Communities Dominate Brands Archive

Flow

I was speaking to a good friend of mine earlier this week about the concept of FLOW

It is one of the principles of Engagement

Adam asked me where I had got to with the idea of flow – ? I thought for a while and answered

Flow(s)

Information Flows, Flows of Communication, Flows of Ideas across borders, boundaries and through people.

Those flows at speed, through time and space, Flows of Distribution.

It was curious as one could run a whole workshop on the idea of FLOW – what it means philosophically and then practically. Go here if you want to read more about the psychology of FLOW

I was thinking about the statement that Widgets do this to the Internet – that it changes the nature of what the Internet is, where it’s not a collection of pages, but a collection of information, and of course how that information flows and is distributed via a network effect, cascading and flowing in all directions

Weissbach flowing

So my other friend – yes I have two, announces that…

I made my very own widget last night. It’s very simple, made up of drag and drop elements and click-to-add bits from Sprout. It’s the orange box in the left hand col of my blog; Signature Posts.
I find it useful because it tidies up a bit of my blog and means if (and it’s a big if, I’ll grant) someone wants the 10 posts I currently select as representations of my thinking, they can display it on their own page/space (rather than take my latest which anyone of course can select using rss feeds).

The process of DIY reinforced something very important for me, as it so often does. Just as I learn so much about the simple fact we are all content creators now by writing this blog, so I learn, from first hand experience, that we are all distributors now by creating a widget.

As I often say, don’t just witness the power of the network ? if you want to evolve to survive in this world then you have to live in its environment.

The Age of Unreason in the Age of Networks

I came across this today A book and idea which requires some reflection

anti-rational government is not the product of a Machiavellian plot by ?Washington? but is the inevitable result of ?an overarching crisis of memory and knowledge? that has left many ordinary citizens and their elected representatives without the intellectual tools needed for sound public decision-making. The real question is not why politicians have lied to the public but why the public was so receptive and so passive when it heard the lies. At this crucial political juncture, The Age of American Unreason challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what our descent into intellectual laziness and our flight from reason have cost us as individuals and as a nation.

Its a bold statement -

The author Susan Jacoby appeared on Comedy Central -

Matthew C. Nisbet writing at Framing Science observes….

Jacoby’s appearance on Colbert does prompt the serious question: to what degree do shows such as the Daily Show and The Colbert Report contribute to the age of unreason, with younger viewers displacing traditional news consumption with regular viewing of late night satirical comedy? In other words, can young audiences have their satire and their knowledge too?

Is this true? I don’t know.

But when trust in traditional media is very low – where do you go to get your information? As I understand it blogging went vertical in the US after 911 – when people hungry for information went online. Take the whole issue of VNR’s for example

According to the trade-group Public Relations Society of America, a VNR is the video equivalent of a press release and presents a client’s case in an attractive, informative format. The VNR placement agency seeks to garner media attention for the client’s products, services, brands or other marketing goals. The VNR affords local TV stations free broadcast quality materials for use in reports offered by such stations.

Trust Wiki

Its why OhMyNews in Korea a Citizen Journalism news platform is so powerful – and the underlying point is trust – trust between you and me and trust in the media

So we are in a process of migration

Founded on the premise that “every citizen is a reporter,” OhmyNews is accredited for having a tremendous impact on the news production, distribution and consumption habits of citizens across the world. By promoting an inclusive online forum for news reporting, OhmyNews encourages online global collaboration and features over 40,000 contributing journalists worldwide, generating over one million hits daily. OhmyNews president Oh Yeon Ho reflected on the importance of online social movements, ?Being acknowledged by institutions such as Infosys and Wharton confirms the arrival of citizen journalism as a catalyst to create an egalitarian media.

An egalitarian media.

Mash-ups for the masses: Storming the bastille 2008

Intel wants to make the whole Web editable, just like a single Wikipedia page.

The chip giant on Tuesday will make a beta available of Intel Mash Maker , a free browser extension that allows users to modify Web pages and combine information from different sources. Its first beta works with Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7, though at this point the features are far more mature in Firefox, Intel said.

