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| Hierarchies and Social Media |
| chasing the mammoth |
I wrote a weblog piece on ContentBlogger a couple of months back on the book Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. In this piece I noted:
In its furthest extension, then, the Wikinomics concept is really about returning human society to the pre-historic era of nomadic hunting tribes, which could shift their location and resources as needed to respond to rapidly changing environments without the need to have external hierarchies protecting land through wars. Given the issues of our physical environment that are unfolding before our eyes the timing of the development of Internet-based collaborative and peer-based publishing may turn out to be quite fortuitous. But the world of today's publishing is certainly not ready for the most part to accept the depth of this kind of change in their own structures. We're still in the era of publishers trying to turn wild animals of content that we chase in a hunting culture into the domesticated animals of an agricultural culture, through which we can gather the herds into the barns for milking every quarter.
I expanded on this concept for a presentation at this year's Buying and Selling eContent conference. I am thinking of expanding this concept into a book proposal, using materials that will be developed on Content Nation or a companion site on Near-Time. What are your thoughts on the long-term implications to society for social media? How is social media changing the structure of how publications are created and managed? How is social media going to influence how human society organizes itself, makes itself productive and adapts to a rapid changes in our environment and in the political structure required to respond to these changes?
Join Content Nation and then visit the "Chasing the Mammoth" pages to add your thoughts on what the book should cover in comments or your own new pages.
david5 said
Hey John – Your presentation at Buying and Selling eContent was really good. I think that your challenge will be to carve out a very particular take on social media for your book. There are already books out on social media and I would expect, given that the subject is "hot" that publishers will be bringing out more titles in the next year.
One thing that interest me is—Will social media become totally mainstream? Or maybe not? Something like 70% of Americans use the Web. So will social media see similar numbers? Or is it only a niche?
David
John Blossom said
Hi David,
I think that your point is a good one. My thought is that although social media is a key trend it becomes a question as to what begat what. Is social media begetting significant changes in how humans cooperate with one another to attain various goals or is it actually a series of tools that reflect much broader trends in human organization that are required for our survival? We've had thousands of years of command-and-control structure in human society. Are we reaching a point where this is no longer the most beneficial structure for human survival – and if so, how is social media playing a role in this transformation? How can businesses make the best possible use of social media tools to identify and exploit market opportunities? The book that I am thinking of would be kind of a cross between The Cluetrain Manifesto, The Lexus and the Olive Tree and Who Moved My Cheese? – taking simple instances of social change required in response to climates, creating parables out of them, showing how social media tools fit into this pattern and where they take us in the real world of business, politics and human relations on a global basis. My hope is that the confluence of TWO hot topics – global warming and social media – combined with new knowledge being gained about ice-age civilizations might provide a fairly broad audience. I agree that we don't need another tub-thumping book about social media.
I think of this especially in light of things like Wikis being picked up by chambers of commerce and the cycle of micropublishing-begetting-micropublishing that Near-Time is seeing as they popularize easy-to-use Wiki technology. As big as social media is we've barely begun to scratch the surface of how big it can become in a very broad scale of human existence.
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