I asked Alan the question as what he thought the deeper forces were that drive this quiet revolution towards mutuality. As in many ways, the presentation was a more mechanical description/observation on how this all worked. You can’t win – but I had to ask the question, as I believe that for many, the reasons we are in transition from one type of economy/society to another is central to understanding what comes next, and how to get there.

Which led onto other questions from the floor like, why would I buy your paper when I can get it for free online? and I feel uncomfortable that you are working with “non-expert journalists” surely this dissolves your authority and value? Or, I am canceling my Guardian subscription Rupert Murdoch has got to be right? Fascinating, because of the linear/industrial assumption of status conferred by title, authority assumed by some and taken away from others (all very hierarchical) – whereas Alan Rusbridger argued that the true skill of his journalists is in curation, aggregating and interpreting – and I think that is right. On the topic of co-evolved consumers as Kevin Kelly called them, I would prefer to think that citizen journalism in some ways relates to Richard Sennett’s idea about Craftsmanship. But I did get the sense that quite a few people in that room were at the early stages of the journey of understanding the full consequences of living and working in the network society. As Clay Shirkey wrote, Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. This open platform approach to journalism and newsbrands that relates to the Guardian one can (read more here). And there was a very relevant question raised about data, its uses and implications form an ethical and legal perspective.

In Currency of information: the future of newspapers, I quoted Alan who wrote The future of newspapers is a bit like climate change: there are now far fewer ‘old-media’ deniers. Indeed, as its only when companies start to hemorrhage cash quarterly, and when the FO has done all cutting, in some instance through the bone that they say, OK what is it I need to do? I truly admire the Guardian, as they have consistently worked at evolving what it means to be a valued newsbrand in the networked society, and I equally admire Alan Rusbridger as editor of that newspaper, as under his stewardship the Guardian has responded to the challenges that were apparent some time ago. He did point out the journey for the Guardian has not been all plain sailing (reading between the lines here) but through dialogue internally and engaging in the debate – progress has been made, and continues to do so.

The project for Excellence in Journalism report stated

If older media sectors focus on profit-taking and stock price, they may do so at the expense of building the new technologies that are vital to the future. There are signs that that may be occurring.

what do we take from the old to combine with the new?

The only way to save journalism is to develop a new model that finds profit in truth, vigilance, and social responsibility,” Phil Meyer said.

That dull phrase, “new model,” includes stuff that is not dull at all. Like a different kind of company to work for, a better sense of how journalists can create value on the Web, a new and deeper commitment to interactivity with users as a way to do more kick-ass reporting.

My view is this, its not that the decline of the mass media (here) businesses could be completely averted, however, these companies could have been in a far better position to face a market place defined by what I call networked economics. Instead, these boards have attempted to squeeze more efficiency from the thinning value of their current business models. Though it would be a brave CEO to stand up and say, we are fucked, lets rethink our business model, for the simple reason that she or he – the CEO must talk up his or her business to the media, shareholders and analysts, and harvest the cash-flow for the quarterly numbers. The whole-scale tragedy is eventually failure to act in a timely fashion means that the road crash at the end is that more; final and ugly – for everyone. Lost jobs, lost lives, and a big black-hole for institutional investors wondering how they will ever get their pension funds back. The research findings from Communities Dominate Brands published in 2005 lead us to conclude that it is about: Connectivity, Culture, Community and Commerce. You can’t separate these anymore, without failing commercially.

The key points are in my humble opinion that:

[1] We live in a Read & Write culture

[2] We live in a participatory culture

[3] We live in a search economy and a semantic universe and refined data transforms how brands and people can find each other in more meaningful ways

[4] We live in the networked society Which also encompasses the glittering allure of the mobile society

This transformation Yochai Benkler argued is structural – challenging how businesses and markets will co-evolve over the oncoming decades.

[5] The networked society and the Read & Write culture dramatically alter the power relationships between society the media, and organisations.

“In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomised  but connected ‘up’ to Big Media, but not, across to each other, and now that authority is eroding”, says Journalism Professor Jay Rosen

[6] That communication technology is political

Communication power, says Manuel Castells is at the heart of the structure and dynamics of society. By which he means, who has and who wields that power, can transform society. Communication technology is at the very heart of this current transformation of society – because we are seeking meaningful communication with each other, something that traditional media has failed to grasp, or crassly deployed it via Pop Idol and the X-Factor. The reality is that there there are consequences to this evolution.

[7] That interruptive, display, and image advertising is the junk mail of the 21st Century.

[8] There is no online and offline, there is no analogue vs. digital there is only blended reality – the crisis comes when there is no connectivity. Business models must reflect that fact. This also has implications for how organisations construct themselves.

[9] The language and therefore the literacy that defines this networked society is different to the straight line, siloed, industrial mass media, mass consumer language and literacy.

[10] Business value is defined by (a) being: life-enabling, life-simplifying and navigational (help me navigate through the complexity of my life), (b) business models are hybrid, (c) the 4C’s: commerce, culture, community, connectivity.

