Web experts and #PokemonGo.

Published on 25 July 2016

There are 3 kinds of people who don't play PokemonGo:

• Those who genuinely don't care.

• Those who say they don't care but who have a compulsive need to compare players to sheep every 5 minutes.

• The Web experts who completely panic.

This third category is the most predictable, and the most annoying. Let me explain.

There's a fair number of us who have been working in the Internet for years, mastering the usual tools, and generally feeling much more legitimate and skilled when using those tools. We've read articles about the best times to post our tweets, the best hashtags to get likes on Instagram, the best hooks to perform on Facebook, etc. All that, we know how to do.

The problem is that yes, we know how to do it, but we have the same reactions as the old, nasty taxi drivers when they saw the ride-hailing apps arrive, namely digging in their heels, and insulting the newcomers.

Why? Because they're wild, because they're numerous, and above all because we don't know how to do what they do.

The phenomenon was the same with Snapchat. Most Web experts completely missed the boat. And above all, riddled with certainties, and enormously lazy, they lost the desire to discover something new and to experiment. Too many young folks who master it much faster and much better than us.

It's far easier to say that a social network, a game, or any novelty on the Web "is useless" or "is ridiculous," than to make the effort to try to understand it, to test it, and above all to try to learn from the younger ones. That would be an admission of weakness, and since we're experts, we can't be weak.

So there we are, chuckling at images of guys running to catch Pokémon in parks, desperately racking our brains to find an angle that ridicules or belittles this phenomenon that completely passes us by.

This thing just throws in our face once again that, on the scale of the Internet, we're old and slow, and that we haven't even had time to finish understanding Snapchat before we're already going to have to relearn another thing, and dammit that's annoying.

We've become fucking taxi drivers.

By Paingout