First off less than 2% of Congress totaling 535 members, have professional backgrounds in science, whereas there are 222 lawyers.

When in 1987 the Federal Communications Commission removed the fairness doctrine of how difficult or controversial news was reported it open the door to more extreme punditry, take a bow Rush Limbaugh. And we have witnessed an increasing line of anti-science perspectives from Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, with the whip held by Newt Gringrich.

And Otto argues right now science is under threat by anti-climate change organisations – between 2009 and June 2010 the energy industry spent half a billion dollars fighting climate change legislation. He writes that 96 of the 100 newly elected Republican members of Congress deny outright that climate change is real or are voting against it in one form or another.

That said Otto argues there are complex forces that are shaping the debate on public perceptions towards science, ‘the moral ambiguity createdafter the dropping of the Atom bomb and living in a nuclear MAD world’, or some of the terrible excesses of toxic pollution that killed and maimed ordinary people – coupled with the culpability of government, the effects of postmodernism on the one hand and the rise of fundamentalist religion on the other smashing into each other. A deep distrust arouse around government and science.

This is the volatile cocktail that combines – commerce, science, truth and politics and results says Otto on an assault on American science that is unprecedented. Though the Barack Obama administration does not get away with it scott free

President Obama’s not much better. Running strong on climate change in 2008, he has since totally de-prioritized it, apparently marginalizing his scientist appointees like Chu, Holdren and Lubchenco, all of them outspoken on climate change, and now appears to be moving ahead with offshore oil drilling, lower air pollution standards, poor carbon standards, and the Keystone XL oil pipeline. In a time when the science has only advanced further and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences says anthropogenic global warming should be “regarded as settled facts” — a time when China’s leapfrogging ahead on clean energy investments in the next economy, that’s not going to take America where we need to go.

Finally Otto refers to ScienceDebate2012 as he describes it, ‘a grassroots campaign for a presidential debate on science, technology, health, medicine and the environment’. Which was born out of Science Debate 2008 which was the largest political initiative in the history of American science.

We are on a journey from a linear world to a non-linear one (click here for more information) and we need good science to come with us. To attempt to shout down science, diminishes us all and limits the possibilities of our world.

For more information on Otto’s perspective read New Scientist October 27th 2011 (subscription required) or the Huffington Post- The un-American war on Science.

Shawn Otto has written book called Fool Me Twice: fighting thee assault on science in America

The next decade will see the continuing transformation of television, with video becoming more personal and democratic as new networks subvert and transcend the broadcast model. Dr William Cooper of the convergent communications consultancy informitv offers 20 practical predictions for the next 10 years.

1. Television will be less dominant. Free to air television networks will become a secondary medium, like radio, increasingly reliant upon relaying live events that can attract a national audience, as other modes of digital distribution displace the broadcast provision of pre-recorded programming.

2. Fewer television channels will survive. Mass media ownership will continue to consolidate and the number of broadcast television channels will decline as the interruptive advertising model will fail to support them all, but the range of brands using video communications for marketing will increase exponentially.

3. Global communities will dominate media. Global social networking applications will continue to proliferate into the video realm, providing communal interaction and real-time ratings and recommendations, creating shared experiences around asynchronous viewing across geographic boundaries.

4. Audiovisual communication will become personal. Audio and video will be used as routinely for personal communication as text or images, requiring audiovisual production to become part of the school curriculum and a standard skill in the workplace.

5. Most viewing will be on personal screens. Tablets and touch screens will proliferate and more audio and video will be consumed on personal devices than on the traditional shared living room display, which will become more multifunctional and less defined by the television viewing experience.

6. Mobile video will be delivered over data networks. Most mobile television and video services will be delivered over data networks rather than using extensions of current digital broadcasting standards.

7. Displays will be network connected. Hybrid broadcast and broadband devices and displays will become mainstream and most video screens will have some form of data connection, while the resolution of consumer electronics products will typically exceed that of conventional broadcast networks.

8. Displays will become resolution independent. Powerful media processors will provide real-time transcoding between different formats and resolutions on the fly, decoupling displays from specific broadcast standards.

9. High definition will be standard. High definition will become the new standard and progressive scanning will eventually replace interlaced display and its attendant artifacts, while frame rates will double, offering smoother motion.