SMLXL archives on newspapers, newsbrands

Andrew McAfee is a principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at MIT and recently wrote an article in the Financial Times, I would like to quote Andrew from the article but I can’t,

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. You may share using our article tools. Please don’t cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.

So I can share the article using lots and lots of tools but…. where is fair use in this? Anyway, I digress…

So I shall paraphrase, McAfee, says that E2.0 tools dramatically increase productivity inside organisations. Increases were measured from 20% to as much as 35%. He says we should be cautious about such claims however, they cannot be ignored. That people friendly organisation McKinsey produced these reports…

McAfee, says that this is because these “tools” support informal networks…. I think what he is saying is that this is all about as Howard Rheingold would say, amplifying human talents for cooperation.

My unease, with the article is that the word people is never mentioned. And where I to read this as a an eager novice in this area, I would wonder what informal networks were? Is that computers that wear chino’s? And that technology saves the day!

Euan Semple writes of his own experience of being head of knowledge management at the BBC

First we caused the twin evils of poor communication and inability to learn from each other through our systematisation and bureaucratisation of the world of work. We devalued relationships and trust as twin pillars of human endeavour. Then we made it worse by sticking plaster on the wound, adding layers of “professional” intervention on top in the form of “internal communicators” and “knowledge managers” in our attempts to make things better. We buried the people trying to do things under increasingly collusive layers of “grown ups” pretending that this is the way things have to be.

And he goes on

The inevitable rise of networked communications in organisations is deeply challenging to many of those currently in managerial positions. I see it in their eyes on a daily basis. I feel sorry for them. But anyone standing in the way of this happening in their organisation has to be off their rocker.

DoooooH - Where's my E2.0 Marge?

Euan says, that most companies who try to do Enterprise 2.0 will fail, and it will be for these reasons in no particular order:

1. They think it is about technology.

2. They aren’t prepared to deal with the friction that allowing their staff to connect generates.

3. They will assimilate it into business as usual.

4. They will try to do it in a way that “maximizes business effectiveness” without realizing that it calls for a radical shift in what is seen as effective.

5. They will grind down their early adopters until they give up.

6. They will get fleeced by the IT industry for over engineered, under delivering solutions, think that Enterprise 2.0 failed to live up to its promise and move on to the next fad.

7. Lack of patience

8. It is not companies who do Enterprise 2.0 it is individuals.

Its about people stupid and technologies of cooperation

Although referencing E2.0 in the above Euan prefers the term Social Business, and in fact in case you don’t know, Business is a social science, not that you would believe that in the way MBA’s are taught.

Euan expands upon this theme/meme

Stowe Boyd wrote today about his discomfort with the phrase Enterprise 2.0 and his preference for “social business” as a way of describing the changes we are seeing currently. While I understand Andrew McAfee’s thinking when he came up with the phrase I’m with Stowe – it’s too narrow, too corporate and too managerial!

I am with Euan and Stowe on this, we are witnesses to a structural and transformational change in society, what many describe as the toxic tail end of our industrial, mass consumer, mass media era. The tragic legacy of the last 150 years is that humanity has been thin sliced and deconstructed almost to the point of destruction. Human beings have become little more than individual units of capitalism – pawns of economists and unfettered capitalism. As Carl Jung wrote, “I” needs “We” to truly be “I” – it is managing the complexity and paradox of these two that enables Social Business to tick along at a fair old pace. Managerial everything is proven to be as dysfunctional and the obsession with  measuring everything. Just look at the deep Do-Da the UK is in as it has turned the National Health Service to become not focused on being effective but efficient. This is the ultimate example of the tyranny of numbers wielded against and over people. As social philosopher Richard Sennett argues, we want to, “recover something of the spirit of the Enlightenment on terms appropriate to our time”. The tools of the revolution are digital communication technologies, but the drivers are about human connection and human identity.

Want to change stuff effectively?  Management steps out of the way and allows people to work it out for themselves.

And if we take the advice of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, If you want to build a ship, don’t divide the work and give orders; teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. I think you get a sense of what Enterprise 2.0 is really all about.

The economics of happiness

SMLXL archives

The quiet revolution of cooperation

The economics of cooperation

The architecture of authority (photograph Richard Ross)

Just as the leaks predicted, the UK government has offered up its Digital Economy Bill, which includes massive changes to copyright law, including the power of the government to effectively change the law at will with little to no oversight. Basically, it would let the Business Secretary, Lord Mandelson, change copyright law through secondary legislation, which requires no Parliamentary approval. As people are noting, Mandelson has had to resign from elected positions twice in the past in disgrace, and is now in an unelected position. And he’s the guy who gets to change copyright law at will? That does not seem right. On top of that, the bill doesn’t even specify “three” strikes for users. Instead, it requires ISPs to notify users with warnings — and to notify copyright holders that they did notify users — and if file sharing is not reduced by 70% in a year (with no indication of how this is measured), then the government will tell ISPs to start kicking people off the internet.

