Patrick and I met earlier this year, when he overheard me. discussing the No Straight Lines project with someone in a coffee shop in Cambridge. So Patrick contacted me, and this is what he had to say.

What you seem to be talking about runs in parallel to much of the social theory being used within archaeological theory today. Basically, many archaeologists are now beginning to realise that the behaviour of people (I am referring to stuff that was going one about 20,000 years ago when mobile art, figurines and parietal – cave – art largely first appeared in Europe) had much to do with building and maintaining networks, not just with people but also with other elements of the world). Of particular interest is that some archaeologists are now discussing the role of possessing and interacting with mobile (e.g. animal) figurines as a means of creating and maintaining human identity. Much of the ethnographic data suggests that these people actually thought of these objects, and other things in the world, as actually being part of them in a very real way. Thus, when objects such as these are exchanged, it is not simply that they represent the identity of a person (e.g. relative): they actually are part of the person. Archaeologists are also beginning to employ social theories such as Actor-Network Theory to explore such concepts.

What I have now realised is that the way that people engage with objects and media (e.g. mobile phones) in the Western’ world today is not so different to 20,000 years ago. I am not saying that people thought about the world in the same way. But what seems to be apparent, especially with the enormous rise of social networking today, is that human identity is embodied with in the very objects (real and virtual) that people use, and when people communicate with each other it is not simply a matter of communication, but it is in a very real way part of themselves that is being sent/communicated. This is very interesting, because human identity then becomes something which is not confined to the immediacy of the person and the immediate surrounding world, but is distributed throughout the world in the form of pictures, emails etc. Interaction with these things (both real and virtual) then becomes a matter of necessity, as it did during the Palaeolithic, as their identity or personhood is embodied within these things. No longer can be people be socially secure (i.e. interact with important elements of the known world on a regular basis) through normal modes of communication: in order to maintain a sense of social cohesion people must now continually interact with elements of their identity that are distributed throughout the globe via objects (e.g. phones). Social cohesion becomes a matter of remote rather than direct interaction.

My simple observation is that if we are are designing a society and world that is becoming more inherently social through connectivity, this has to relate to identity, and meaning. How we create meaning. We cannot ignore that for many people modern life is rubbish, or that the shopping mall really is Van Diemens land. As I wrote in that post

For me this is the backdrop to perhaps some of the biggest, and perhaps intractable problems of our current society. Loss of identity, belonging, and community – with all its subsequent fallout.

In the issue of identity in a post modern world, psychologist Sandra Harilld points out

Until postmodern times, we dealt with problems that had their origins in relation to the other or the outside in a concrete way and in imagination problems tended to come from people with psychosis or personality disorders. We are still getting those problems but what has changed for some people are the triggers to illness, in so much as people who do not have a strong inner sense of self tend to feel more fragmented more easily and the idea of self construction is very threatening to these types of people.

They seem to need more direct human contact to help them to define themselves and years ago would have been defined and lived within the confines of their families, villages, social classes or friends, with daily personal interaction reinforcing that. So, for instance, we see a lot of phobias and depressions, particularly problems such as social phobia that are linked to this fearfulness of how to be in the world and whether one is acceptable or not.

And in my post human nature and the need for social connection, I point out using the work of John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, that,

Looking more deeply at the invisible forces that link one human being to another helps us see something even more profound: our brains and bodies are designed to function in aggregates, not in isolation. That is the essence of an obligatory gregarious species. The attempt to function in denial of our need for others, whether that need is great or small in any given individual, violates our design specifications.

