Social technological advancement is, in ways not possible before now, enabling us to create value and discover community in a persistently disruptive social ecosystem, says Stephen Johnson.
One the most compelling aspects of emergent trends and the global super brain is that information is overflowing on a scale beyond that which we can physically comprehend.
As technology fellow Jason Silva surmises on the Imaginary Foundation blog, “The electronic, collective, hive mind that we know as the internet produces so much information that organising this data – and extracting meaning from it – has become the conversation of our time.”
Silva invokes Canadian-born architectural theorist and writer Sanford Kwinter’s Far From Equilibrium, a book that tackles everything from technology, to society, to architecture on the premise that, “Creativity, catharsis, transformation and progressive breakthroughs occur far from equilibrium.” (Kwinter S., Far From Equilibrium – Essays on Technology and Design Culture, Barcelona: Actar, 2008).
This is where we find ourselves today – confronted by an overwhelming frequency of radical transformation and information overload.
Sanford asserts how, “We accurately think of ourselves today not only as citizens of an information society, but literally as clusters of matter within an unbroken informational continuum: ‘We are all,’ as the great composer Karlheinz Stockhausen once said, ‘transistors, in the literal sense.’ We send, receive and organise (and) so long as we are vital, our principle work is to capture and artfully incorporate the signals that surround us.”
Let us examine these signals. In a few short years our online experience has shifted beyond mere two-way dialogue into a social capital phase. Here, community has become currency, exercising great power and influence over the way we build brands, innovate products and services, solve complex problems and manage or destroy reputations.
These signals usher us toward a world where knowledge, power and productive capability will be more dispersed than at any time in our history – a world where value creation will be fast, fluid and persistently disruptive.
To understand the nature of social capital and its impact on society, commerce and culture, we must return to the pre-internet era. Can you remember how you researched ideas before Google or garnered the support of friends and peers around important issues before social networks like Facebook existed?
Many argue life was simpler, while early adopters describe the old world as one-dimensional, characterised by static, linear transaction where ideas were conceived, packaged, dispatched and consumed, often without interpretation or input.
Consider that marketing in the early 21st century is dominated by two approaches, neither of which is visible to the naked eye. Firstly, “The use of data to define and shape human affairs into machine-readable form; secondly, the effort to create and sustain ongoing two-way relationships with consumers. The former is arguably one way in which human life is subjugated to the regime of the machine, whilst the latter is a sign that the individual may one day emerge from within the dataverse.” (Ellis, L., Marketing in the In-Between: A Post-Modern Turn on Madison Avenue, Booksurge, 2006).
These insights from social scientist and communications strategist Len Ellis, suggest a “post-modern perspective is needed to reveal both the ‘kaleidoscope’ of data and the ‘raw immaterials’ of relationships.”
Facebook’s partnership in 2009 with the World Economic Forum in Switzerland signalled that this post-modern future is upon us. The event transposed online thought and content once relegated to a small physical setting to a world stage, unencumbered by demography or geography, enabling delegates to poll random segments of Facebook’s then 150 million user-base.
The result was a real-time pulse of what millions of people around the world were thinking and feeling at that precise moment, directly connected to planetary level question of import.
This act extols the strength of weak ties, a theory first presented by Mark Granovetter in 1983, whereby networks of connected strangers can become a crucial bridge between clusters of strong ties (the people we know), thus highlighting how people react when healthy social reinforcement is in place (Granovetter,M., The Strength of Weak Ties: A network theory revisited, Sociological Theory, Volume 1, 201-233 (1983).
It is a paradigm shift toward community where everyone participates, everyone contributes and everyone belongs. Importantly, it reinforces the relevance and power of social networks to connect people, resources and ideas to drive creativity and innovation forward. In many ways it is a declaration of interdependence.
In 2008 Forrester’s Mary Beth Kemp challenged the advertising industry in her white paper titled The Connected Agency, predicting that the survival of agencies would be determined by their ability to evolve from, “Pushing advertising campaigns to nurturing communities of consumers and matchmaking them with brands” (Kemp, M & Kim, P., The Connected Agency – Agencies Who Listen Instead of Shout, Forrester Research, 2008).
In what has largely been realised, Kemp hypothesised that the business of the future will have “learned to connect itself” with defined communities of consumers and by cultivating insights into their behaviour as they interact. Likewise, as social technology continues to advance, our transactional relationships with communities will evolve.
Thus, the evolution of the internet toward a more socialised experience gave rise to a ‘second place’, forever changing the ways we engage, create and share online. Along with the many opportunities that followed, came challenges and questions.