Furthermore, Minister for Digital Britain Stephen Timms, who introduced the new bill, claimed that 99% of ISPs are “broadly supportive” of the bill. That’s funny because BT and TalkTalk — two of the largest ISPs in the UK — have loudly complained about the plans (with TalkTalk threatening to sue, and BT saying that this solution is “not the way forward”) and the ISP Association, which represents ISPs in the UK has loudly slammed the bill as unworkable and backwards looking

Via newsNow

But the reality is that companies struggle to shore up the thinning value of their analogue business models. And therefore do some heavy leaning on government, their selfish interest overriding any other issues, needs or concerns – and so they say Thou shall not share.

The architecture of copyright as Murdoch wants it? And Mandy is going to deliver?

Charles Arthur for The Guardian wrote yesterday,

Labour colleagues are concerned that if he succeeds it could give a future Tory government the ability that Rupert Murdoch wants to quash Google.

In a letter to Harriet Harman, the leader of the house and head of the committee responsible for determining changes to such legislation, Mandelson says he is “writing to seek your urgent agreement” to changes to the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act “for the purposes of facilitating prevention or reduction of online copyright infringement”.

By writing to Harman, the business secretary is seeking to get the change made through a “statutory instrument” – in effect, an update to the existing bill that the government can push through using its parliamentary majority.

That can be done with the minimum of parliamentary time, which is already at a premium.

Arthur continues

The changes proposed seem small – but are enormously wideranging, given both the breadth of even minor copyright infringement online, where photographs and text are copied with little regard to ownership, and the complexity of ownership.

Mandelson says in his letter that he is concerned about “cyberlockers” – websites that offer users private storage spaces whose contents can be shared by passing a web link via email.

And

Murdoch has recently said that he believes that copyright is being abused, particularly by organisations such as Google, which uses short extracts from online newspapers to create its Google News page, and the BBC, which he has accused of “stealing from newspapers“.

Earlier this month Murdoch was vituperative about how search engines have aggregated news. “The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them,” he said. “That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people … They shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep.”

This is as about as serious as it gets – in the networked society, something that NewsCorp has singularly failed to grasp, as have other media owners, you need a networked economics model that is fundamentally different to the straight lines of a mass media culture. Mandleson is a wily fox and I worry about the Machiavellian machinations that surround such a desire to alter copyright law. Something that we all know Lawrence Lessig has written, taught, and lectured on – extensively. And there is much evidence that sharing drives economies

Here is a lesson on how an open source approach to innovation and commerce can also deliver regional development and growth. And here and here.

Legacy media business models

Mandleson is representative of the 2oth Century model of government, whereas Lee Bryant explains,

Over the past decade, we have learned a lot about how network thinking and specifically the social web can dramatically reduce the costs of co-ordination and collective action, allowing new ways of involving people in organisational, democratic or social processes. Many people have argued that government and industry should take advantage of these innovations to create more people-powered organisations. Now, in the face of serious crises in both the economy and the political system, and in the middle of a recession that calls into question whether we can even afford ‘business as usual’, it is time to take a serious look at how we can leverage human talent, energy and creativity to begin rebooting the system to create sustainable, affordable, long-term mechanisms for public engagement.

Yochai Benkler – Carlota Perez – John Battelle – Howard Rheingold – Henry Jenkins – Lawrence Lessig – Barabara Ehrenrich – Danah Boyd – Soshana Zubhoff – Thomas Frank – Robert McChesney – Joseph Steiglitz … and there is more, all point to a world that is in flux, in transition and mutating. Enclosing the commons and locking down culture will do massive and irreparable damage to this country. Something that as someone that is supposed to be championing business in the UK should understand?

Carlota Perez talks about the patterns of technological revolutions and how they impact industry, society and culture.

When the economy is shaken by a powerful set of new opportunities with the emergence of the next technological revolution, society is still strongly wedded to the old paradigm and its institutional framework. The world of computers, flexible production and the internet has a different logic and different requirements from those that facilitated the spread of the automobile, synthetic materials, mass production and the highway network. Suddenly in relation to the new technologies, the old habits and regulations become obstacles, the old services and infrastructures are found wanting, the old organisations and institutions inadequate. A new context must be created; a new ‘common sense’ must emerge and propagate.

We are migrating from a Read Only (R/O to a Read/Write (R/W)culture. The Read Only (R/O) and Read/Write (R/W) transmission and production of artistic and cultural content. Read Only characterized the passive transmission of culture through the 1900s, while Read/Write has characterized the production of culture in the 19th century-and, now, the late 20th and early 21st centuries-allowing for active and collective making and remaking of content. A reviewer writes of Lessig’s book Remix

Lessig points out that the act of writing is near-universal. We teach our children how to write at an early age, and the tools to do so have long been accessible. With so much writing going on, there is bound to be appropriation of others’ work, but its universal character has meant that no one minds, as long as it is attributed. The accessibility of new tools of digital literacy — and with them the ability to remix audiovisual works — is a much more recent phenomenon. Here, Lessig says, our instincts are too often wrongly grounded in the elaborate rules of copyright and licensing practices that date from an era when only big publishers could effectively edit such works. Lessig claims that the new is actually the old: before the rise of mass media, people naturally reworked audiovisual works as they sang the songs or performed the plays of the day. Even the most orthodox copyright proponents did not object. Some, such as composer John P. Sousa, thought this remixing crucial, lest the new “infernal machines” of mass media led to a world only of “the mechanical device and the professional executants”. The loss of amateur ‘yeoman creators’, says Lessig, cheapens and flattens our culture, and worse, alienates us from our kids.

