Don’t just witness the network.

Be part of it
Advice for anyone working in media. Advice for life?

David Cushman (http://fasterfuture.blogspot.com ), September, 2007.

There’s a powerful explosion looming. It could wipe out everything we know.

Some of us see it coming. If only we could warn someone.

Sound familiar?

Sometimes I feel a little like the Japanese fellow from Heroes. Only, not as cute,
obviously.

Hiro can bend time and space. I can’t claim that.

But he’s seen the future, he’s seen a threat and he’s doing his best to warn those
who can make a difference. But he’s speaking a language few of them
understand.

Now that is familiar.

Today, I hope to teach a little Japanese, so to speak…

In Heroes there’s a moment of super-evolution kicking-in.

Perhaps art is imitating life? There’s little doubt in my mind that the changes in
media and in business in general happening right now are not evolutionary – they
are revolutionary.

But revolution is how evolution has always happened.

Need an image? Think of the fosbury flop. Once, every high jumper tried to leap
a little higher over the bar by honing their scissor kick. And everyone knew what
they were doing. They knew how to do a scissor kick. They just had to work a
little better and harder to make incremental improvements.

That’s often what we demand of our business planning. It’s what ‘The City’ likes.
It’s what The City ‘gets’. Incremental improvement. Get a little better, a little
faster… a little higher.
But the breakthroughs – the great leaps forward – come when someone works
out how to alter what they are doing. And the rest of us wonder what the hell that
high jumper is up to as he turns his back to the high jump bar and starts to leap…
backwards… and higher than ever before.

We’re witnessing a world in which self-forming non-directed communities of

shared interest and purpose are winning. We are witnessing a world of edge-in
rather than centre-out control. We are witnessing the death of mass media and
the emergence of global niches.

We should be more than witnesses. Because all this adds up to the biggest
change since the industrial revolution – and not only for media. It’s also the most
radical of shake-ups for how services will be developed and served, how
products are created, how value is built – how the business of business is done.

And in pure information control terms, it’s the biggest shift in 500 years.
Information – not money - is what makes this world go round.

But the good news is that you don’t have to be first to win. The good news is that
it’s not the fittest that survive – but the most adaptable.

Provided we are willing to learn, to adapt, we can do more than survive. We can
go from strength to strength.

What characterizes the new world we see emerging?

It is inhabited by what Alan Moore refers to as the We Species, what Stowe Boyd
calls the Edglings. These people are nodes on the network. They are constantly
connected to groups of their choosing and creation. They expect to co-create,
rate, share, shape, design, engage - participate.

In this world there’s no need for mass media. Mass media is about the lowest
common denominator – pleasing as many people as possible for as much of the
time as possible.

But the possibilities are now much greater. Now there are tools available which
allow anyone to please themselves – and their self-selecting groups of shared
interest - all of the time.

Mass Media was always about offering you a load of content you didn’t want
(literally in the case of magazines) stapled to content you did.

Where digital content applies, now the user can choose exactly the content they
want, and only the content they want.
This disaggregation leads to one-to-one relationships between relevant content
and relevant selling opportunity. Advertising is no longer about reaching the
maximum number of any-old eyeballs. Now it is about reaching the optimum
number of the exact right eyeballs. And if there’s no need for a mass audience for
advertising eyeballs, what role is left for mass media?

Interruptive ads on TV aren’t working, we’ve stopped looking at the banner ads
on websites and we tune away the moment an ad appears on radio - if we are
still putting up with our listening choices being made centrally for us!

Now we are seeing that it’s more important to be famous for 15 people, than for
15 minutes.

This world is awash with content – slashing its value in and of itself. Its value
does not reside in broadcasting it to the masses – its value is revealed only by
the long tail.

Quality rules are changed. Relevance trumps ‘quality’ if that quality is judged by
someone essentially irrelevant to you.

What does the We Species want? To engage with self-forming communities of

(global) niche shared interest (purpose).

It wants Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Bebo, Twitter, txt… social networks are
the fastest growing business opportunities on the planet.

Most of the world’s top 15 sites are engaged networks of sharing. None are
broadcast, centre-out models. And it’s been this way for more than the last five
minutes…

We Species is a communal, social, animal. We Species is a participator.

We always have been. Now we have the tools to roll back the oddity of the last
50-or-so years of being ‘entertained’ in silence – of being broadcast at.

Audiences (that which we were) consume content.

Communities (that which was formerly known as the audience) co-create,

comment on, rate, review, engineer, design, market, share, buy, sell, create value
(YouTube, Blogs, eBay, MyNuMo)… are in charge.

How do we engage with this networked world, with the communities we wish to
be part of rather than the audiences we want to broadcast to? How do we find
our place?
Perhaps the new role for media is to be the creators/facilitators of platforms for
self-forming communities of shared interest.

Focused on their interests, we should provide tools to allow co-creation and

aggregation of content, products and services.

We see communities working together to create content right now. And we’re
seeing the emergence of communities creating services and products, too.

And I believe (see Why Media is the New Business Ecology, below) this puts
media in the very best position of all business types as the 21st century finds
second gear.

In the networked world community – not OUR content – is king.

The network creates, responds, controls… creates value.

