thought 5 years ago. This idea for an app wouldn’t have been “dug up” if it wasn’t for our technological incline over the last two decades. In order to build a factory, you need a nice plot of land, it needs to be level, it needs to be excavated, and it needs a foundation. The technology needed to build Snapchat was that plot of level land that was ready to be excavated. The technology was the foundation and this foundation wouldn’t be possible without informationalists. Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy discovered this plot of land and started digging and prepping it for their new discovery. 

Snapchat would not be as popular as it is today if it had never grown or been fed. In a way, this app was just like a field. The “seed” of Snapchat was planted. Now all it needed was to be watered. It needed people to use it and the people that liked it needed to tell their friends to download it, so on and so forth. Just one watering of a field won’t make something grow. It needs to be watered over and over again. That’s what was happening with Snapchat. People were using it, they were feeding it, and it is still being nourished and used. Snapchat is STILL growing, right now “Snapchat has about 30 million monthly active users. Fifty-five percent of monthly active users use Snapchat daily. That's 16.5 million people" (businessinsider). If that isn’t considered growth I don’t know what is… Snapchat started as a little seed of an idea and has grown into a beautiful informational sequoia tree. 

Finally, Snapchat was indeed built. No, it did not need hammers, screw drivers, or power tools but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t built. It was just built differently. The power tools necessary to build and grow this app were brains, codes, designs, and hours and hours of work. Snapchat may not be a building that produces cars, engines, or various foods, but it DOES produce entertainment and information and financial well-being for the economy. So it is unfair to call Snapchat fluff because it was built in its own right. 

Essentially, what I’m trying to say is, it shouldn’t be “Informationalists vs. Industrialists,” it should be “Informationalists AND Industrialists.” They do the same things, just differently. 
In both regards you need a nice foundation, nourishment, and tools. Neither are fluff and both are necessary. 

What is a hammer to one person, is a smartphone for someone else. 

http://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-active-users-exceed-30-million-2013-12