One of my favourite toys as a kid was my LEGO set. This was helped by my parents and close relatives always buying me extra boxes of the stuff on my birthdays and at Christmas. These ranged from the standard sets to the wonderful London Bus set I received on my 5th birthday. It got to the stage that you could hardly move in my parents’ front room for all my weird and wonderful (to me, anyways) LEGO creations.
Which makes me think that LEGO should have trademarked the whole social media medium in its early days – they would have made a killing. Think about it:
- LEGO sets enable you to build fantastic worlds without boundaries. Social media allows you the free rein to open up new worlds limited only by your ambition and determination.
- With LEGO, if you were creating something and you didn’t like it, you simply started again. With social media, if you find out a particular application or site isn’t working for you, you simply start again with a new application or site until you find the one that fits.
- There were no limits to what you could do with LEGO. As long as you had another piece, your spaceship could transform to a car, shark or even a pet dog – all you had to do was add. With social media, each piece leads to a new discovery – Twitter friends lead you to new sites and blogs, Stumbleupon opens up the web to you, and much more.
- LEGO changed with the times and embraced new technologies. A perfect example is their MINDSTORMS NXT range of LEGO robots (not to mention the wonderful LEGO Technics and LEGO video games). Social media is continuously evolving and embracing current and future technologies and software. Applications like Backtype and MeeID are great examples of simple yet effective natural progressions from guestbooks and business cards respectively.
This ability and willingness to change and adapt, not to mention use the best tools available at the time, has ensured LEGO’s continued success more than 70 years after it was started. Whether social media will still be around in one form or other in 70 years is another thing – but the users of it are certainly amongst those most responsive to change, so perhaps it will.
Sometimes the past really does shape the future for the better.
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Danny,
Awesome comparison. It was very nostalgic. Wonder how long it will be before we see the LEGO Facebook app. “Building blocks – build a house with your connections” or some such.
Great read. Thumbed, good sir.
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Josh,
Thank you for your kind comments and glad you liked the post. A LEGO Facebook app? I think you might be onto something there, good sir – do you know any good developers?
Danny,
Great analysis. LEGO has always had a certain Web 2.0 multicolored ethstetic, even before Web 2.0 existed. LEGO really is the granddaddy of user generated content.
That’s a great outlook, Daniel – if social media and Web 2.0 is the ultimate in user-generated content, then indeed LEGO were the pioneers.
Thanks for reading and offering your analogy.
This couldn’t be more accurate or timely – thanks!
You’re welcome, Robyn, and glad you enjoyed the post.
I knew there was a reason I always loved legos. A lego structure can be very solid and yet very temporary at the same time. Like you said, if you don’t like what you have created, you can simply move things around and come up with something entirely new. The simple toy allows the space for creative thinking. Social media seems to be a community where creative thinking is embraced. Maybe Lego is responsible after all because it helped to teach creative thinking.
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It’s strange, isn’t it, how the most beneficial things come from the simplest beginnings? You see the plastic LEGO block and you think, “Well that’s not very exciting at all.”
Then you get a bunch of them together and the magic starts happening.
If LEGO weren’t directly responsible for where social media is taking us, then they laid some great ideas in the minds of a lot of people that are being transferred over!
Thanks for reading and commenting, I appreciate it.
Boy, am I glad that I clicked your link from The Lives and Times Blogiversary Carnival! I love Legos. I remember playing with them when I was a child, and the worlds, characters and stories that I created using them. I never thought of the comparison to social media, but now that you mention it, I can see it. Maybe that’s why I enjoy Stumble Upon so much.
It is surprising when you look at the two and see how much they have in common – I often wonder what other nostalgic toys or items could be related in the same way.
Thanks for dropping in from the carnival, hope you enjoyed it!