10. Fidelity of reproduction will improve. Ultra high definition formats will be commercially available and will be routinely used for acquisition and post production, providing print resolution reproduction, while increased bit depths will offer improved dynamic range and colour representation, resulting in much richer images.

11. 3D will be a limited success. Stereoscopic 3D will be popular for movies and major live events but will remain a niche product while it requires viewers to wear special glasses, although stereo eyewear will become increasingly fashionable and will allow immersive gaming and photorealistic virtual reality and role-playing experiences.

12. Network distribution will become more efficient. Multicast distribution will allow live programming to be delivered cost-effectively to millions of users simultaneously over fixed and wireless data networks on a global basis.

13. Fibre-optic networks will reach the home. Cable television operators will migrate to internet protocols and extend their fibre-optic networks to the premises, forcing other telecommunications companies to compete, offering access to a virtually unlimited range of audiovisual media, delivered in real-time or faster, without delays or interruptions.

14. Broadband will become a utility. Broadband data access will become an essential utility, like water, gas and electricity, providing connections of 1Gbps or more in urban areas, charged by terabytes transferred, at peak and off peak rates, with no further restrictions on usage.

15. Home networks will become ubiquitous. Wired and wireless data networks will replace dedicated wiring within the home for audio visual distribution, communication and automation, while universal low voltage connections will reduce the need for multiple power adapters.

16. Massive data storage will be cheap as chips. Solid state devices will largely replace spinning disks and massive local storage will provide instant access to thousands of hours of audiovisual information and entertainment, allowing an entire collection of movies and videos to be stored on a portable device.

17. Physical media distribution will decline. Streams and downloads will displace but not entirely replace the distribution of physical discs for audio and video, while licensed media will be ubiquitously accessible from network storage in the cloud.

18. Global releases will reduce piracy. Major movies and premium programmes will be distributed simultaneously worldwide to reduce piracy and regionally localised global events will be funded by sponsorship and subscription.

19. Copyright protection will be invisible. Digital rights management restrictions will be transparent to legitimate users who will be able to access media freely on any device within the terms of their licence, while forensic fingerprinting and legal measures will be used to combat unauthorised distribution.

20. People will pay to avoid adverts. While increasingly sophisticated targeting of commercial messages will make them more relevant and more acceptable, people will pay a premium for subscription services that are uninterrupted by intrusive adverts.

From inform TV

Capitalism says Umar overstates benefits and understates costs

1). Social costs

2). Environmental costs

3). human costs

4). The cost of unfairness

And Gerd Leonhard describes the issues that media companies face in the networked society

However, we are right now at the barricades of a communications revolution, in which humanity is renegotiating the power relationships between; people, organisations, and even governments. As social philosopher Richard Sennett argues, we want to,

recover something of the spirit of the Enlightenment on terms appropriate to our time.

We are able to recover this spirit through networked communication technologies. I argue that, the only straight lines made in nature are made by man, a metaphor for the industrialized mass media and consumer society. But nature is not like that – nature is connected and interconnected in completely different ways. If we agree that we live in a participatory-networked society, as espoused by many across the globe, then we need a different philosophy, language and framework in which we operate.

Therefore, our imperative is to de-school ourselves in a philosophy and a way of thinking and acting that has delivered us into a cultural, ideological and economic cul-de-sac. We need to liberate ourselves from how we were once taught to think and live our lives, stemming from the ethos of industrialisation and the mass consumer society.  We may need a form of dualism for a while, understanding that we are in the process of making a journey, spiritually, socially, and economically from one way of seeing and behaving in the world, to another.  The source of the solution lies in finding once again the ‘being’ in human being. The fundamental need we have is for us to commune and find shared meaning, because without such collective meaning or personal sense of belonging, social isolation deprives us of both our feeling of social connection and our individual sense of purpose. On both counts, the results can be devastating, not only for the individual, but for societies as well.

Straight line thinking stops HERE.

The Future of Journalism Conference: The newsroom view of user content sort of got my pip.

Research into journalists’ views of the contributions made by website users found that many consider it a distraction from doing the “real job” of journalism.

In the UK, both BBC News and the regional newspaper publisher Johnston Press were studied by academics who presented their findings at the Future of Journalism Conference at Cardiff University this afternoon.

