Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For 30 years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth.

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatisation and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all the rhetoric which accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.

Indeed, this is a point of view that I share (here) and (here) and (here), in fact I have written a book about it (video) – Judt’s article goes onto examine the role of the state in the context its enthrallment with all things market driven. And yet we are told whoever comes into power in the UK slash and burn of core pubic sector services is inevitable. And of course this will be done in a manner redolent of the industrial age.

Yet – a networked approach to solving problems can help re-frame our world vision – providing new solutions to once seemingly age old and intractable problems.

From an automotive perspective we have the story of Local Motors, from a humanitarian perspective there is Ushahidi, from our own backyard the story of Microfinancing in London, and in terms or orgnisation of labour there is txtEagle. Of Ushahidi, the New York Times writes

Ushahidi, which has become a hero of the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes and which may have something larger to tell us about the future of humanitarianism, innovation and the nature of what we label as truth.

Ushahidi also represents a new frontier of innovation. Silicon Valley has been the reigning paradigm of innovation, with its universities, financiers, mentors, immigrants and robust patents. Ushahidi comes from another world, in which entrepreneurship is born of hardship and innovators focus on doing more with less, rather than on selling you new and improved stuff.

Because Ushahidi originated in crisis, no one tried to patent and monopolize it. Because Kenya is poor, with computers out of reach for many, Ushahidi made its system work on cellphones. Because Ushahidi had no venture-capital backing, it used open-source software and was thus free to let others remix its tool for new projects.

Ushahidi remixes have been used in India to monitor elections; in Africa to report medicine shortages; in the Middle East to collect reports of wartime violence; and in Washington, D.C., where The Washington Post partnered to build a site to map road blockages and the location of available snowplows and blowers.

On top of that I would add, entrepreneurship, regional development and sustainability. Lightweight, flexible and adaptive systems that can work at velocities that are unprecedented, and where sociability is embedded into the very fabric of the process. Where in the case of Local Motors, cars are developed in half the time and 100x less the capital cost. And of the Micro finance scheme,

Nearly 10 years ago, armed with a degree in geography and a credit card, Faisel Rahman, a slight and softly spoken man now 34, had a big idea: he decided he would open his own bank in the East End of London. The idea, he says now, was really a response to a puzzle: why was it that the poorest people in Britain – the people most in need of some financial assistance, most in need of fair rates of interest – were also the people who were denied access to bank accounts?

Closed minds in closed systems of course said what worked in poor countries could not work in the UK – because we were not poor! Well that is not entirely true is it. This is a land where people at the edges of society that banks deem untouchable, can only get finance for loan sharks or money lenders at rates between 600 to 2500%.

Rahman spent a lot of time talking his idea through with people in the financial industry. He was told that microfinance might work in the developing world but it would never work here. That the poor would not save. That bad debtors would never become prompt repayers. That he could never develop the idea at scale. In the face of this scepticism Rahman obtained a grant for a few thousand pounds from the overdraft of a charitable trust and secured it against his credit card. He then opened the doors of Fair Finance to Business.

Not only has Rahman help people get out of debt, he has help entrepreneurs start businesses that otherwise would have been impossible. And in fact is expanding his business to 8 to 10 more sites in London. John Thackara writing In the Bubble: designing for a complex world, describes how we have created a ‘heavy world’, both materially and psychologically. It’s an ideology that is so powerful and all consuming that we fail to see or comprehend it. A little like a recent local government “expert”, that sneered at my hard won knowledge and perspective, because I did not come from his world. I exaggerate, only slightly. So lets see who else we can learn from…

Nathan Eagle who founded txteagle said,

There are over 2 billion literate, mobile phone subscribers in the developing world, many living on less than $5 a day. Corporations pay people to accomplish billions of image, audio and text-based tasks. txteagle enables these tasks to be completed via the mobile phone by people around the globe.

