A major trade show like NPE2018 this week is an overload of direct person-to-person contact. And that's a great thing. Let's press the flesh. Let's hit the Bottle Zone for a beer in a plastic bottle.
Listen to Heavy Metal: How much do our indirect, cutoff lives of today really …. suck? Our society is self-absorbed in trying to be noticed and be remarked on. But it's all indirect, online. Virtual friends. Virtual reality. The problem is, it's not real.
And that's a major issue. Congress can't regulate Facebook and fix that. We choose to live like this.
Well it's time to make a stand for real things and real people. What about your family and neighbors? Actual people living and breathing, not something in the "cloud."
And that's why the giants, the NPEs and K shows and Chinaplas events, are so much fun. You can get charged up seeing other people. Not that long ago — I'd say about 10 years in the past — people were predicting the end of trade shows, with all virtual on-line shopping. And you know what, it turns out that while that might work for books, but for big-money industrial machinery…. it really sucked.