Indeed, violating our design specifications in a profound way, “I” needs “We” to truly be “I” was the maxim of Carl Jung, as told by Charles Handy in The Hungry Spirit. The industrial age has done some fantastic things for us – but it also has stripped away for many of us what makes us human n the first place. In this context, I am frustrated with the word, “social media” as it just cannot describe the true reality of what is going on in the world we live in today. This perspective is I argue as relevant to business as it is organisations, as it is to education, and lastly to each and every one of us. Because, I think it alters the way we make things, and get stuff done. These are the drivers to the networked world where as Jan van Dijk explains,

In a mass media society, the basic units are the large collective ‘masses’. In contrast, a network society is based on individuals who form voluntary connections with other individuals regardless of location. In a network society, the network becomes a basic unit of organization at all levels (individuals, groups and organizations). Online social networks, media networks and technology networks act as the catalysts for a networked society

His story is one that around the world in different cultures, we experience depression, and describe mental trauma in a rich variety of ways, for example a,

Nigerian man might experience a culturally distinct form of depression by describing a “peppery” feeling in his head, while a Chinese farmer might speak only of shoulder or stomach aches. Salvadorean women refugees suffering psychological trauma after a long civil war, on the other hand, often experience something called calorias, a feeling of intense body heat.

For a long time, psychiatrists and medical anthropologists studying mental illness in different cultures found that mental illnesses are not evenly distributed globally, and do not take the same form from place to place. Unfortunately, mental health professionals in the US, who dominate the global discussion about how mental illnesses are categorised and treated, have often ignored or dismissed these differences.

Watters argues that what big pharma is doing is reaching to the world and describing peoples well-being in their own terms for their own benefit.

local versions of mental illnesses are now being homogenised into American versions at an extraordinary rate.

This for me is when one can refer to the dysfunctional nature of an industrial system – mass markets no longer defined by ones territory, and that’s OK – but when the corporation becomes more important then those that it is meant to serve you kind of think the game is up. Watters expands his thinking in Crazy Like US. Laurence Kirmayer wrote

The clinical presentation of depression and anxiety is a function not only of patients’ ethnocultural backgrounds, but of the structure of the healthcare system they find themselves in and the diagnostic categories and concepts they encounter in mass media and in dialogue with family, friends and clinicians,” Kirmayer wrote later in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

In other words, there is a great deal here about the context of identity, in relation to the culture one lives in etc., All a bit of a pain in the backside when all one wants to do is shift vary large quantities of something. Watters tells to the story of how the pharmaceutical giant GSK redefined mental health issues in Japan to sell its drug Paroxetine. The result, as reported by Watters and Kirmayer was,

“What I was witnessing was a multinational pharmaceutical corporation working hard to redefine narratives about mental health,” Kirmayer said. “These changes have far-reaching effects, informing the cultural conceptions of personhood and how people conduct their everyday lives. And this is happening on a global scale. These companies are upending long-held cultural beliefs about the meaning of illness and healing.”

Now is that a good thing? As we have witnessed when people are cut adrift from culture (here) and (here) that they can identify with, when they face a world in which they are unsure and uncertain – terrible things can happen, as people struggle to make sense of a world in which they are fearful. For example until postmodern times, we dealt with problems that had their origins in relation to the other or the outside in a concrete way and in imagination problems tended to come from people with psychosis or personality disorders. A friend of mine, a clinical psychologist, says, we are still getting those problems but what has changed for some people are the triggers to illness, in so much as people who do not have a strong inner sense of self tend to feel more fragmented more easily and the idea of self construction is very threatening to these types of people. She goes on

These people seem to need more direct human contact to help them to define themselves and years ago would have been defined and lived within the confines of their families, villages, social classes or friends, with daily personal interaction reinforcing that. So, for instance, we see a lot of phobias and depressions, particularly problems such as social phobia that are linked to this fearfulness of how to be in the world and whether one is acceptable or not.

So I wonder what makes it a good idea to help other cultures be more like us – its appears that we have enough problems of our own?

Also on the bench are

Professor Michael Solomon: Michael will be flying in from Philadelphia where he is the Professor of Marketing and Director of the Center for Consumer Research in the Haub School of Business at Saint Joseph’s University.

Dr Alex Gordon: Alex is a cultural detective and semiotician, part time poker player, Canvas8 Thought Leader, lecturer and Managing Director of branding and semiotics consultancy Sign Salad. Alex has a PhD in Semiotics and Identity Politics.