The product, which originated in Intel’s research labs, is similar to existing mash-up tools like Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly in that it has a graphical design tool.

We’re trying to change the nature of what the Internet is, where it’s not a collection of pages, but a collection of information. And we want to allow users to collaboratively choose how they see that information.

Communities Dominate Brands – Wow.

As the Bachman Turner Overdrive sang you ain’t seen nothing yet

Advertising – social media – google and myspace

How google screwed up the myspace deal proclaims Wired.

Lots of smart people are trying to figure out how to monetize social networks. It’s no easy feat: Even if millions of people log on to Facebook twice a day, they aren’t there to buy sneakers, they’re there to connect with friends.

And thats exactly right.

Google has an agreement with MySpace, which has proven mostly disappointing. Under the deal, Google will serve ads on MySpace through the second quarter 2010. In return for the privilege, it will cumulatively pay the social network $900 million as part of a revenue-share agreement. Here’s the problem: If Google doesn’t make enough money over MySpace to meet the minimum revenue-share requirements, it has dig deep and make those payments, anyway. And thus far, the deal has shaved roughly 1.5 percent off the company’s gross margins, according to estimates from Bernstein Research analyst Jeffrey Lindsay.

So if Google can’t make a buck off social networks, who can?

What this highlights is a number of key and pressing questions.

Firstly – we have a media ecology partially defined by the concept of Collaborative Social Media which has nothing to do with the straight lines of an analogue world, economy, philosophy, how it is measured and how it defines value.

Jeff Jarvis makes some astute points here

Yet the traditional models of what advertising is and how it is measured remain in place for now.

Someone once said that that the challenge in this space is how to make advertising useful?

This leads to the second point that when we say advertising – people think not of commercial communication as a principle but formats, like furniture. So advertising is format defined – TV Spots, Radio Spots, Banners, Posters etc., This points to an inability to see beyond these formats.

Thirdly we need to think about what underpins the future of commercial communications – within the context of Social Media? I have described this as Social Marketing Intelligence. In We’re all loved up but we’re not making any cash. Who will be the first to build a portfolio of next generation marketing communications capability? I wrote

Social Marketing Intelligence is the black gold of the 21st Century – Today we leave digital footprints – and therefore we can recount the audience to a degree of accuracy never before thought possible.

Social Marketing Intelligence is the ability to take large, raw and multiple data flows – refine those data flows to enable organisations to recognise the patterns of social interactions, social network structure, and each individual?s role therein ? such granularity is critical for delivering the appropriate communication to the appropriate audience at the right time.

We go from Cost per Thousands to Cost per Click to Cost Per Relevant Audience. This is defined by delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time. It is a paradigm shift

Tomi explains

This is a total shift in the advertising paradigm. No longer is the perfect ad campaign designed in New York, with the ultimate supermodel (or sports hero) selected as the spokesperson for our brand; now the users themselves select which is their favourite celebrity to be used in the ads. No longer is the brilliant ad graphic designer selecting the absolute most amazing colour shade for given product, whether lipstick or designer suit or Nike sneaker or BMW. No matter how perfect the artistic vision of that graphic designer, there are always more of an audience who have a favoured OTHER colour than the one selected. Now the colours are selected by the consumer of the ads. No longer is the dialogue in the ads produced by a master award-winning copyrighter on Madison Avenue, now it is co-created with the teenagers who are accustomed to mashing, who co-create all the time on social networking sites, and who prefer to write in their cryptic grammr & spellng of txt mssgng.

How close to “0″ does one need to get to before people realise click throughs’ don’t work – someone said to me recently. And why is that? Because Media Can?t Deliver A Captive Audience Anymore. Jarvis writes

But the pity is that ad agencies and stock analysts, reporters, and stock buyers still pay attention to these outmoded measurements and the companies that push them.

Yet we use the same pieces of old furniture to communicate in the this new media ecology, because we can’t see beyond what we see today or how we measure it. What gets measured gets made.