Although mainly concerned with users’ comments on news stories, the User Generated Content also included video clips and pictures submitted to the news organisations.

Jane Singer of the University of Central Lancashire said the replies revealed the journalists felt strongly they needed to be the gatekeepers of that content, and had skills which the general public didn’t possess to enable them to do that.

The issue is that the role of journalist becomes manifold in the networked society. The description of this particular discussion at the conference to me suggests that their is little understanding of co-creation

The BBC study was carried out in 2007 by a team from Cardiff University including Dr Andy Williams, who said even the name of the journalists’ training programme – Have They Got News For You! – was indiciative of the mismatch of the potential collaboration and the “old media” reality.

He said the training at that time mainly consisted of learning to spot a hoax and contained almost nothing about collaborative networked journalism, with the then editor Peter Horrocks describing the process as “sorting wheat from chaff”.

I remember speaking at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston in January 2007 – the knowledge of the effects of digital communications and the meta forces driving the current communications revolution seemed non-existant. It was the year that the Johnston Press created a chair for research.

Apparently the beeb as caught up, they call it the “BBC UGC hub” of 23 journalists now based in the heart of the newsroom and dealing with 10-20,000 emails a day. Dr Claire Wardle was quoted as saying

Now, every day on the hub there’s a core team out on Flickr and Twitter looking for news stories, going to where the conversation is taking place rather than waiting for it to come to them. The hub has an awareness of how it (social media) works, and is trying to get the rest of the BBC to take it on board.

Bravo – but please, pretty please with sugar on top – don’t use the term UGC. We are not users, like consumers, we are people. We all exist on the same planet and we all breathe the same air.

Remember what you call things is important. Like the words irrelevant, or obsolescent, or even broadersheet.

Did they discuss trust @ the conference in relation to co-creation of news, or even investigative journalism, and how it manifests itself when you allow people to embrace what they create. I am not saying its a free for all. But lets be honest – what is the standard of professional local journalism today? Judging my my local rag, The Cambridge Evening news, we are still in the “read all about it” age. Maybe I am being unfair, but maybe I am not.

SMLXL archives on newsbrands and journalism

There are no conscripts in the networked society, only volunteers, said Euan quoting Drucker, and he additionally observed  that coercion is a very poor way to inspire people to deliver their very best work inside organisations. Information locked in silo’s rarely shared, no harnessing of collective intelligence or as Euan pointed out the harnessing of the collective wisdom of 30,000 employees, that needed to be networked, transparent and available.

It also got me thinking about innovation in the context of Tom Kelley’s story about the decline of his home town in Ohio. This was triggered by the only major company that at one time, made all the tyres for all the trucks and cars in America. Putting off the need to innovate to the point that it was too late for them to do anything when the moment to respond to an economic threat had passed them by, so they became obsolete.

This morning, I was reading The Life and Democracy by John Keane. Well worth it. Keane, takes us through the story of how “Representative Democracy” was born,

Contrary to some old-fashioned, devoutly British accounts, which think that Big Ben as timeless, and suppose, arrogantly, tat parliamentary institutions were ‘incomparably the greatest gift of the English people to the civilization of the world’, parliaments were in fact an invention of what today is northern Spain.

Keane tells us that Parliaments were born out of sheer and utter despair – Christianity believed that the tide of Islam was overwhelming it and encroaching upon its bastion strongholds and overthrowing them. Syria, Palestine, Egypt, the North African coast, Constantinople, Spain, and southern France, the sacking of Rome and the occupation of Sicily – it goes on.

The taking of Jerusalem

Tens of thousands of Christians, felt squeezed by the combined forces of what they saw as discriminatory taxation and contemptuous toleration by Islamic rulers.

Enter, stage left King Alfonso IX of Iberia. His kingdom, says Keane was under intense military pressure, not only from neighbouring fiefdoms but by the Moorish army. Against a bleak situation Alfonso decided to fight his way to freedom. But to do this Alfonso had to innovate to bring disparate parties to a table to agree collectively to a plan of sustained action. Alfonso IX knew that the shit had indeed hit the fan, and, he also knew that when the shit hits the fan you never stand downwind!