My presentation will deal with why so many companies struggle with truly understanding the challenges they face in the networked society – more stuff here if you want a deeper dive

And here is a short film that explains what this all means to me…

What are the lessons for business and brands in the networked society? and here and a cautionary tale

From Interruption to Engagement – the journey to truly engaging in the networked world from Alan Moore on Vimeo.

For over 150 years our economies, culture and society have been shaped by astraight-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 organisations have co-evolved over the last 150 years.

This creates a dilemma. And the dilemma is this ­ How can firms and the people that work in those firms, develop coherent marketing strategies/products and services that are premised upon No-Straight-Line principles ­ when they have been versed only in Straight-Line thinking ­ at
least for the over 35¹s ­ from birth? So 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.

And to bring some sharper focus to what we do here is a film made by the Dutch Think Tank Freedom Lab that explores the central themes of my current research.

The basic outline is this… “I needs we, to truly be I,” wrote Carl Jung, and that is why we as a species are on a quest to rediscover our role in society. Humanity, deconstructed, over the last 150 years, to the point of deconstruction is now deploying communication technologies to regain its true identity. The rise of the networked society is no accident, and a new philosophy is needed to help us with our quest. The core areas are these:

1. System breakdown: We are witness to a structural and transformational change in society.

2. The wholesale pursuit of material wealth has in fact come at a terrible cost for society

3. Threat: the current unsustainability of humanity

4. The true nature of humans and the technology of man: their intimate relationship

5. Liberation Day: We need to examine the various solutions and tools that can enable us to thrive and survive, to take back that which makes us whole as people, individually and collectively.

6. Simplexity: The digital and highly networked world seems to have created a more complex way of living. We need to learn to deal with this complexity, by understanding how it works.

7. Deschoolling: Our imperative is to de-school ourselves in a philosophy that has driven us into a cultural, ideological and economic cul-de-sac.

8. New Philosophy: We need a new language to help us understand the deep context of the change we are in

9. The no straight line universe: We need to explore its shape we need to feel it; physically, intellectually, and emotionally

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.

Here’s mine

Loneliness by John T.Cacioppo & William Patrick

Two cornerstones of classic economic theory are the assumptions that individuals are rational decision makers and individuals have purely self-regarding preferences.  These assumptions fly in the face of most psychological theories, where individuals are depicted as characterized by bounded rationality if not also by bounded self-interests.

writes John T. Cacioppo

One of the themes of my current thinking is that one of the reasons we are driving technology hard towards products and tools that amplify human talents for cooperation is because we desperately seek meaning and identity in a world that forces us to quest for identity and meaning. Social isolation can be as harmful to your health as smoking or a sedentary lifestyle. A large part of this effect is driven by the subjective sense of social isolation called loneliness. New research shows that human beings are simply far more intertwined and interdependent—physiologically as well as psychologically—than our cultural prejudices have allowed us to acknowledge.

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

In Loneliness, human nature and the need for social connection by Cacioppo and Patrick, we get a psychological insight which underpins discussions and thoughts around collaboration and co-creation. I explored this area a little in The issue of self-identity in a post modern world. And here

Once again, we see why human beings do not thrive as the “existential cowboys” that so much modern thought celebrates. While it may be literally true that “we are born alone” and that “we die alone,” connection not only help us to make us who we are in evolutionary terms it helps determine who we become as individuals. I both cases, human connections, mental health, psychological health, and emotional well-being are all inextricably linked.

One of the most terrible things we can do to people is to exclude them from society. The ultimate punishment in prison is solitary confinement. A term we used to use in the UK but so much any more was social ostracism which was described as “being sent to Coventry”.

Dorothy Day wrote that we have all known the long loneliness, and we have learned that the only solution is love, and that love comes with community.

Dorothy Day

Looking more deeply at the invisible forces that link one human being to another helps us see something even more profound: our brains and bodies are designed to function in aggregates, not in isolation. That is the essence of an obligatory gregarious species. The attempt to function in denial of our need for others, whether that need is great or small in any given individual, violates our design specifications. The effects on health are warning signs, similar to the “Check Engine” light that comes on in today’s cars with their comptuerised sensors. But social connection is not jusy a lubricant that like motor oil, prevents overheating and wear. Social connection is a fundamental part of the human operating and organising system itself.