Perhaps someone should send Lord Mandleson a copy of Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The dynamics of bubbles and golden ages? This is the End of the Belle Epoch for a mass media – mass consumer society. I understand the debate is complex, and there is a great deal of fog – which means if you are not well versed on the issues at hand one can end up making decisions that have a long term impact which could do great damage and give more power not less to those that do not deserve to wield it.

When push comes to pull: the new economy & culture of the networked society might be worth a read here. And I quote

The collaborative peer production acheived through pull platforms can be radically more efficient than classically structured corporation can achieve

Driven by shared meaning and trust and Yochai Benkler in Coases Penguin says

Commons based peer production is an emerging third model of production that relies on decentralised information gathering and exchange and more efficient allocation of human creativity

And the legacy companies are in a bit of a flap as they are being disintermediated twice. Once by technology and rival companies leveraging that opportunity but also via peer-to-peer communities that are communicating and creating without intermediaries.

Its not that the decline of the mass media businesses could be completely averted, however, these companies could have been in a far better position to face a market place defined by what I call networked economics. Instead, these boards have attempted to squeeze more efficiency from the thinning value of their current business models. Though it would be a brave CEO to stand up and say, we are fucked, lets rethink our business model, for the simple reason that he – the CEO must talk up his or her business to the media, shareholders and analysts, and harvest the cash-flow for the quarterly numbers. The whole scale tragedy is eventually the failure to act in a timely fashion means that the road crash at the end is that more final and ugly – for everyone. Lost jobs, lost lives, and a big black-hole for institutional investors wondering how they will ever get their pension funds back.

The paradox is that there is a movement towards devolved government, and a realisation in other areas that taking a different perspective on data, information and content is a relevant a necessary issue to address.

The likes of the Murdoch(s) are digging in for some serious trench warfare – their interest is political only in so far as the protection and control of media empires. As one of my favourite quotes goes,

Companies die as days do gasping for every last ray of light.

I just wonder these media behemoths are somewhat lost in translation? And here is a rather inconvenient truth – your business models are mostly irrelevant in a networked economy. Nick Davies wrote about media companies

These are corporations that think greatly about commerce and casually about journalism

This is the heart of modern journalism, the rapid repackaging of largely unchecked second-hand material, much of it designed to service the political or commercial interests of those that provide it.

And why is this becoming such an important debate? Because, the motivation is ideological – to retard the growing awareness among citizens that they can create a media system superior to the one that currently serves the needs of a handful of media corporations, argues Robert McChesney. In an age of information technology, control of our culture becomes a critical battleground.  The arcane ins and outs of today’s copyright battles now mask a much deeper cultural struggle in which the stakes have grown unthinkably high.

Lessig writes

Never in our history have fewer had a legal right to control more of the development of our culture than now.

A people will only be free, writes Frantz Fanon when they control their own communications.

This is as non-linear as it gets in terms of thinking how business works in this networked wired up world. And fascinatingly enough its all about people, people connecting, information flowing, distributed information and content platforms, cooperation and technologies of cooperation.

Often when you talk to people entering into the networked world, or when you talk about communities or social networks or networked economics, everything gets reduced down very quickly to an, either, or perspective – its reductive, rather than being expansive. Of course this is natural when one cannot draw upon a knowledge bank to support unknown theories.

So Cory Doctorow discusses his hybrid model of free + unique £10k + limited edition + podcasts + MP3 files. This is post digital thinking, its blended reality. If I were anyone wanting to get their head around how to commercially succeed in the 21st Century, may I suggest you watch this video, again and again, then give it some very serious consideration.

A great deal of this thinking they say comes from both Conservatives and Labour Blairites. And much though has gone into social welfare etc., And recently we are starting to see experimentation with engagement, co-creation and a networked approach to getting stuff done.

The Economist argues that though this is good stuff – it hardly deals with the fiscal deficit. However in my post on big pharma and how one can unleash innovation, creativity and commercial success I argued that a networked approach to these challenges could be highly beneficial for the economy. As did John Martin. Equally in looking at innovation in manufacturing and engineering and (here) there are clear signposts for speeding up innovation for commercial success and to create jobs by approaching the problem from a networked perspective? But it requires a decoupling from tooling big, and closed knowledge systems. It requires funding, but it can also be more flexible and more lightweight. Something that I am exploring in The No Straight Lines project.

I do think that concerns raised about the apathy of Britons to become more engaged are valid – but then I also see that the current process does engender proper engagement in public life, and I also think that many are missing the real opportunity of the networked society – just look at the Digital Britain report. A plumbers guide for what could have been something more vital.