No Straight Line thinking is concerned with understanding and comprehending – to be able to better apply that knowledge in real world situations. To me, Local Motors, Ushahidi, Fair Finance to Business and txteagle come from a perspective that is non-linear, and understands through necessity, to seek viable and workable solutions to complex real world problems. For example, Rahman is interested in finding practical solutions. Along with other lobbyists he has recently been in talks with the Treasury about ways in which the “contract between banks and the community can be renewed”, and in which the privations and anxieties of financial exclusion can be avoided. What if we took Nathan’s txteagle capability and used that in the UK – where we have a mobile penetration rate of 120%, where many live on the £39.50 job seekers allowance, locked into a life of poverty, poor physical and mental health. So, these people could be earning maybe a little more, as a distributed workforce in ways previously thought impossible. With the tantalising prospect of a life better lived? As the Boston Globe (smlxl – the future of work) pointed out,

The jobs – short stretches of speech to be transcribed or translated into a local dialect, search engine results to be checked, images to be labeled, short market research surveys to be completed – come in over a worker’s own cellphone and the worker responds either by speaking into the phone or texting back the answer. The workers can be anyone with a cellphone – a secretary waiting for a bus, a Masai tribesman herding cattle, a student between classes, a security guard on a slow day, or one of Kenya’s tens of millions of unemployed.

At the core of every one of these examples is people, how people are, how they work, how trust is built and repaid in loyalty. Not the cold glint of an industrial process or linear thinking. Our tyrannical obsession with efficiency, a false god, over effectiveness is a deep flaw in this heavy world, that weighs us down. Judt writes about the sell off of public utilities in Britain, eviscerating the state’s responsibilities and capacities, as I think the belief was they would perform better,

What we have been watching is the steady shift of public responsibility on to the private sector to no discernible collective advantage. Contrary to economic theory and popular myth, privatisation is inefficient. Most of the things that governments have seen fit to pass into the private sector were operating at a loss: whether they were railway companies, coal mines, postal services, or energy utilities, they cost more to provide and maintain than they could ever hope to attract in revenue. For just this reason, such public goods were inherently unattractive to private buyers unless offered at a steep discount. But when the state sells cheap, the public takes a loss. It has been calculated that, in the course of the Thatcher-era UK privatisations, the deliberately low price at which longstanding public assets were marketed to the private sector resulted in a net transfer of £14bn from the taxpaying public to stockholders and other investors.

So when it comes to planning what to cut, slash and tax to pay our huge debt, at a moment when economically Britain has to be punching above its weight, we could learn from these people, these organisations and companies that have shown us how we can do things better, quicker, smarter and more effectively and more humanely – often without the huge sums required when the industrial machine comes into play.

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.

The historic drop resulted from a worsening economy that sharply exacerbated long-term challenges already confronting the newspaper industry, and it affected all kinds of newspaper ads. National ad sales fell 18.4%, classifieds sank 30.9%, and the biggest category, retail, slid 11.7%. Newspapers’ online ad sales, where everyone is hoping some part of the future business model resides, accelerated their decline with a 3% drop. Online ad sales slipped 2.4% in the second quarter.

Reports Adage – Read more on Newspaper and economics

I predict we will see newspapers fail, the economic downturn is the final scene in this play. However, what newspapers have not done, nor most media, is to understand that in a networked society, the currency of advertising has to evolve, that offers more perceived value to both its recipients and its creators. An information ecology and economy judges information on its contextual relevancy, its timeliness and its ability to enable decisions and transactions to be made. Unfortunately, few have been able to grasp this completely and be able to deliver the type of value that signals the potential of survival as the gales of creative destruction whirl around us. The Link Economy is different to the Controlled Content Economy. We need a new logic and common sense and only then can we comprehend this miscellaneous world.

There are many people, companies, striving to make sense of the networked world from a commercial perspective – this started right back in time when Murdoch bought myspace – but many still struggle with how – and there is a very obvious reason for this – the traditional inventory is mostly inapproriate in a social media space.