This research affirms for me the theory that we are evolving our world into one that more reflects human nature. This is a world that defies the logic of the industrial society. And reinterprets it as one that brings more meaning to our lives.

The shift is already remaking the computer industry, bringing new competitors like Google and Salesforce.com to the fore and threatening stalwarts like Microsoft and Dell. But the effects will reach much further. Cheap, utility-supplied computing will ultimately change society as profoundly as cheap electricity did. We can already see the early effects — in the shift of control over media from institutions to individuals, in debates over the value of privacy, in the export of the jobs of knowledge workers, even in the growing concentration of wealth. As information utilities expand, the changes will only broaden, and their pace will only accelerate.

writes Nicholas Carr in his book the Big Switch

John Naughton writes

Google Trends reveals that ‘cloud computing’ first starts to figure in queries in 2007. Interest grew slowly until April this year, when Salesforce.com announced a deal with Google. There’s another peak in July, when Yahoo, Intel and HP announced they were collaborating with several universities to set up cloud computing labs. This week’s news from Amazon will doubtless produce an even bigger spike in Google searches by people wondering what’s going on.

he adds

Google Trends reveals that ‘cloud computing’ first starts to figure in queries in 2007. Interest grew slowly until April this year, when Salesforce.com announced a deal with Google. There’s another peak in July, when Yahoo, Intel and HP announced they were collaborating with several universities to set up cloud computing labs. This week’s news from Amazon will doubtless produce an even bigger spike in Google searches by people wondering what’s going on.

Why is this so important? Because,

Carrs analogy is that of electricity generation: once, most companies had their own generators; now they buy electricity from big utilities. Computing, he says, is heading in the same direction, and for many of the same reasons. By using infrastructure as a service, basic IT costs are moved from a capital expense to a variable cost, building clearer relationships between expenditures and revenue-generating activities.’

Irving Wladawsky-Berger is Chairman Emeritus of the IBM Academy of Technology. He Presented his theory on cloud computing

In my own presentation, following Nick Carr, I also framed cloud computing in sort of historical terms. First, I think of what is going on with IT as a kind of Cambrian Explosion, which is the period over 500 million years ago when the rate of evolution accelerated by an order of magnitude, giving rise to both more complex animals and a far greater diversity of organisms. This was at least partly due to the fact that the cell had been perfected and standardized over the preceding billion years, so evolution could now focus its energies in using these essentially commoditized cells in far more complex and diverse ways.

Looking at the Cambrian Explosion as a metaphor, we can think of digital components as following the path of cells in biology. In its first few decades, the IT industry spent a considerable fraction of its energies developing the basic components. But now that they are essentially standardized, commoditized and good enough for most purposes, we are seeing both the emergence of massively scalable systems—i.e., cloud data centers

Naughton comments

The Cambrian period triggered a staggering increase in the pace of evolutionary development, as measured by the rate at which species appeared and disappeared. For some of our most established IT companies, Vogels’s cloud may have a darker lining than they expect.

Dave mentions Reed's Law – the law of group forming networks. Another thought that has crossed my mind is that there is a great deal of discussion around self-serving advertising engines, again this is the start of how the role of commercial messaging will evolve in this social interactive media ecology. In my view open api's and widgets, being used within the context of Reeds Law – defines a new paradigm of marketing, communication and commerce.

For example David asks

Who gets to create content?
Any and everyone
Who gets to distribute content?
Any and everyone
Who controls the user experience?
The user is the destination now, they control their ownA-to-anywhere journey

And, in (social) networks the broadcast message doesn’t arrive because are already looking at, and pointing to and, talking to each other.

Different model see to a captive audience – They aren’t your groups, they are theirs. They aren’t your messages, they are theirs. Marketing is not done to them, it is done by them.

And yet we are still trying to stuff the same old furniture of advertising into a completely different model of communication.