However, the Economist concludes

Despite the flaws in giving power away—its tentativeness in some areas, its optimistic assumptions in others—Westminster may not have seen as interesting an intellectual movement since the 1970s, when a few poky think-tanks harboured the early stirrings of what would become Thatcherism. It goes with the grain of Britain’s ornery zeitgeist, with its antipathy to politicians. The fruits of the project may take decades to come, but politicians are more often accused of excessive short-termism. The Tories’ policy wonks now travel the world to study real-life examples of power-spreading. In the coming years, if they get their way, Britain itself will be the laboratory for these ideas.

Networked economics

Networked society

Reboot Britain

The African film industry is one of the oldest – with its roots in Ain el Ghezel (The Girl of Carthage), which was produced in Tunisia by Chemama Chikly in 1924. M-Net has spent the last three years negotiating the rights to almost 600 works in English, French, Arabic and Portuguese and digitally remastering them.

The library forms an important archive of the continent’s cultural cinematic heritage, and also, for the first time, makes the African artists’ works easily accessible by a wide viewership around the globe – creating a new audience for existing and emerging filmmakers.

The library consists of award-winning works from more than 80 producers including Senegalese Ousmane Sembene and Djibril Mambety, Yousef Chahine from Egypt and Haile Gerima from Ethiopia.

I would love to play a video that explains the concept but for some reason the embed is corrupted

What does this mean? It means that media in the networked society is about connecting people up to information that is uniquely relevant to them – this is something that I have been thinking about for some time now, and the economic model that starts to evolve back to the millennial insights as to how true markets thrive. Underpinning that social connection and interaction is data, huge dollops of the stuff which will enable us to bundle, filter, aggregate, point to, link to, share, embed, and trade. It then becomes social business.

This is the mitochondria (cellular respiration – key to all life) of networked economics. (here)

Thanks to Arjan of Freedom Lab for the hat tip

I would argue that the contemporary moment of transmedia has heightened our awareness of these earlier moments of authors unfolding stories across media, much as the rise of digital media more generally has led to a revitalization of the study of “old media when they were new” or the history of the book. We certainly want to understand what is new about our current push for transmedia entertainment, which to me has to do with the particular configuration of media systems and the push towards a more participatory culture.

Tolkien, Lewis, Baum, and Smith all sought to model contemporary fictions on the dispersed, episodic, yet interlocking structures of classic mythology — creating a folklore for a post-folkloric society. And so, yes, there are going to be many resemblances to be drawn between transmedia stories, informed by these creative figures, and traditional religious or mythological works.

And perhaps what resonates with my argument that all businesses and organisations including governments must “engage or die”.

I’ve long ago given up trying to separate the creative and commercial motivations of transmedia entertainment, but then, all popular culture, no, all art depends on a complex balance between the two. From the start, most transmedia has been funded through the promotional budget rather than being understood as part of the creative costs of a particular franchise, even where it has been understood as performing key world building or story expanding functions. This was a central issue in the Writer’s Strike a few years ago. Indeed, in so far as Hollywood has grasped transmedia, it has been in the context of a growing awareness of the urgency of creating “consumer engagement” that has been a buzz word across the entertainment industry in recent years. This is why the transmedia chapter in CC follows so closely after the discussion of “affective economics” and American Idol.

The chapter called “Engagement” in Communities Dominate Brands begins,

I hear you knockin’ but you can’t come in, is something as customers we say to brands on a daily basis, consciously or unconsciously. Yet businesses need to grow, revenues and profits increased. And this book is ultimately about how you do that in a changing world. This is not the time for nostalgia or for the board to sing just keep swimming, swimming, swimming. So the question we presented ourselves with is how do you overcome the problems caused by technological change in society and in business? We have explored how customers change and how a new Generation-C is emerging. We explained how communities act as a counterbalancing force to branding and advertising power. Now it remains for us to expose the way to capitalise on the dramatic change in business. We call it engagement. Now some people may say that yes but all communications is about engagement. We don’t think it is.

The important bit in Henry’s quote is this,

Indeed, in so far as Hollywood has grasped transmedia, it has been in the context of a growing awareness of the urgency of creating “consumer engagement” that has been a buzz word across the entertainment industry in recent years. This is why the transmedia chapter in CC follows so closely after the discussion of “affective economics” and American Idol.

SMLXL produced its own paper on Pop Idol which you can download here In which we made several important points.

[1] Pop Idol was an incredible economic success – globally. Why? Because of its ability to “engage” its audience

[2] It inspired 30% of people in the US to send their first ever text message in the 2nd US Pop Idol

Its no accident that the X Factor is a derivative of Pop Idol.