We have accepted social networks and communities have become part of our media landscape, we now need to accept its needs a different model to support it.

The future lies in letting loose the very thing they have spent a large part of the past 20 years trying to suppress – the individual voices of their writers – and recognising that all that the web provides is a platform upon which to compete for the key commodities: attention and trust.

Price Waterhouse Coopers believe that consumer conversations will fundamentally transform business. Change the way you count and you change the way the money flows.

But that’s OK – building a whole new media eco-system is never straight forward.

A new era in marketing and advertising
One combines market segmentation and context with customer behavior and social network profiles, this recognizes consumers as individuals within their communities and networks. The process is dynamic and the system is self-learning. Transforming advertising is not based on search or words, but on customer and community profiles.

What gets served as commercial communication then has to be thought through. We can find and deliver the right audience, so, what type of communication comes next? What is the value? What is the currency of the communication as perceived by the recipient.

On the origin of Social Media and Advertising

Read it here

Though Mark Selby speaking at Forum Oxford today says its not UGC – It is in fact Collaborative Social Media and I buy that.

UGC – for advertisers USER read CONSUMER – faceless and nameless. This will not cut the mustard in the world of conversation and Social Media. And that is why many will fail because they attempt to ram the straight lines of an industrial world into a networked eco-system that is completely different.

Just listen to Richard Rosenblatt explain Social Media goes vertical

People will talk about you whether you like it or not the good the bad and the ugly – so you might as well join the conversation

Fear of the dark

A major obstacle to doing anything new is fear of the unknown. Many advertisers simply aren?t clear on how to go about UGC Social Media advertising, or are unsure of which solution will best ?t their objectives. But advertisers who approach publishers with a desire to get started will ? nd no shortage of eager, accommodating partners

One prevailing method of UGC Social Media advertising is to produce content that borrows the esthetic, the attitude and sometimes the distribution modes of actual UGC. This can be a tricky proposition, one that demands full transparency (i.e., not trying to pass off your content as actual UGC) and respect for the culture of UGC Social Media. But done correctly, it can help brands weave themselves seamlessly into conversations online.

As we wrote in CDB the biggest challenge for brands is to become a part of the social fabric of peoples lives.

How do I reach Jan Chipchase @ Nokia and why is Apple so bad? [2]

I posted on Nokia’s ethnographic research and used a Wired article as an example of 2 different ways of approaching product design

And David Clark commented

Its important to note that Apple doesn’t shun user research or even contextual inquiry/user ethnography. Its just that they do it in secret. The Wired article is correct in asserting that Apple does not open up its process to the world, but good design is good design and these days that can only be done by really understanding your users and what they are trying to do.

I very much appreciate the comment David – as I replied

Thank you for your comment – and I could not agree more. For example with the iPsei bottle we wanted something that would fit in a users hand and be designed for the hand not the production process.

Your comment also points to an inaccuracy through bias in the Wired article by the the subtlety of omission. That you correct.

Sometimes speed to publish is not always the best solution. Though thinking about it – its great to share a view and be challenged almost immediately. Henry Jenkins describes it as collective intelligence. I share, you share knowledge and we end up in a better place as a consequence. With a better world view.

This asks questions about leadership in a world of participatory culture and collective intelligence. Though the evidence is such that it requires a small group or kernal to drive dialogue, production, and change etc., a group of volunteers and then a wider group to build, organise and produce.

I argued passionately recently that Apple work very hard at useability – hence me saying…

However it still took a PC company to turn out one of the most disruptive pieces of handset design and wake up the entire industry. And of course that company was Apple.

Russell Davies belligerently opined recently that Apple doesn’t care what other people think about its products, they do what they think is right – cause that’s leadership. Hmm I was a bit dubious about that.

Yet reflecting on David’s observation, a great deal of thought and effort does go into the customer experience and that goes right down to the stores themselves. At the opening of the Apple store in Cambridge staff clapped customers as they walked into the store on the opening day – who else would do that?

photo credit John Naughton

I was quick to judge in my post and I thank David for pointing out my error of omission.