Both Alfonso IX and the local nobility agreed that the reconquest required political deals to be struck, minimally by waging war in tandem. But that meant winning over the bishops of the Church, the estate that saw itself as the guardian of souls and the spiritual protector of God’s lands. Launching war also meant costs. Permanent warfare against the Moors had to somehow be paid for.

With the whole region now permanently under siege, and strategically vital towns like León now resembling a walled fortress, Alfonso decide to appeal for their solidarity.

He achieved this by reaching out to those influential men in the town that were recognised by the community as being respected as ‘good men’. These men could deliver trained soldiers, and they could also provide the necessary cash to wage the war. But Alfonso IX also recognised the ‘principal of mutual compromise had to apply: with the backing of the warrior nobility and the Church. He did this by offering protection to the besieged towns in retun for fighting men and money. Alfonso IX understood that he must deeply engage with all stakeholders, and make them accountable to each other. It meant he was no longer supreme ruler, but that was better than life-long servitude under the Moors and their way of life.

And so it was within this princely triangle formed by the nobles, bishops and urban citizens, the modern practice of parliamentary representation was born. In 1188 in León Alfonso convened the first ever cortes.

Keane summarises

Although committed to open discussion, the first ever cortes, was not an assembly of citizens of the Syrian-Mespotamian, Phoenician, Greek, or Islamic kind. It was also not a western version of the Meshawara that developed during the Ottoman Empire. It was instead the brainchild of a self-interested Christian monarch bent on building up his realm, the creation of a political animal who saw that effective government required the creation of a new mechanism for resolving disputes and striking bargains among interested parties who felt they had a common interest in reaching compromise, so avoiding interncine violence.

Thinking the unthinkable

In the networked society, companies premised upon the legacy, linear, mass-media models of: business, organisation, and marketing must think the unthinkable – in fact they must embrace the unthinkable. And work out how they innovate to survive.

For example the Tour de France was created to sell more newspapers of L’Equip in France.

Whilst Rupert Murdoch decides to put up paid walls around the thinning value of his legacy media empire, and his son kicks the BBC in the teeth as they both rage against the networked society, that is dissolving their personal control of the media per se.

The Johnston Press failed to innovate at the moment it needed to and is struggling, as is the Guardian Media Group, as it navel gazes over whether to axe the Observer for cost / cash flow reasons. The music industry lashed around for years liked a wounded bull – until it had to admit its model of distribution and therefore its business model must evolve to survive.

Every work of art said Wassily Kandinsky, is a child of its time.

Money Bonds were created in Italy to raise money for the intercine fighting between cities and towns that developed into a whole banking system.

LEGO innovated in its marketing and product development by co-creating with its most ardent critics and its most ardent advocates; one and the same person in fact – listening and then developing. I believe the view is, that this approach and mindset has enable the company to survive.

Company Command did not ask to set itself up but it has transformed the effectiveness of US company commanders in the field of battle – by enabling people to share and exchange knowledge and information

I guess the hard part is recognising that you are at that very moment where you must seek the sublime from ordinary people enabling you to innovate your way out of extreme danger. Or actually being prepared to admit the shit has hit the fan, rather than handing on the baton, to the next poor sod as you move on or retire.

Communication technology is political, and we are busy using that communication technology to renegotiate what type of world we want to live in, that truly reflects our fundamental needs as human beings.

And we have to innovate around that simple fact.

Its not that journalism, news and newspapers are redundant in this time of epochal change, but the people that run them are. Because they have failed to truly experiment, they have failed to ask themselves what is advertising in the 21st Century? Because that was the model supporting them. I meet the CEO of the Johnston Press in 2006 and implored him that, JP needed to do 2 things…

1). Think hard about how to create more value for its readers and to invest in that

2). Think harder about how in achieving [1] they delivered greater value for their advertisers

This had to be done as a web/mobile – ergo ‘digital’ strategy. Unfortunately, this did not happen. And the net result is the parlous state of JP today. And frankly I think there is no going back. Which is in fact tragic, because it has significant ramifications.