Out of this we deduced that by engaging an audience, using multiple communication technologies, Pop Idol uncovered an important insight into participation (I+We and the placing of both within a space in which we can all create and participate), and more critically the economic need for engagement. Something that many brands have consistently overlooked, because they are still is unable to integrate properly all communication / media channels into a compelling idea. Beholden to media companies that are gate keepers to brand spending all $3 trillion of it. Its why SMLXL is more interested in “engagement” per se, preferring that approach which is more in keeping with aspects of transmedia storytelling than social media, with some of our initiatives. Sociability is a core component of engagement – but we believe there is a much bigger prize to be had. The hot media of; co-creation, networked distribution, participation, and the economics of attraction and attention are important issues to address, understand and to apply. The short hand is the 4C’s: Commerce+Culture+community+Connectivity. The origin of wealth in the networked society is contextualised by the idea of networked economics – this is different to mass media economics – and as Henry says we are in a period of transition from a world of analogue economics to a world defined by what we call blended reality. There is no offline and online, digital vs. analogue there is only blended reality. This is the age of engagement. Where through storytelling (think compare the Meerkat) across media platforms we create deeper context, deeper context creates greater meaning, which this correlates with the economics of attention and how brands, business etc., that have  a commercial agenda can survive and thrive in the networked society.

Henry finishes up

On another level, I’d say we are still at a moment of transition where transmedia practices are concerned. Each new experiment — even the failed ones — teach us things about how to shape a compelling transmedia experience or what kinds of tools are needed to allow consumers to manage information as it is dispersed across multiple platforms. In some ways, the transmedia stories may need to be conservative on other levels — adopting relatively familiar genre formulas — so that the reader learns how to put together the pieces into a meaningful whole, much as the first jigsaw puzzles we are given as children take shape into familiar characters and do not have the challenges found in those designed for hardcore puzzlers.

Culture lock down. Image Richard Ross

Curiously the Dutch government undertook a study that showed file sharing increased revenues

The Dutch government, in cooperation with the Dutch research institute TNO, has recently conducted a survey into the economic effects of file sharing on the music industry. The results are quite surprising as they’ve concluded that illegally downloading music (which is allowed in Holland) has a positive effect on the music industry. If it would no longer be possible to download music, the sales of CD’s would further decrease. Quite the perspective change, or not?

Whilst, the Isle of Man is considering implementing a plan that allows people to download unlimited music in return for a basic tax to ISP’s of £1.00 per month, in an effort to find a way to solve illegal music piracy. The idea is that this money is collectively redistributed to copyright holders.

Richard Wray writes,

It has finally sunk in that there will not be one single replacement for the ongoing drop in “physical” music sales – in other words, the perpetual decline in CD buying. Instead, a host of new services will help plug the gap alongside sales of individual digital tracks and albums.

Networked economics is different to analogue economics, in the same way that advertising is also different in the networked society. Where and how we place value on ‘things’ is important; how we package, bundle, filter, point to, link to, enable, are all key components to success.

Those that wish to lock down content through aggressive tactics do not get the digital elixiar of commerce, I would have thought studying Cyworld in Korea might have been a good idea for exec’s, in understanding how to make their business work within the context of digital economics. The model is hybrid, networked and connected. It must be about being; life enabling, life simplifying and navigational.

As we wrote in 2005,

Now, the Age of Connectedness and its newly active communities are altering the way all businesses will market, promote and sell their goods and services. The very first cases are emerging simultaneously around the world, and they clearly give an answer to what the marketing industry has expressed for several years already. Traditional methods of  business, are increasingly ineffective.

Phillip Evans and Thomas S. Wurster state in their book Blown to Bits that digitalisation is “deconstructing” traditional industries such as home electronics, business, broadcast, retailing and banking, while at the same time creating new commercial opportunities such as Google and eBay, the low cost airline industry, on-line banking. These are trends echoed time and again by experts analysing the individual phenomena such as digital convergence and disruptive technologies.

Straight Line thinking stops here

hierarchy

silos’

brittle business

unsustainable value

culture lock down

market fundamentalism

dogma

creative apartheid

opacity

the war on everything

information distribution control

top down

Milton Friedman

fundamentalist ideologies

trust empty systems

human units of consumption

human units of production

battery farming education

thin value

Specialisation may well have helped build industrial society – but its like grit in the wheel of the networked society writes John Thackara, these wrenching changes put great stress on industrial systems placing them into deep crisis as they struggle to adapt to the networked world.

The Journalism Online e-commerce system will offer a single account for users to access all the publishers’ websites and a range of payment options from pay-per-article, day passes and monthly and yearly subscriptions.

The question is whether in a networked economy, newsbrands can survive by still offering the same fare? Broadcasting, as in broadsheets were designed and built for a mass media, where deep specialisation, could not scale because of limits to production, distribution, language etc.,

In a superglobal networked economy, this no longer applies. Just look at the extraordinary success of Lauren Luke. Ok, shes not a newsbrand, but she offers specialisation.

For a deeper dive into my thoughts go to Life and commerce in the connectivity of the clouds

Nicholas Carr in his book the Big Switch takes the view that the most advanced uses of utility computing are aimed not at companies but us – people, individuals. I wonder what this implies for what media and commercial worlds we are creating? If we thought that the world we are in fact creating was already in 5th gear – I think we need to look at the stick shift to understand we are probably only in 2nd gear.

We are decoupling from the 19th and 20th Centuries – philosophically, technologically, culturally, and commercially. Creating a new society, always demands we destroy the old, as we pull our age out of the captivity of the last one.