In a world that is no longer command-and-control but non-hierarchical – more peer-to-peer – how do you orchestrate the right set of people and circumstances at the right moment to create value? What is its design? Is it static, or a continuum? And what technological and human skills are required to make things happen? Community Engine Product Manager and uber-comrade, Jim May, puts it perfectly: “When we moved to the city, and the internet, we lost the benefit of the village.”
It presents us with an interesting dilemma. Is being connected and having conversation really enough? While it is difficult to contest the half a billion people on Facebook, consider for a moment that its 600 million users reject commercial intrusions into a place they consider very personal.
Thus, despite its ubiquitous benefits, it fails to capture the overlapping, asymmetrical, semi-public nature of real life in our local community – the community of our passions. Another way to distil this argument is to ask where is the value in environments that serve us content based on preferences and attributes of people to whom we have arbitrary connections, yet nothing in common?
It seems clear we are moving towards another sociological tipping point – one that demands context and meaning. It highlights the existence of a ‘third place’; an ecosystem of overlapping communities of passion; a mix of social and commercial transactions that is semi-public, semi-familiar and a different experience for everyone.
The challenge and opportunity born of this environment is to understand the capacity, emotions and activities of a situation. It is real life, in real time – an acute relevance delivered through personalisation and location logic, progressively transforming our binary interactions with the social web. It is a context that beckons us to live our lives in a perpetual state of beta.
Social technological advancement is therefore, in ways not possible before now, enabling us to become a value creator within context. It is an environment where personal and professional participation culminate in a reconnection to what is timely, relevant, and authentic. I often refer to this ecosystem as a new lens through which to see authentically and experience the world, where opportunity and innovation are interdependent, presenting us with new paths and a new narrative.
Thus, we are writing our future through and within this narrative – inspiring a sense of belonging to something bigger than us. Contextual value is a natural by-product of the ‘third place’ ecosystem, realised in the myriad transactional benefits that ensue.
Understanding this fully is, in part, learning how we can authentically drive content across platforms to create new experiences. Harnessed appropriately, this shift can lead to seismic impact.
It is learning how we can, “Transform from being content producers to context producers” (Tennø, H., Context, value and the new marketing economy, Slideshare, 2010) as we reflect reconnection in our products, culture and people. By doing so, we foster trusted networks as our interaction and consumption become more authentic.
The ‘third place’ ecosystem mirrors accordingly the inter-dependent actions of individuals like you and I, striving to improve meaning in our lives, personally and professionally. The result is a beautiful duality of shared and self-ownership which gives rise to niche, contextual community – a frontier where creative and strategic partnership plays out in a heroic celebration of the everyday, bound by a new currency that considers peoples’ lives.
As evidence of what this future holds, consider the sheer profundity of our ability to galvanise people of diverse culture, geography, passion, interest and opinion to create dynamic value and competitive advantage. This is more than an altruistic pipedream. Hence, the value of such an ecosystem is for those who partake contextual reach, engagement, management and commerce.
Social technology can – and in many ways already is – improving our human condition by enabling contextually relevant, personal and commercial transaction. The ‘third place’ connects us to the information and communities we need the most.
In conclusion, the words of lauded cognitive scientist Roger Schank, come to mind: “Humans are not really set up to hear logic. People, however, like to hear stories,” (Advances in social cognition: Knowledge and memory: the real story (ed. Wyer, Roger Schank and Robert Abelson, 1995).
If we contemplate this, it is not so difficult to imagine a narrative future consisting of more personal and more visceral social interactions which speak to us in unexpected ways.
Raymond Kurzweil, director of The Imaginary Foundation, positions this context poignantly: “We live in a society in which spurious realities are constructed by the media, by governments and by big corporations. We are bombarded with pseudo realities fabricated by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated mechanisms.
“Perhaps for many designers irony is the only possible response to a media space where it’s impossible to distinguish reality from manipulation. We need to be future-focused and explore what comes after the darkness; revel in the beauty on the other side of the looking glass.
“Living creatively and joyfully requires dismissing gloom, defeatism, and negativism. We acknowledge problems, but do not allow them to dominate our thinking and our direction. The opportunity is to be for rather than against, to create solutions rather than protest against what exists.
“There are things worth believing in; there are things worth being passionate about; and so our action must not be a reaction but a creation” (Kurzweil , R., The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Penguin, 2006).
Mr Johnson is a prominent thought leader, founder of social enterprise catalyst Altitud3 and director of social with Community Engine, Australia. He is a Cannes Cyber Lion, AIMIA and Webby award winner. For more information, visit http://au.linkedin.com/in/stephenjohnson1 or follow him on http://Twitter.com/Huxley or http://Facebook.com/Huxley .