Upon reflection

Autoportrait at Versailles Hall of Mirrors, Fuji XF10, F3.2 ISO 400

If you ever want to be taken down a peg, just read your dissertation. My own MA DAM dissertation of four years ago now seems idealistic to the point of naivety in its faith not merely in the benefits of technology, but the way in which corporations would manage it.

Worse, one thing it completely fails to address is failures to grasp hold of what seem to be basic problems. Take WiFi. If your company has a bad WiFi network, then attempts to connect to your DAM become more fragile. And people are so used to WiFi being functional that they don't even consider the possibility that the reason 'the DAM is slow' is because the WiFi is crap.

Much the same can be said of VPN. If that has problems, then logins to your DAM can timeout.

And we can experience this in our day to day lives too. How often walking down a regular, if narrow, street does your phone lose its internet connection? Your phone and your SIM card may be 5G, but what does it matter if the 5G service coverage is poor?

I recently moved to Germany. Immediately, all YouTube ads and websites defaulterd to German. The fact that I moved to Germany didn't mean that I automatically became capable of speaking the language. My phone has a UK SIM card, but websites on my phone default to German too.

So if I was going to write my dissertation today, one of the things I'd want to address is the fragility of underlying technologies upon which DAM is dependent and the potential for that fragility to impact service provision and adoption.

Four years of practical experience can really change your perspective. I can only imagine what I'll think of this post in four years!