Journalism Online was founded in April by Steven Brill, the journalist and journalism lecturer at Yale; Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal; and Leon Hindery, who heads the media industry fund InterMedia Partners.

They say they are acting to meet “the urgent need for a comprehensive, immediate plan to address the downward spiral in the business of publishing original, quality journalism”

Hmmmmmmmmmmm. What this suggest to me is what happens when society goes through a painful process of transition, there is great resistance, based upon working harder and harder at the old ways of doing things, rather than standing in the flows of new possibilities. As Howard Rheingold said, don’t stand at the back of the queue of information, stand in its flow.

When the economy is shaken by a powerful set of new opportunities with the emergence of the next technological revolution, society is still strongly wedded to the old paradigm and its institutional framework. The world of computers, flexible production and the internet has a different logic and different requirements from those that facilitated the spread of the automobile, synthetic materials, mass production and the highway network. Suddenly in relation to the new technologies, the old habits and regulations become obstacles, the old services and infrastructures are found wanting, the old organisations and institutions inadequate. A new context must be created; a new ‘common sense’ must emerge and propogate.

And, Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com, which already charges for its online content across a three-tiered paywall, says the BBC is a factor, “but has its own constraints”, such as its enforced politically neutral stance. He adds: “In general, we do not see any reasons why not to charge for content. But users will not pay for wire or press release copy.”

Now the real rub is in this statement, “In general, we do not see any reasons why not to charge for content. But users will not pay for wire or press release copy.“  Wire copy – Why should we pay for something that is, fabricated as news in one form or another?

Nick Davies in his book Flat Earth News excoriates the owners of newspapers (describing them as Grocers)because their interest is not about being local, its not about community, its not about quality journalism is about one thing and one thing only – MONEY – PROFIT AND SHAREHOLDER RETURN. And thats all well and good until the quality of the product is so inferior it devalues itself.

This is life in a news factory, says Davies whilst writing about one journalists experience of working for a local news paper.

These are corporations that think greatly about commerce and casually about journalism

This is the heart of modern journalism, the rapid repackaging of largely unchecked second-hand material, much of it designed to service the political or commercial interests of those that provide it

Robert McChesney, author of The problem of the media says in his preface,

The first myth is that media does not matter that much – that they merely reflect reality, rather than shape it. In fact, media are a social force in their own right, and not just a reflection of other forces. These are complex relationships, often difficult to disintangle, because media are so interwoven into the fabric of our lives

McChesney goes onto say that big business is standing firmly in the path of the ordinary joe to make a difference

The point of this claim is patently ideological – to retard the growing awareness among citizens that they can create a media system superior to the one that currently serves the needs of a handful of media corporations

And why would you want to pay for that?

John Hagel also explored the issues facing legacy newsbrands, he lists a number of key criteria:

1). Shifts from advertising placed in digital content to ads placed in social networks and applications?

2). Shifts from digital advertisements delivered through conventional PC?s to a growing array of mobile devices, with an increasing ability to target messages based on the physical location of the person?

3). Shifts in the behavior of digital users in their responsiveness to advertisements online?

4). Shifts in the way that companies connect with and build relationships with stakeholders (e.g., blurring boundaries between customers, partners and suppliers)?

5). Shifts in the revenue models for businesses, as online businesses in particular become more and more dependent on advertising as a key revenue source (e.g., is there any Web 2.0 start-up that doesn?t blithely answer ?advertising? when asked about their revenue model?).

Hagels message to advertisers is that they should be able to genuinely engage people around their products and services. And to do so in such a compelling way that people seek them out ? and keep coming back because they have received so much value. What we describe as Engagement Marketing.

The transition is almost too painful to watch – but the reason is dead simple – The management of these companies just can’t grasp the fundamentals of living in a digitally networked society. The profound implications of living in a pull not a push economy pass them by like faint shadows.

They fail to grasp the fact that the media is now embedded in society as social media, that we live in a participatory culture, and they have failed to grasp the possibilities of how data, its collection and refinement could in fact be a key aspect to its survival.

In a paper I am preparing for Nokia on data analytics I write

What companies will be creating, using and selling in the near future is what is described as Social Marketing Intelligence. The more unique the “intelligence” extracted from the raw material of multiple data flows, the more valuable that “intelligence” becomes to a number of parties. Unique and valuable intelligence = $$$.

Or it could be that the process of evolution is so traumatic it just can’t be achieved – leaving the door open to new competitors – without the baggage to get on with the job. Lets face it – if you had been a scribe all your life, cosetted, fed. clothed etc., – why change that for the nonsense they call the printing press?

Traditional media have to learn how to engage or they will die. In that post I highlight my own views on some broader issues facing traditional media:

[1] We live in a Read & Write culture

[2] We live in a participatory culture

Convergence is a cultural phenomenon not a technological one

[3] We live in a search economy and a semantic universe and refined data transforms how brands and people can find each other in more meaningful ways

[4] We live in the networked society Which also encompasses the glittering allure of the mobile society

This transformation Yochai Benkler argued is structural – challenging how businesses and markets will co-evolve over the oncoming decades.