And the government has also be complicit in its demise, as explained by Claire Enders

Local newspapers refused the suggestion that they should be regulated by Ofcom. Simultaneously, the government started withdrawing public sector advertising and the Royal Mail “eliminated distribution to homes”. The government believes the local press is read by people, middle-aged and older, who live local lives. They are not relevant to the government’s view of itself. Instead of helping local media to stay alive longer, the effect of government action has been to push them over the edge faster. We’re talking about a fourth estate that is facing the future with much fewer resources. The resources on the government side are overwhelming.

Perhaps, this is also why we see the growth of local councils producing their own newspapers

What nearly all traditional media boards have failed to grasp are a number of very important developments. I would say in fact that, there has been a catastrophic failure at board level, to truly engage with the business and marketing challenges presented in the early 21st Century. A VP of a large media company said to me that,

The problem was that we (the company) thought that the problem was technology, so we invested a great deal of money in inappropriate technology. What we failed to see was in fact a bigger and broader picture, as a consequence we are now hamstrung by the massive costs of those investments, twinned with dwindling revenues, with few, if any resources to combat the business environment we are now in. The CFO, hears a huge sucking sound on cashflow, with only a trickle coming back in revenues from ‘digital’. We listened to the wrong people, and now we are facing the consequences of our own myopia.

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 wholse-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 key points are:

[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 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.”

Augmented reality

Think about it like this, an ordnance survey map represents multiple layers of information, derived from various studies of an area. The map is valuable to me, as it enables me to navigate to various destinations or to take a number of critical decisions on my journey, whether by foot or otherwise. This is information is ‘augmented,’ and, its value is derived from the unique augmentation of that information. Traditional notions of what constitutes “value” are made redundant, mostly in the 10 points I have outlined. Free, was never going to work, because, media owners never understood that they were on a journey to a new type of society, that perceived value in a different way to them. Media owners failed to understand that the “furniture of advertising” must evolve from display and interruptive (useful in a broadcast mass media society) to an enabling service, in the intention economy, which also has regulatory ramifications.

Which brings me onto Engagement.

Companies have to embrace the idea of engagement – why? Because “what information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention …The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention”, wrote Herbert Simon. How do you as a media brand stay relevant in a fragmented, superglobal networked media eco-system? You have to deeply engage people, especially when we live in a a networked, participatory culture. Businesses need to become part of the fabric of peoples lives, the need for intimacy acheived through high relevancy is key. Blyk as a pioneer in mobile marketing has clearly demonstrated that intimacy is vital in the 21st Century.

Engagement – if the 20th Century was about straight line thinking around commerce, media and communications, the 21st Century will be about a no straight line approach defined as Engagement which creates deeper context and greater meaning.

Engagement is about connecting large or small communities to an idea/task/goal/passion that they want to be part of, and, that they want to share with their friends driven by a commercial or social agenda. Or, deliver information of such unique value, people are prepared to pay for it – like the FT. Or, deliver information that is so highly relevant and contextual and targeted that is starts to deliver response rates of 29%+

Engagement Communications also enables the creation of new business models that make more sense in a participatory culture of no straight lines.

Traditional media must learn to engage with this 10 point plan or they will die.

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.

Industry after industry tends to eat itself before it can move forward. Rather than thinking the unthinkable about the veracity and durability of existing business models, and then moving on. There is great resistance to evolution, like Hollywood and the music industry trying to sue everyone, whom they suspect of stealing their content. Whereas a Dutch government survey discovered that sharing drives economic success. I wonder what the bill for lawyers fees is in the music industry? Perhaps that money in most cases would have been better spent on R&D? Just a thought.

Richard Wray goes on to mention Spotify, that has already 2 million users/subscribers in the UK, and apparently double that number in Europe. They have achieved this in less than 6  months. Its success has spurred Microsoft into action.

Following in the wake of Last.fm and We7, Spotify has made it easy for people to get the music they want to hear when they want to hear it, helping to lure people away from illegal file-sharing websites.

And Spotify are working on a mobile enabled service, now this gets interesting. As Nokia’s Comes with Music, must be feeling a little queasy. Why? Because Comes with Music is a shadow of what a music service should be. And in Australia, the handsets that Comes with Music are selling successfully, but few are turning on the service? (Spotify raises a warchest)

music executives hope it will prove to be rather more successful than the attempt by Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer, to introduce its own unlimited download service, Comes With Music, last year. Amid widespread confusion about the service – caused by a marketing campaign one music executive criticised by saying “you had to be a real music anorak to understand what they were wittering on about” – it has underperformed the industry’s expectations.