There are new rules:

1. Serve the community first
2. Niche global NOT mass.
3. Two-way flows – NOT broadcast
4. Networks NOT Silos
5. Power of the node over power vested in hierarchies
6. Adhoc, self-forming communities over directed teams.
7. Persistent conversation trumps ‘capturing’ ID.
8. Real-time, niche-community-focused, user-generated information over
News
9. That we all act as shared contributors to and users of common pool
resources.
10. . That we learn to cherish Group Forming Network Theory (Reed’s law).

Great things happen when you engage with the network. Value emerges in
rarely-predicted ways…

Blogs are a great example.

Some regard them as the illustration of all of this giant leap we are undertaking.

They represent the greatest shift in the control of information since Gutenburg
rocked up with his movable type.

Until that point information was centralised and restricted. The Church published
The Book. You were lucky if you could even read it, let alone own a copy.

With the arrival of the printing press books could be produced cheaply and
distribution became much less controlled – much less centralised.
The result was an explosion in new thinking generated by new routes for the
exchange of information. Mash-ups for the masses.

Now blogs have arrived, lowering the technical barrier so that anyone can publish
their thoughts, their views, their ‘information’, on the internet.

Doc Searls says: “I can’t think of anything that demonstrates the sovereign
nature of the self better than a blog.”

And if blogs were just like books – this would be a radical transformation in
information control and in self expression, too.

But they are more than this – much more.

Blogs offer two way flows of information between the author and the readers who
respond.
They create trust through recommendation and reputation.
They enable decentralised, self-forming communities of interest.
They have zero hierarchy or silo restrictions.

Bloggers share connections with one another. They come together through the
interest they share. They form networks – communities with a common purpose.
They introduce each other to things they didn’t know they needed to know – and
to people they didn’t need to know – and all the things that those people know.

The mash-ups and mergers of ideas that result create new emerging value.

They are much, much more than electronic never-ending books.

And they work to create real value. Conferences get organised, products and
services get invented and marketed, new ideas emerge. Job offers happen.

Opening up your network – which successful blog networks do – will help you
understand and it will help you win.

Goldcorp in Canada shared its mining data with the internet – and turned itself
from a $100m company to a $10bn one. Nokia’s ‘connecting people’ mantra
transformed it from a cellphone maker to a major media powerhouse. Facebook
students bagged themselves £144 a year in profit just by joining a group to
protest against proposed overdraft charges. Regarding itself as a series of
widgets anyone could distributed made youtube the phenomenom of web2.0.
How do you personally get to grips with this world?

The best way of learning usually involves a bit of doing. I’m going to advocate the
same.

Mostly because, as Alan Moore is fond of saying,: “That which we create, we

embrace.”

So, be a node. Don’t just witness the network in action. Be part of it. Leave an
impression on it. Add a little of yourself. Participate.

If you’re doing nothing on the network right now, start. Just touch the network
maybe three times a week: write a post on a forum, add a comment on a blog.
Write a blog post yourself? Rate someone’s review. Play with facebook. Suck it
and see!

And please don’t say you don’t have time. Getting a fundamental understanding
of how the network functions is critical for you to take your value-sharing place on
it. It’s critical for your future and for your own and your network’s productivity.

Stowe Boyd asks us to think of attention (ie demand on our time) as being more
about flow than focus.

• Don't listen to industrial era or information era (the last stage of industrial-
ism) nonsense about personal productivity...
• The network is mostly connections. The connections matter, give it value,
not the nodes.
• Time is a shared space -- your time is truly not your own
• Productivity is second to Connection: network productivity trumps
personal productivity.

This belief in the power of the network and his willingness to subsume personal
focus to it is based on the simple notion that:

I am made greater by the sum of my connections so are my connections.

At a corporate level, it’s my belief that we need to activate the network internally:
Allow adhoc, non-directed self-forming communities of shared interest.

I believe we have to figure out the tools to bring people of shared

interest/passions together within businesses to create ideas they will embrace.
These will result in teams of people that no one has directed to get together –
working on projects that no ‘boss’ has ordered the construction of. These will be
a better fit with the needs of the residents of the networked world.
We must learn to make our internal silo walls permeable – and those around the
organisation itself.

If Nokia is comfortable inviting emap, Disney, yahoo et al to talk mobile

advertising with it – why isn’t your organisation opening its doors.

Shared ideas create emerging value for all those taking part. This is the lesson of
the network.

Jouko Ahvenainen of Xtract says: “Today’s great phenomena are born in

networks where shared passion creates action”

We see examples again and again: it’s even transforming politics right now with
Barack Obama’s facebook groups, youtube channels and blogs threatening to
trump all the cash old-style politicians are throwing at the American presidential
race.

Centralised control, centralised power, is being disintermediated where ever the

network touches it. A new ecology dawns.

There’s a powerful explosion looming.

You can be part of it – or you can be blown away by it.

Investigate further:
• Why business is the new media ecology:
http://fasterfuture.blogspot.com/2007/08/white-paper-wiki-power-of-
network.html
• Communities Dominate Brands: http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/
• Stowe Boyd: http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/
• Xtract: http://www.xtract.fi/
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com
• Wikinomics: http://wikinomics.com/
• Doc Searls: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/
• Faster Future: http://fasterfuture.blogspot.com