[5] The networked society and the Read & Write culture dramatically alter the power relationships between society the media, and organisations.

“In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomised  but connected ‘up’ to Big Media, but not, across to each other, and now that authority is eroding”, says Journalism Professor Jay Rosen

[6] That communication technology is political

Communication power, says Manuel Castells is at the heart of the structure and dynamics of society. By which he means, who has and who wields that power, can transform society. Communication technology is at the very heart of this current transformation of society – because we are seeking meaningful communication with each other, something that traditional media has failed to grasp, or crassly deployed it via Pop Idol and the X-Factor. The reality is that there there are consequences to this evolution.

[7] That interruptive, display, and image advertising is the junk mail of the 21st Century.

[8] There is no online and offline, there is no analogue vs. digital there is only blended reality – the crisis comes when there is No connectivity. Business models must reflect that fact. This has implications for how organisations construct themselves.

[9] The language and therefore the literacy that defines this networked society is different to the straight line, siloed, industrial mass media, mass consumer language and literacy.

[10] Business value is defined by (a) being: life-enabling, life-simplifying and navigational (help me navigate through the complexity of my life), (b) business models are hybrid, (c) the 4C’s: commerce, culture, community, connectivity.

Spotify, World of warcfraft, Apple Apps, Cyworld, enabling mobile services like; Girlswalker or Help Networks in Japan , are all representative of the digital elixiar of networked economics. And all these business models represent the “augmentation of information” plus, the “augmentation of experience.”

But this has become a political issue, not merely a commercial one. What we read, how we read it, who distributes it, who controls it – has become of critical importance. Franz Fanon, famously said, “a people will only be free when they control their own communications”. Take this for example, an article about Barack Obama, and the unleashing of extremist views, inflamed by the Republicans fanning the embers of poverty, identity, and social breakdown.

The cacophony of gibes and unfounded claims is loudest, however, on rightwing TV and radio. Fox News presenter Glenn Beck, who last week came to British attention following a negative interview about the NHS with Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan, has claimed Obama dislikes white people. “This guy is, I believe, a racist,” Beck said. Beck has also discussed allegations that Obama is setting up a network of secret internment camps and joked about poisoning Democratic congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. Meanwhile Rush Limbaugh, whose weekly radio show is listened to by millions of Americans, has compared the Democrats to the Nazi party. Perhaps taking him at his word, some healthcare protesters have carried signs featuring swastikas and Obama with a “Hitler” moustache.

Who is Fox owned by? Rupert Murdoch. What is it exactly I am paying for Mr Murdoch? Where is your credibility in the networked society?

This book is important because, the 4 co-authors all come from different, but increasingly overlapping worlds of marketing, media, data analytics and the mobile-web. The rules of marketing are currently being re-written, and I would like to think we are part of that debate.

Our foreword begins:

MARKETS ARE CONVERSATIONS: When Doc Searls wrote those words 10 years ago, few truly understood the full dramatic extent of his observation.  Yet in a recent 2008 report Nokia noted that 25% of all media will be created by us by 2012.  And coupled with that we see the creation of data flows exploding from 161 billion gigabytes in 2006 to 988 billion gbs by 2012.  YouTube uploads 20 hours of audio-visual content every 60 seconds of every day of the year. That’s a lot of data. We no longer live in a society governed by the simple rules of mass media, nor by the frameworks that apply to mass media production, dissemination and economics. We live in a networked society, where we, the people formerly known as the audience, are now the media. The pressure this has brought to bear on the entire economics of the media, marketing and advertising industries has become acute.

In 2005, when Alan co-authored ‘Communities Dominate Brands’, he described at length the challenges brought about by digital economics. He discussed the generation dubbed Generation-C, the community generation. The generation that has grown up connected and socially networked, wanting to engage and participate, to create and co-create. He pointed to the role data, and more importantly social marketing intelligence, the Black Gold of the 21st Century would play in this wired up “we media” world.

Three years on, “Social Media”, or “Social Media Networking”, accompanied by the 2.0 moniker have become familiar, if misunderstood terms. Inaccurately, the terms have become almost synonymous with enormous sites like My Space and Facebook. This is not what we mean by ‘Social Media’. We mean any media form that links people and communities – including many smaller sites, mobile internet services and telephony.

The digitally networked visitor to these social media forms leaves behind the footprints, shadows and trails of his or her individual and collective endeavours in the form of data; data that enables new type of marketing and communications between and within consumer communities. The challenge now is to harness those data flows and make money from them. Whilst also being cognisant of the fact that the power relationships between brands and their customers has evolved. It offers opportunities for businesses to rethink hw they find, attract and retain valued customer relationships. Misuse becomes invavsive, good use becomes value and more relevant and intmate communications – that leads to commercial activity.

This interview, provides some of the key issues raised by the book

Thus, instead of having one large ‘broadcast’ campaign – we have many small narrowcast, interactive and ongoing campaigns. The campaigns and conversations are based on a feedback loop, hence they are iterative and form an ongoing learning experience.