It is in fact very simple why it has underperformed, I always said Comes with Music, would be a success in spite of itself. But, for music executives they must understand Nokia, wants to shift handsets, not music, therefore, its movtivation to produce a world class music service is low. The commercial offering is testament to that, a ‘thin value offering.’ Not that Nokia would admit this. Whereas, Spotify or Last.FM are highly motivated. Steve Jobs approached Nokia when working on the iTunes service, he was shown the door, the rest they say is history – perhaps the iPhone was Jobs response to that encounter.

Last.FM or Spotify have understood that “FREE” is not the kicker, its the quality of the service, that ‘enables’ its users in a rich variety of ways. Playlists, recomendations, presonalisation, discovery, contextualisation, location, sharing are again part of this new vocabulary.

We then move onto ISP’s, and the green shoots of unlimited download music services. Virgin has signed a deal with Universal, and Sky is working on its own masculine offering. It is the ‘mammoth customer bases and marketing muscle, combined with the existence of long term billing relationships that is key in this particular area of the evolution of music, writes Richard Wray. 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.

Back to the digital elixiar of commerce, I would have thought studying Cyworld in Korea might have been a good idea for music exec’s, in understanding how to make music 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. The model is specialised and it must do one thing; motivate its users of the service to advocate. I wonder how much advocacy Comes with Music gets?

I work with the Think Tank Freedom Lab in Amsterdam, and I have had a fruitful relationship with The FreedomLab boys since 1995. This film is something they created from a two hour conversation about my next project, and what I see as some real and pressing issues for businesses and brands. Usually these films are not released into the public realm, but Arjan and Jorgen agreed to allow my to share this. So thank you Freedom Lab.

I argue that we are now living in what many people now call the Networked Society, where we are creating, collaborating, in ways that defy the logic of our industrial era. Therefore we need to embrace the thinking of a No Straight Line World – something that I expanded upon at Reboot Britain, and will do so in our upcoming workshops and courses.

SB: Right now there seems to be a lot of confusion between social media and the definition of community. The idea of community is right now as fairly elusive one and is being bandied about like it’s some sacrosanct term. Community built around consumption is, for me fairly transitory. It reminds of an unruly mob during the time of the Paris Commune. We’re  not going to get a whole lot of sense out of this right now.

Then there’s these dire warnings coming from people like Forrester, that brands will be excluded from consumer choice because somehow they are now being defined by communities and no longer by the brand owners themselves. I think this is both disingenuous and untrue. Forcing brands out of their hands via social media created communities is only part of the story. While even as early as 2005 Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore warned marketers, in their prescient work ‘Communities Dominate Brands‘, that if they didn’t cut loose the shackles of the traditional advertising agency and TV network model they would lose their brands. I’m seeing many of the same warnings again this year, particularly in the wake of the great financial crisis. But what real, if any, changes have we seen to this paradigm? No brands have fallen by the wayside because they didn’t have a social media strategy or because they continued advertising in traditional media.

JB: Brands may not fall by the wayside as such, but brands will become stronger because of their consumer engagement strategies. For example, the well known Dell Hell scenario certainly impacted on that organisation negatively, but by engaging with the community they came back stronger and more relevant to their client base. If they hadn’t done that who knows where that organisation would have been.

Some brands come to social media like Dell in a ‘reactive’ fashion knowing they now need to engage with consumers due to a negative event/issue. Other brands initiate the online engagement strategy ‘proactively’, understanding it will add value to their knowledge base, understanding the client better, product development and customer service.

SB: Ahonen and Moore predicted the consumer and their connected communities, would select the products and brands that are engaged in the most relevant dialogue with them. Somehow this would become the centre of a new modern and sustainable marketing model. While I think there are some massive shifts occurring,  I don’t think we’re quite there yet with this because I’m not sure anyone understands these kinds of ROIs yet.

Metrics, metrics, metrics. I can’t count so I am unable to help, but the fact is one can see where commerce is to be made, if one digs around a bit. And the big question is what is advertising and marketing in the 21st Century? When we live in a search economy, a participatory culture, where 25% of al media is made by us and there are 3.5 billion mobile phones of the planet. Networked economics?