Perhaps the point then is why has Nokia, with all that insight, not produced something as beautiful to use as the iPhone?

Is that a contradiction from my last post? – perhaps its a point of conversation.

Radio Remix

Radiohead is a band that has given me countless hours of pleasure. At Radio 1 recently – whoever was hosting the show did their own version of Nude a Radiohead song as a remix. here’s he link to remix your own version.

On October 8th we wrote about Radiohead embracing the digital age

More CDB thinking on Music

How do I reach Jan Chipchase @ Nokia and why is Apple so bad?

If you need to reach Jan Chipchase, the best, and sometimes only, way to get him is on his cellphone. The first time I spoke to him last fall, he was at home in his apartment in Tokyo. The next time, he was in Accra, the capital of Ghana, in West Africa. Several weeks after that, he was in Uzbekistan, by way of Tajikistan and China, and in short order he and his phone visited Helsinki, London and Los Angeles. If you decide not to call Jan Chipchase but rather to send e-mail, the odds are fairly good that you?ll get an ?out of office? reply redirecting you back to his cellphone, with a notation about his current time zone ? ?GMT +9? or ?GMT -8?

Writes the New York Times

We need to understand that space and time have been subverted by the digital revolution

The comedian Bill Bailey describes reading Stephen Hawkings? A Brief History of Time. In it Hawking suggests the universe could be 3 possible shapes. These are:

1). Long and thin like a piece of tagliatelle
2). Round like a marble
3). Saddle shaped

Bailey finds it hard to deal with the notion that our universe could be saddle shaped In fact he says that Hawkings should say that the universe is saddle shaped that is strapped t a giant donkey being led up and down an intergalactic beach by God.

The point is that our once familiar analogue world, which we understood no longer exists in our digital universe. As Bailey observed, in the days of Christopher Columbus it was easier to buy a ‘To the edge and back ticket.”

My point is, we don?t know what shape our new digital universe is. We have to learn to navigate and describe it. And that is exactly what Chipchase is doing..

Chipchase has worked for the Finnish cellphone company Nokia as a “human-behavior researcher.” He?s also sometimes referred to as a ?user anthropologist.? To an outsider, the job can seem decidedly oblique. His mission, broadly defined, is to peer into the lives of other people, accumulating as much knowledge as possible about human behavior so that he can feed helpful bits of information back to the company ? to the squads of designers and technologists and marketing people who may never have set foot in a Vietnamese barbershop but who would appreciate it greatly if that barber someday were to buy a Nokia.

Identity and community

A Mississippi bowling alley, he will say, is a social hub, a place rife with nuggets of information about how people communicate. ( here 2 ) A photograph of the contents of a woman?s handbag is more than that; it?s a window on her identity, what she considers essential, the weight she is willing to bear. The prostitute ads in the Brazilian phone booth? Those are just names, probably fake names, coupled with real cellphone numbers ? lending to Chipchase?s theory that in an increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity.

Start with a laugh and work backwards
Bil Bailey is a comedian and he is asked how he comes up with his jokes. Bill says

I start with a laugh and works backwards. What do I need to do to create that about of laughter!! What is the higher order currency we are creating for our endusers?

If that is lost in translation, this means, what is the greatest customer experience you can create and do that in such a way that they want to come back and do it gain and again and again?

And this is what Chipchase is looking for

This sort of on-the-ground intelligence-gathering is central to what?s known as human-centered design, a business-world niche that has become especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to figure out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that people find useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on. Several companies, including Intel, Motorola and Microsoft, employ trained anthropologists to study potential customers, while Nokia?s researchers, including Chipchase, more often have degrees in design. Rather than sending someone like Chipchase to Vietnam or India as an emissary for the company ? loaded with products and pitch lines, as a marketer might be ? the idea is to reverse it, to have Chipchase, a patently good listener, act as an emissary for people like the barber or the shoe-shop owner?s wife, enlightening the company through written reports and PowerPoint presentations on how they live and what they?re likely to need from a cellphone, allowing that to inform its design.