As the Chief Editor and Publisher, Jason Pontin of MIT Technology Review – said of Xtract

You are solving the billion dollar most burning question, and, this is the most comprehensive solution for social media advertising I have seen. When I see something like your presentation, I feel it makes sense to travel a long way to this kind event

So I suggest that it would be worth downloading the paper to get a better insight into how advertising works in the world of the Networked Society

As we asked the question a while ago Do you want 6 feet of junk mail or a 29% response rate?

Wikipedia notes

Quadir?s vision, which was deemed radical at the time, was to create universal access to telephone service in Bangladesh and to increase self-employment opportunities for its rural poor. In 1993, Quadir started a New York-based company named Gonofone (Bengali for ?phones for the masses?), which later became the launch-pad for GrameenPhone . Currently the largest telephone company in Bangladesh with nearly sixteen million subscribers, GrameenPhone provides telephone access to more than 100 million rural people living in 60,000 villages and generates revenues close to $1 billion annually. With infrastructure investments of more than $1 billion, GrameenPhone is providing cellular coverage throughout Bangladesh.

Kelly writes

In 1993 when Quadir began, Bangladesh had one of the lowest penetrations of telephones on the planet — only one phone for every 500 people. GrameenPhone project unleashed 25 million phones. Today there are 100 times as many phones, or one per 5 people. Just as Quadir had envisioned, this decentralized connectivity has increased productivity. Without connectivity people waste a lot more time on economic errands. With cell connectivity farmers maximize their profits by getting real-time prices at distant markets; shepherds can call a vet, or order medicine. One study concluded that the total lifetime cost of an additional phone (including the cell tower and switching gear) was about $2,000, but that each phone enabled $50,000 of increased productivity. And surprisingly, the poorer the country to begin with, the greater the increase in wealth from connectivity.

Iqbal is currently investigating whether energy can also be dethroned from its current mode of extremely centralized generation.

And on this blog all 400,000 words of it, relates to the centrality of networks, social engagement and how that is shaping and changing our world. And why we need to comprehend the principles of: trust, co-operation, sharing, co-creation et al are still the basic tenets of successful societies.

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.

Said the economist Herbert Simon who developed a theory called Attention Economics

Simon noted that many designers of information systems incorrectly represented their design problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result they built systems that excelled at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information.

This came to mind whilst reading a story in the Guardian entitled Why we buy what we buy

Dan Ariely [is - sic] one of an increasingly influential group of behavioural economists, who analyse how people behave everywhere from supermarkets to stock markets – and they have found a chasm between what traditional economists and regulators presume we do, and what really happens. One of the most exciting areas of research, behavioural economics could overturn many of the assumptions and assertions that shape modern policy-making.

For the past century, economists have viewed the economy as an equilibrium system made up of perfectly rational agents with access to full information, who produce and consume goods and services in economies with optimally efficient markets and institutions

Eric Beinhocker in his book the Origin of Wealth adds to this new area of economics

Beinhocker argues that neoclassical economics is fundamentally flawed, has a poor record of empirical validation, and that the strong assumptions the theory requires serve to make economics of less relevance to real world issues than the field otherwise might be. Beinhocker claims that neoclassical theory is in the process of being supplanted by what he calls complexity economics – the view that the economy is a complex adaptive system made up of realistically rational agents who dynamically interact with each other in an evolutionary system . Complexity economics is in turn built on foundations of a long-standing tradition of heterodox economics that includes areas such as behavioral economics, institutional economics, Austrian economics, and evolutionary economics.

Back to the Guardian story

“Economists know all about choosing jam,” he says, ambling down an aisle with 73 varieties. He describes an experiment where academics set up a tasting booth in a store in California. On some days they put out six kinds of jam, on others 24. When the booth had 24 types, it was mobbed – “there was more colour, more excitement”. But it was the sales that were truly remarkable: with six jams on show, 30% of customers bought a jar; when 24 were out, only 3% did. “Jams are hardly complex things, but people saw 24 stacked together and thought: ‘I have no idea how to deal with this.’”

If that is how choosing between strawberry or plum makes us feel, imagine the toll looking at mortgage options takes on the nerves. What Ariely’s jam study suggests is that, contrary to economic belief that more choice is better, confronted with too much complexity, we make bad decisions, or stick with what we have already got.

Structural or mental inferiority did not drive the dinosaurs to extinction. They were doing well, and showing no sign of ceding domination, right until the extraterrestrial debacle unleashed a set of sudden consequences (as yet to be adequately specified, although the ‘nuclear winter’ scenario of a cold dark world has beem proposed for the same reasons). Some mammals weathered the storm; no dinosaurs did.

I refer to the regional press and the Johnston Press

Johnston Press, the regional newspaper group whose titles include The Scotsman and the Yorkshire Post, resorted to a ?212.3m emergency fund raising yesterday that will see the group’s founding family lose its place as the largest shareholder for the first time.

and

Under pressure from digital competitors and the slowing economy, the group’s ?692m debt was proving unsustainable against underlying earnings projections for the year of just ?185m

The problem in my humble view is that the Johnston Press failed to innovate at the time it really needed to do so in preparation for the challenges it faces today. Now that may be inevitable – but if you look at the Guardian it has grasped the digital challenge and really investigated the opportunities of social media, digital technology and global audiences.

Perhaps I am wrong. But as we all know – digital is not analogue – display advertising is furniture of the analogue era – we have the opportunity to recreate something very different more valuable and different as a currency to the end user : more valuable information.

Now I also know that we have a very backwards view of how to count media, which is currently undergoing review

Life is local say the Johnston Press and my consulting company SMLXL has been thinking about this space for some time yet that means taking that sentiment seriously. But JP is not taking this seriously.

Yesterday I mused on some of the discussions we had about TV at the conference in Monaco these were :

What is the new business model for TV advertising?

1). Brands have to be everywhere
2). Cross platform assets
3). Brands need to become part of the daily fabric of people?s lives
4). All content should be inspired by brands wishing to meaningfully engage with their audience

Frankly however I could see this working for local news platforms.

Nick Davies in his book Flat Earth News excoriates the owners of newspapers (describing them as Grocers)because their interest is not about being local, its not about community, its not about quality journalism is about one thing and one thing only – MONEY – PROFIT AND SHAREHOLDER RETURN.

And thats all well and good until the quality of the product is so inferior it devalues itself.

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

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

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

In a major piece of research with Cardiff University on journalism and commerce

Professor Franklin found that hundreds of them (local papers) were simply killed off, their town-centre offices often sold for profit. In the ten years after Wapping, according to the Newspaper Society, 403 local titles were closed – 24% of the 1,687 which had been supplying news to their areas and to the nationals. Those tha survived saw their staffing cut to the bone with just over half of the 8,000 journalists working in the provinces losing their jobs between 1986 and 2000; some local newsrooms were replaced by regional hubs, cut off from their communities ; and senior reporters were replaced with low-paid trainees. With rare exceptions, these papers were reduced to mere churnalism of the kind described in the young reporters diary

And

In 2004 Johnston press which had been among the most destructive of the new owners, declared a profit of ?177 million, a profit margin of 35%

In the story about Johnston Press what I think is so sad is an inability to be prepared to move from the world of Gutenberg to the world of Google.

What I do know is that JP is selling digital advertising in the same way one sells analogue dispaly advertising. To do so is to be doomed. Today I went and had a look at the advertising inventory of a vertical community site. These are smart people having worked out an entirely different inventory = value for advertisers.

Are the Digital Vikings coming?
ITV Local could in fact cannibalise the entire regional display advertising market. The Future of news is: Grassroots, Mobile, Immediate, Visual, Participatory, Trusted. On top of that it creates an entirely new inventory and services for advertisers, and also gives new value to the JP’s readers. Delivered via the internet and mobile.

ITV local has the potential – it could create a richer user experience it – could be more participatory (People embrace what they create) and as a consequence they could truly embrace the concept of “life is local.”

We break down the division between community and commerce in a way that is relevant to both parties. This builds commerce and this builds community. It is not rocket science, but it is about looking at the world in a different way.

Markets form around 3 things
1). Commerce
2). Knowledge & information exchange
3). Entertainment

This is the glue of community and social cohesion and ITV local could really leverage this opportunity.

The race to monetize and leverage the power of social networks is turning into a stampede, as evidenced by Microsoft?s recently renewed efforts to acquire Facebook in the wake of its failed bid for Yahoo.Many of the biggest and most intriguing niche social networks are in play as a result of the Microsoft-Yahoo merger battle, which is fundamentally about potentially lucrative but unrealized advertising and e-commerce gains. Both companies have limited exposure to social networking?the most prominent being Microsoft?s 1.6% stake in Facebook, for which it paid $240 million.

And

The mighty Google has brought a new sense of urgency to the social-network mining game by leveraging the iGoogle home page into a convenient aggregation of user-selected links to social sites and friends? personal pages.

Think about this 25% of all media will be created by us in 2012. So will we have consumer created advertising too?

Consumer-created advertising will have all the appeal of anything crafted by the agencies, and will be ?co-opted? by the brands themselves.

Mermigas has a point of view on this

The lessons learned about how to make online social networks more constructive and profitable will have far-reaching ramifications for all digital media?s community-driven business?from the players of ?Grand Auto Theft IV? to the kids and families of Walt Disney to the Dow Jones business constituency. Eventually, the economics of most Web sites will be secured by social networking and community elements. If the business minds don?t crack the monetization codes, chances are that tech-empowered consumers will.

Ning, a do-it-yourself social network company already valued at $500 million, has aided the development of more than 100,000 social network sites. That?s the beauty of the digital interactive age: The answers lie within

So what does that mean for traditional media? and this debate hardly touches mobile yet and we did ask whether traditional TV advertising was moving the deck chairs on the Titanic and we did post about the data flow wars because when we leave digital footprints in the digital age, we can recount the audience, we can develop universal profiles and certain companies will transform advertising effectiveness by harnessing a refining digital shadows and that data flows that will reach 988 billion gb’s by 2010 from 161 gb’s in 2006. Social networks play a key role in this development and this is a battle between the experts and the amateurs?

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Professor Henry Jenkins of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT articulates a world in which young people have a very different relationship with media consumption. This is the migration from consumption as an individual practice to consumption as a networked practice – which I might add is voluntary. Convergence Jenkins argues is also a culture phenomenon rather than a technological one

Culture Jenkins argues is today Participatory. We create, we share, we collaborate, we consume, we discuss. Henry Jenkins on Obama and the “We” Generation

When people consume and produce media together, when they pool their insights and information, mobilise to promote common interests, and function as grassroots intermediaries ? rather than talking about personal media, perhaps we should be talking about communal media or social commerce that becomes part of our lives as members of communities, whether experienced face-to-face at the most local level or over the Net.

This is an engaged, motivated and self-selected audience. If we accept Jenkins world view, this has profound implications on how we reach out and attract our customers, talk to our suppliers and how we create value. It was Jonathan Schwartz that said our 1000 bloggers at Sun have done more for this company than a $1bn ad campaign could have ever done. This is participatory culture at the coalface. Or we could reference wikipedia, World of Warcraft, Pop Idol, the Matrix, citizen journalism or social commerce platforms like ebay, MyNuMo or Spreadshirt.

Shirky also observes

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society

Shirky says we have been on a bit of a bender recently and are just waking up to the reality that we posses a cognitive surplus – Wikipedia represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus.

Back to Shirky’s 4 year old

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for

An ancient Chinese proverb says: “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.? I like to say “People embrace what they create.”

If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen? And I’m betting the answer is yes.

Maybe the answer looks like this? or this or indeed this

Of course Gutenberg was the first to unleash the flow of knowledge, ideas and communication.

Today the projection looks like this

The unleashing of such data flows are the equivalent to Gutenberg unleashing the first 15million books printed in the first 2o years of the printing press.

So are such data flows going to deliver a new Renaissance?