Some called Tomi and I polemicists – I like to think we highlighted something critically important for brands, business and organisations. Remember our subtitle was, “business and marketing challenges for the 21st Century”. This went way beyond in my view the social media paradigm that so many are so now engaged in.

A while ago I asked David Bollier who had worked with the Aspen Institute for 15 years to help draft a response to the Digital Britain report – as I believed so much more was on offer, which as a Fellow I did ask the RSA to engage with – we wrote,

Seizing the Moment: Can Britain Harness the Promise of Digital Networks?

Earlier this year, Lord Carter published “Digital Britain,” a major report that sketches a vision for improving the Internet in the years ahead.  It is an unassailable report, so far as it goes:  It calls for modernizing the digital network infrastructure, developing investment-friendly content and applications, guaranteeing universal access to the Internet and improving Government services through better uses of the Internet.  The report dutifully mentions the challenges facing mobile, broadcasting, copyright law and education, and it cites a variety of experts with their own sense of the future. 

The report is a disappointment, however, because it amounts to a plumber’s guide to the future.  It suggests that the primary task facing this country is to develop better, faster “pipes” to push conventional media content.  With little sense of what might fill these pipes and little examination of the disruptive dynamics of our digitally connected world, the report affirms the status quo.  It smiles upon the existing business models of BT, the BBC and Virgin Media, and implicitly seeks to extend their dominance over the cultural landscape.  To read Digital Britain, one would think that the nation need only let business assert greater control over online networks and give government upgraded communications tools to carry on its customary work.  In the words of Joshua Coper Ramo, we are at the start of what may become the most dramatic change in the international order for several centuries. What we face is an avalanche of ceaseless change.  Yet, some of the best minds of our era are still in thrall to an older way of seeing and thinking.

Little attention is paid to the real dynamics of this current communications revolution that is now transforming countless corners of our world.  Innovators of all creeds – talented amateurs, enterprising schools, resourceful academics, artists from all creative sectors, self-organized online communities, smart entrepreneurs – are pioneering new creative genres.  They are the creative economic force, inventing new revenue models for organizations, new intellectual property norms, and new social collaborations that create value.  None of these issues receive much attention as they deserve.

Which prompts us to ask, Do the authors of this report truly understand the rich promise of this paradigm shift described as the digitally networked society?  When Lord Carter was CEO of OfCom, his then right-hand man, Ed Richards, described digital’s epochal impact on society as an “evolving, historic act of liberation.”  The reader of Digital Britain glimpses few of the enormous opportunities that might be seized, via this evolving, historic act of liberation.  The report is a small-bore compendium of policy reforms and infrastructure improvements that fails to appreciate the immediate promise of the connected society, technologies of cooperation and the new ways of doing anything and everything.

Yes, we can all agree we need better connectivity.  And we need some serious housekeeping.  But how might society leverage digital tools of cooperation to better meet its essential needs?  Such basic questions do not get asked. We need fresh, large-scale ideas, and to see the world as a ceaselessly complex and adaptive system that demands a different way of thinking.

Think about it like this – the only straight lines made in nature are made by man, and similarly our industrial world has been built with the same straight-line logic and, philosophy. Yet nature has no straight lines.  Nature flows; nature is more densely connected in all respects.  It is a completely different ecosystem, in fact, one that digital networks emulate.  It suggests a different type of process and logic at play that is not centralized, bureaucratic or inflexible.

For straight-line thinkers, the world of no straight lines is akin to living in a foreign land; the customs, language, symbols etc., are dis-lo-cating-ly alien – they are outsiders, unable to fully participate, as they do not have the comprehension, language, nor the insight or the necessary capability to fully engage.  They have become concussed observers to the vital world around them.

The visceral shock, however, is, that this is happening, not in some foreign land, but in our own backyards.

Our world of business, media, communications, and society are evolving from the straight-lines of an industrial era to the more complex and networked world that mimics nature.  This interactive networked world isn’t about vertical silos, traditional notions of product and service creation, mass-production and mass media and marketing.  It is about the massive flows of people who are autonomously connecting, collaborating, organising and creating in messy, unpredictable ways.  This is truly an engaged and participatory culture.

Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks argues that, for over 150 years our economies, culture and society have been shaped by a straight-line logic producing considerable economic success.  However, in the dawn of the Networked-Society, a straight-line logic of getting stuff done becomes a barrier to progress. Why? Because, the change wrought by the networked-society is structural – challenging how markets and organizations have co-evolved over the last 150 years.

This creates a dilemma.  And the dilemma is this – How can organisations, and the people that work in those organisations, develop coherent strategies, products and services in the new networked environment when they have been versed only in straight-line thinking from birth?

SEIZING THE MOMENT

We believe that Great Britain needs a larger, more robust vision for the future delivered by a different set of technological tools.  The dynamics of our culture that are now unfolding need to be better explained to the public, legislators, industry and the press.  The boundless energies and imagination of British citizens do not need to be directed and organized, but rather, unleashed.  If you want to build a ship, it has been said, don’t divide the work and give orders; teach people to yearn for the vast and endless sea. 

We need a report that conveys much more about “the vast, endless sea.”  It must go beyond the mundane mechanics of ship-building and sketch the new logic and ways of thinking that our new society is now demanding.  If one looks to the periphery, where innovation always occurs, one can see how digital technologies are enabling entirely new sorts of capacities in commerce, civil governance, media, healthcare and education.  Revolutions are now raging in open-access scholarly publishing; in scientific data-sharing; in social networking and wikis; in user-driven collaborations; and in the curation of public-sector information.

The question is, Will Britain help co-create and develop the new paradigms of business, learning, creativity, culture and citizenship?  Or will it recommit itself to backward-looking models while other nations capitalize on the novel, emergent dynamics of digital networks, tools and technologies? 

It is important for British leaders to come to terms with some inexorable realities:  New gatekeepers will arise in the information distribution wars.  Grassroots collaborations will compete with conventional hierarchies.  For example, socially based innovation is already challenging corporate R&D models.

Digital communication technologies hold the promise to transform this society in the same way that Gutenberg’s 42 Line Bible liberated information from the controlling authority of the church and redistributed it to a wider society, which subsequently delivered us the Reformation, and the possibility that man and woman for the first time could make their own way in the world. 

The new tools and technologies of cooperation are empowering individuals as never before.  They are challenging the centralized institutions of the 20th Century to be more responsive and transparent.  They are enabling value to be generated more efficiently, with broader participation and new types of collaboration, than in the past.  They are empowering individuals and self-organized communities in ways that many institutions prefer to ignore.

These are the types of issues that this nation must be grappling with frankly and intelligently.  This discussion and debate has yet to occur.  We need to have an informed debate that celebrates our diversity – and the inherent capacity of everyone to contribute in meaningful ways.  We need to explore how learning and education can be made more effective and cost-efficient in a world of universal information access.  How can the “sharing economy” that exists outside of the marketplace be fortified to perform its valuable work?  How might digital technologies of cooperation improve the efficiency and responsiveness of healthcare?

Let us explore new participatory, open structures for learning, journalism, arts and culture, community and civic endeavors, voluntarism and more.  Let us challenge government to re-imagine its services to make them more citizen-friendly and – more significantly accountable.  Let us seek to make the “public-sector information” controlled by museums, universities, archives and other public institutions more accessible to all.

STARTING A NEW DISCUSSION, DEVELOPING A BROADER VISION

Proust once said, “The real voyage of discovery is not seeking new landscapes but, to look upon the world with fresh eyes.”  As the digital revolution swirls around us, it is imperative that our nation have a more bracing and sophisticated sense of the future.  We must have a more honest reckoning with the transformative power of open platforms that provide; community co-creation, sharing, cooperation and grassroots innovation.

To that end, we propose a small, three-day retreat to address the questions posed above.  We wish to convene some leading thinkers and practitioners who have thought deeply about how digital technologies are changing the shape of creativity in music, video and journalism; education and healthcare; media in all its myriad forms; SMEs and emergency services, and government services at all levels.  We need to hear from the guardians of cultural artifacts and civic organizations, cultural curators and entrepreneurs. 

We propose that a report be written that distills the key insights of this gathering, and that the report be widely disseminated to thought leaders throughout the country, particularly among elected officials, government agencies, business executives, and prominent leaders in education, healthcare and other nonprofit sectors.