However it still took a PC company to turn out one of the most disruptive pieces of handset design and wake up the entire industry. And of course that company was Apple. In How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong Is the complete antithesis of Chips work and process. Wired explains….

But by deliberately flouting the Google mantra (don’t do evil – sic), Apple has thrived. When Jobs retook the helm in 1997, the company was struggling to survive. Today it has a market cap of $105 billion, placing it ahead of Dell and behind Intel. Its iPod commands 70 percent of the MP3 player market. Four billion songs have been purchased from iTunes. The iPhone is reshaping the entire wireless industry. Even the underdog Mac operating system has begun to nibble into Windows’ once-unassailable dominance; last year, its share of the US market topped 6 percent, more than double its portion in 2003.

It’s hard to see how any of this would have happened had Jobs hewed to the standard touchy-feely philosophies of Silicon Valley. Apple creates must-have products the old-fashioned way: by locking the doors and sweating and bleeding until something emerges perfectly formed. It’s hard to see the Mac OS and the iPhone coming out of the same design-by-committee process that produced Microsoft Vista or Dell’s Pocket DJ music player. Likewise, had Apple opened its iTunes-iPod juggernaut to outside developers, the company would have risked turning its uniquely integrated service into a hodgepodge of independent applications ? kind of like the rest of the Internet, come to think of it.

And now observers, academics, and even some other companies are taking notes. Because while Apple’s tactics may seem like Industrial Revolution relics, they’ve helped the company position itself ahead of its competitors and at the forefront of the tech industry. Sometimes, evil works.

It’s an interesting dilemma – an open and consultative approach to learning and design or one that is more, shall we say – insular. Yet I believe its not one nor the other. Personally coming from a design background – one can identify with a singular vision, and an uncompromising approach to design. Marc Newson is another good example of visionary design brought to the public fore by an individual. SMLXL‘s work with Masterfoods and The Coca Cola Company was delivered by having a very singular idea of making breakthrough products and the brands that wrapped themselves around those propositions. This was the first asymetric designed botle in the entire history of the CocaCola Company. Everyone said including the leading lights in R&D said it could not be done. I begged to differ as I argued it was a fundamental part of the experience and the communication. Had we left it to committee we would have ended up with something a little more prosaic.

An Apple vs. a Nokia approach are a different form of leadership and investigation into technology, products and how that benefits society.

My one beef perhaps is with the Nokia N80. A great little device, which has one flaw – its rubbish at taking pictures in poor and ambient lighting. This is because as I understand it, the Nokia designers wanted a certain kind of design effect which superceded certain issues around optimal photographic performance. Now that is unforgivable. This issue came up whilst I was in Japan recently.

So Apple and Marc Newson give us their unadulterated vision of design. Its uncompromising and its all very very beautiful – Me I worship at the alter of Apple – Nokia well as The New York Times explains…

…the possibilities afforded by a proliferation of cellphones are potentially revolutionary. Today, there are more than 3.3 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide, which means that there are at least three billion people who don?t own cellphones, the bulk of them to be found in Africa and Asia. Even the smallest improvements in efficiency, amplified across those additional three billion people, could reshape the global economy in ways that we are just beginning to understand.

And that is also a very worthy cause and one I also subscribe to. Equally both Newson and Apple appeal not to Nokia’s vision of connecting everyone, or indeed, to better enable people to connect. Scale in terms of Newson and Apple are debatable here. Because It will be a while before we get iPhones being the mainstay of Africa or even people driving around in 021C Cars.

And “The mobile phone is the cheapest object of personal aspiration.”

the global talent war

As our economic environment evolves greater pressure will be applied to where talent goes.

The Economist has an article exploring this issue

Richard Florida is a chronicler of this movement

And is something that at SMLXL we explore in what we think

Nomadic Generation C in the space of information flows

In our book – we write

The changing of customers habits and behaviours wrought by technology means the old ways just do not work anymore. The crisis of many businesses is the crisis of meaning. Leadership for brands and businesses will be through the creation and management of meaning. Brands have to co-create value and experience to deliver added value a value+ if you will. And why is that? Because our ideas of shopping, having relationships, being a parent, having a job, etc., are being modified from the old models of the past. A job is no longer for life, shopping can be done far more easily on ebay and Amazon, or a host of other internet sites.

And in the Age of Connectedness – people will have public and private and semi-private personas, which coexist in the network and are connected independently. The single most visible thing in the Connected Age, is that we suddenly have permanent access to our peers, our friends, our colleagues and family members. Our communities which previously only existed at given points in time now become ever present.

We are no longer alone As space and time have collapsed.

In an Economist article we get a snap shot from real life by what we meant by this

At the Nomad Café in Oakland, California, Tia Katrina Canlas, a law student at the nearby university in Berkeley, places her double Americano next to her mobile phone and iPod, opens her MacBook laptop computer and logs on to the café’s wireless internet connection to study for her class on the legal treatment of sexual orientation. She is a regular here but doesn’t usually bring cash, so her credit-card statement reads “Nomad, Nomad, Nomad, Nomad.” That says it all, she thinks. Permanently connected, she communicates by text, photo, video or voice throughout the day with her friends and family, and does her ‘work stuff’ at the same time. She roams around town, but often alights at oases that cater to nomads.

Indeed – we can be Placeless but permanently connected what this also implies is that we have the context of a mobile social presence. A bit like how skype works in some ways. And for a more indepth look into the habits of Generation C read They ARE the Borg: Youth, Mobile and SMS text messaging

The owner of Nomad describes his regulars as techno-Bedouins That could me! I also have the added piece of equipment called a Honda Fireblade.

In fact this article reminds of a guy called Leo Plaw who I have never met, who completely overhauled my company SMLXL weblog recently. Leo is Australian, lives in London, has a German girlfriend in Berlin. So the other day, I skyped Leo as he is always “present” – I got an IM back saying

I cant talk, as I am in a café in Berlin and I left my headset at home.

I IM’ed back

Can’t you borrow one?

And that is exactly what happened. So I am in Cambridge Leo is in Berlin designing my weblog in a café?. Networks Economic, Cultural and Media are becoming the nervous system of society argues Manuel Castells – and I am inclined to agree. And of course we could not forget Howard Rheingold who describes these interlocking technologies as technologies of co-operation that amplify human talents for co-operation.

This suggests that our: society, media and communications is evolving from the straight road of an industrial era to the more complex and networked world that mimics nature. Our new media world isn’t about content and distribution. It is about people, connections and social networks. And what happens when Petrabytes seem like flows of kilobytes?

This changes how we will work, how we will collaborate, what we make and who we make it with.

The changes wrought by the networked environment is structural. The above story is a case in point.

Urban nomads like their antecedents are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it. Modern nomads carry almost no paper because they access their documents on their laptop computers, mobile phones or online. Increasingly, they don’t even bring laptops. Many engineers at Google, the leading internet company and a magnet for nomads, travel with only a BlackBerry, iPhone or other ?smart phone?. If ever the need arises for a large keyboard and some earnest typing, they sit down in front of the nearest available computer anywhere in the world, open its web browser and access all their documents online.

Further

The nomadism now emerging is different from, and involves much more than, merely making journeys. A modern nomad is as likely to be a teenager in Oslo, Tokyo or suburban America as a jet-setting chief executive. He or she may never have left his or her city, stepped into an aeroplane or changed address. Indeed, how far he moves is completely irrelevant. Even if an urban nomad confines himself to a small perimeter, he nonetheless has a new and surprisingly different relationship to time, to place and to other people. “Permanent connectivity, not motion, is the critical thing”, says Manuel Castells

Indeed The language of our post-modern culture is one of flexibility – fluidity – portability – permeability – transparency – interactivity – immediacy – facilitation and engagement. These individuals are seeking new consumption choices that can redefine commerce. The new individuals want to make a difference, they want to be heard, and each wants to matter.

This also has a significant impact on our identities described as psychological-self determination. In a post-modern world where our identities are not constructed and defined by, tradition, geography, and economics. We can have many selves, as we undertake a quest for self identity.

This is described as Psychological self-determination the ability to exert control over the most important aspects of ones life, especially personal identity, which has become the source of meaning and purpose in a life no longer dictated by geography or tradition.

These new individuals shun traditional organisations in favour of unmediated relationship to the things they care about. The new individuals thus demand a high quality of direct participation and influence. They have skills to lead, confer and discuss, and they are not content to be good foot soldiers.

So In a post-modern world we can have many selves, as we undertake a quest for self identity. And this is very important because without an identity we become very noisy ghosts in the social machine of life.

Accelerating into the future

Devices, too, are on a steep trajectory. Just as Sony’s Walkman once planted the notion that music can be mobile, the BlackBerry by Research In Motion (RIM), a Canadian firm, has since 1999 made e-mail on the go seem normal. And just as the personal-computer era entered the mainstream only in the 1980s with Apple’s commercialisation of the ?graphical user interface?, the mobile era arguably began only last summer when the same firm launched the iPhone, with its radically new and user-friendly touch interface. As a result, Google, for instance, has received 50 times more web-search requests from iPhones this year than from any other mobile handset.

Back in the distant days of 2005 we wrote about The Birth of the mobile information society As Timo Kopomaa wrote in The City in your pocket

THE FREEDOM PROVIDED by the mobile phone means that people are always available, even when moving, i.e. they are maximizing their contact potential. The more people have a mobile phone, the more complete this reachability becomes. The “need” behind the use of the mobile phones is not just a need for contacts but for autonomous life management, a need to expand the scope of this management both geographically and temporarily. The mobile phone is used to increase the potential in life and to decrease the feeling of possibly missing something.

Kopomaa extends his thinking

As an instrument for maintaining contacts, the mobile phone can be viewed as a ‘place’ adjacent to yet outside of home and work place, a ‘third place’ in the definition of Ray Oldenburg (1989). Oldenburg defined his concept on terms of physical spaces, applying it to coffee-houses, shops and other meeting places. Also the mobile phone is, in its own way, a meeting place, a popular place for spending time, simultaneously a non-place, a centre without physical or geographical boundaries. The mobile phone offers a space where you can withdraw when you feel like it. In addition to small-talk and managing everyday chores, the mobile phone also provides an arena for more serious and intimate discussions which one may not have at home in the presence of the spouse, for example.

The mobile phone has become an established part of urban culture and lifestyle. The use of mobile phone is connected to the fact that urban space is more and more becoming a ‘common living-room’. The freedom and public anonymity of the downtown area streets and squares promote the use of the mobile phone, which also has a lower treshold of contacting than in other types of interaction. Mobile phones have brought added vitality to the public space and allow users to find new ways of attaching themselves to the hub of the city. The mobile phone, as a tool for managing affairs and maintaining the network of social relations, serves to futher condense the use of space.

This is the world of the 7th Mass Media and all that implies.

When the economy is shaken by a powerful set of new opportunities with the emergence of the next technological revolution, society is still strongly wedded to the old paradigm and its institutional framework. The world of computers, flexible production and the internet has a different logic and different requirements from those that facilitated the spread of the automobile, synthetic materials, mass production and the highway network. Suddenly in relation to the new technologies, the old habits and regulations become obstacles, the old services and infrastructures are found wanting, the old organisations and institutions inadequate. A new context must be created; a new ‘common sense’ must emerge and propogate.

Such massive economic transformations involve complex processes of social assimilation. That encompass radical changes in the patterns of production, organisation, management, communication, transportation, and consumption, leading ultimately to a different ‘way of life’. Thus each surge requires massive amounts of effort, investment and learning, both individually and socially.