From the upcoming e-book, Flying Car Syndrome
You may come across the view from clients that “Facebook is just like living in a small town”, or Twitter is “like overhearing people in a crowded subway car”. These people are suffering from the Garden of Eden fallacy; which is thinking that some new technology is recreating something that existed in the past, only updated for the modern world. In fact the the new technology and the old situation have little in common. They might have a similar function, like keeping in touch for FaceBook, but the fallacy gets problematic when people inflict other attributes of the old situation onto the new technology.
Your corrections will go something like “Well, no. What it actually does is…” will fall on deaf ears. Basically the Garden of Eden fallacy is a way for people to talk about some new technology without thinking about the technology. You cannot correct this fallacy without personally insulting the person.
This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog
