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.

We have seen some progress with Data.gov and the UK’s open data project, and extending this to other important data sets, such as mapping data in the UK, is vital work that must continue. We have also seen a number of good participation projects that show the potential for involving people in co-design of services, sense making and decision making. We also have the excellent example of Social Innovation Camp and 4IP that show how people can come together to find innovative solutions to social problems, or just make better public services; and, of course, we have the example of mySociety, who have produced some ground-breaking projects that open up previously invisible data or processes in meaningful ways.

From Euan’s post about Johnnie Moore’s post

TV the culture hearth of the family home?

If found this post over at Russell Davies’s gaff online. Russell has such a lovely turn of phrase dontchya think? Although as someone also said to me. ‘sometimes Alan being right is not necessarily the right thing to be’.

Russell writes

If / when telly people complain that their industry was blind-sided by the internet/interactivity I think it might be fair to point out that this was made in 1990. And that it was shown – ON THE TELLY. Or would that be mean?

Did someone cough the word, ‘hubris’?

We say: Why use your TV to watch repetitive drivel when you can plug your PlayStation into it instead? Whilst you confide in your friend that your TiVo thinks your gay. And someone has to go down the hall to the ‘Grand Fromage’ to tell him that TV advertising is the equivalent of the silent movies of the 21st Century.

In the future of television, we get a vision of well, the future,

To begin, the trend toward larger and larger televisions will continue as screens double in size every 18 months. Televisions will eventually grow so large that families will be forced to watch TV from outside their homes, peering in through the window. Random wolf attacks will make viewing more dangerous. And, just as televisions grow larger and more complicated, so will remote controls. In fact, changing channels will soon require people to literally jump from button to button. Trying to change the channel while simultaneously lowering the volume will require two people and will frequently lead to kinky sex.

SMLXL archives on Television

But in case you have not heard of SMM09 – this is what is does….

The future of marketing is the quality of the conversation between people

Monitoring Social Media 09 will bring together leading brands, Social Media Monitoring experts and suppliers with PR & marketing professionals for a one-day conference in London on 17th November 2009. The first event of its kind in Europe, MSM 09 offers attendees a series of high-value talks, panel sessions and debates, with contributions from leading digital agencies and brands.With the additions of Philp Sheldrake and Asi Sharabi, this looks  like a great line up of speakers.

Whose it for?

1. Digital PR and marketing executives
2. Social media monitoring suppliers & experts
3. Researchers & academics
4. Press and bloggers

If you are interested in getting a 10% discount email me via the smlxl contact form.

I am going to be talking about data: Refined Social Data Changes Everything You Ever Thought About Marketing

Stowe Boyd wrote today about his discomfort with the phrase Enterprise 2.0 and his preference for “social business” as a way of describing the changes we are seeing currently. While I understand Andrew McAfee’s thinking when he came up with the phrase I’m with Stowe – it’s too narrow, too corporate and too managerial!

And he goes onto say,

During a recent series of events for the Telegraph Business Club I felt mild disappointment when an economist claimed the recession was about to end. I explained this feeling to the audience in terms of regretting that too many people will assume that this means a return business as usual. Too many will simply carry on as they did before with the same attitudes that got us into a mess in the first place. Not enough people have felt uncomfortable for long enough to bring about real change.

Why do I believe this? Because I believe there is a fundamental change in how we do business heading our way. Driven by the networked communication tools flourishing on the web, tools like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, not only how we communicate with those who benefit from our services but also how we organise ourselves to produce them will be changed forever.

It all sounds so dramatic, yet the evidence that this is the case. My view based upon the work I call No Straight Lines is paraphrased like this,

We are witnesses to a structural and transformational change in society, what many describe as the toxic tail end of our industrial, mass consumer, mass media era. The tragic legacy of the last 150 years is that humanity has been thin sliced and deconstructed almost to the point of destruction. Human beings have become little more than individual units of capitalism – human cogs secured in place and time whilst serving the feudal needs of the company, occasionally spiritually released through shopping, Christmas and the summer vacation.

We eke out our existence under the industrial tyrannical twins of; the obsession with numbers, and the measurement of efficiency in every walk of life, whilst ignoring the fundamental needs of humanity. Plus, an unfettered pursuit of material wealth over any other value has in fact come at a terrible cost for society, the recent banking/financial crisis, a poster child for the decades of institutionalized abuse that has deeply damaged us, spiritually and ironically for many materially.

Unfortunately; meaning, passions, interests and socialising are things for your free-time not your work-time. Worse, we as a species are cut adrift from a personal and collective sense of belonging, identity and community. The atomization of society has literally left billions of us trapped; individual atoms in a no-mans land as noisy ghosts in the machine called life. Loneliness and the loss of identity are the incubators of fundamentalism in all its myriad hues. As we all are the component parts of a complex system, if we are sick, then the system becomes sick. The patient is in my view in intensive care. This is not a recent phenomenon the first consumer group was formed in 1899 to fight for rights against what people saw as industrial and commercial muscle riding rough shod over the fundamental needs of everyday people. And Henry Candy wrote in 1926,

What we are encountering is a panicky, an almost hysterical attempt to escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life… and the prime cause is not vanity… but the craving of people who feel their personality sinking lower and lower in the whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in a mass civilisation.

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.

Euan goes onto say

To quote David Weinberger, one of the authors of The Cluetrain Manifesto, “conversations can only take place between equals”. This is to say that, at the point of the conversation taking place, both parties have to be willing to stand on an equal footing and be prepared to listen to each other as much as to open up and communicate. Even if one party is the chief executive and the other a new secretary, or one is a large multi nation corporation’s communications team and the other is a customer who had the temerity to complain – if, for the purposes of the conversation, they aren’t prepared to accord each other equal respect, then it is not a conversation but one party talking at another.

Now we are obsessed with BIG, big media likes big business, but lets get some perspective. 80% of the GDP of this country comes from SME’S, even though big media likes to focus on ‘big business’, and ‘big things’. The reality is that the engine room of growth in the UK are the SME’s. They are more likely to want to have a more conversational and to be hinest cheaper and more direct relationship with their customers. Zappo’s insist very member of its company is on twitter – to become part of the permeable human interface in a distributed economic network.

And this communications revolution is about people, its not about organisations. Personally, the term, ‘social media’ makes me gag, like Enterprise 2.0 seems to have the same physiological effect on Stowe and Euan. Social Media, is BIG media’s effort in wanting to cosy up to the communications revolution because it threatens their very existence.

Don’t believe me ask ITV, and the Observer. And behind closed doors many big media groups will admit they are staring down at the abyss.

Euan’s perspective is this on this topic

In a world where the boundaries between an organisation and its customers are blurring the best advocates for your business, believe it or not, are very often your own staff or experts. If you are able to allow and encourage those who work for you to engage with your clients or customers then you are much more likely to engender the direct, person-to-person, conversations, that will make you so much more effective in the online world. This isn’t to say that you just suddenly unleash untutored and unskilled bloggers wild onto the Internet. In fact it is not in your staff’s interests to be placed in such a vulnerable position. Work with them to determine what sort of guidance they might need, what sort of policies may be appropriate, and how to give them the skills to communicate effectively on your behalf.

Euan brings so much common sense to an important but sadly over hyped terminology.

Two blog networks had seen revenues up 20% and 45% respectively, since the beginning of the year.

Insight:

Meanwhile, advertising revenue for magazines dropped 21 percent in the first half, and the number of ad pages sold dropped 28 percent, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.

The blog networks that have survived the downturn in advertising and the explosion of competing content on the Web credit their obsessive coverage of narrow topics, along with business models that reach beyond advertising.

Relevant, contextual and timely.

There is much to recommend this post, but the end is perhaps the most important

“Perpetual movement is the essence of survival and prosperity online,” said Michael Moritz, the Sequoia investor who backed Google, Yahoo and Sugar. “If online media and entertainment companies don’t improve every day, they will just wind up as the newfangled version of Reader’s Digest — bankrupt.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/naum/1639496461/

Ooooooooooph

Via the FutureGov network

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.

In this exclusive interview, social media expert Euan Semple breaks social media down into easy to understand terms and explains not only why every business should at least have a look at social media but also how they can make a start without the need of employing expensive agencies and IT professionals.

Euan explains how most companies are starting to feel pressured to jump head first into social media because everyone is talking about it, although it would be imperative for most businesses to at least investigate social media, throwing too much at it isn’t necessarily going to help.

This links into our co-joined effort to develop a course that really enables people, companies and organisations to understand the context and the needs of how one does business in the networked society. Something we are currently developing with a number of business schools.

You can book your place here