Uneven Distribution.

UNEVEN DISTRIBUTION IS A COLLECTION OF THOUGHTS ON THE DIGITAL WORLD, ITS FUTURE SCENARIOS AND CURRENT TRENDS, AND THE EFFECT THEY HAVE ON BRANDS, ADVERTISING, AND PEOPLE.
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Getting a piece of the cognitive surplus

May 2nd, 2008

A few days ago I read through the speech Clay Shirky gave at the Web 2.0 Conference a few weeks back (there’s also a video ). Apart from being a fabulously captivating read, it also touches on a few ideas that I feel are pertinent to working with and marketing brands online. A lot of what follows is bulk quoting followed by commenting, I honestly don’t have much to add to Shirky’s thinking, but rather just felt like putting his ideas into the context of what I do. So, from the top (he’s talking here about Western society at the onset of the industrial revolution)…

“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… 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.”

This is an important parallel that, as we go trundling through the digital revolution, not enough attention has been paid to. We’re all aware that what we’re participating in right now will, in retrospect, be looked back on as something as important as the industrial revolution. Yet very rarely has anyone dug through the history of the industrial revolution and found the key lessons that can be applied to what we are doing in the current day.

There is the argument that the industrial revolution is so different to the digital revolution that this knowledge would be useless. There is no massive population shift, no drastic shift in employment arrangements, and far from creating a new economic system the digital revolution has only furthered capitalism. But what there is in common is the effect on both culture and on the broader idea of how people spend their non-working time, an idea Shirky frames as the “cognitive surplus”. Essentially, people are waking up after spending the last 50 years on the couch. And they want to be engaged.

“So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.”

100 million hours! What’s amazing is that while we’ve spent the start of this decade becoming aware of just how powerful and huge a thin-sliced market can be on a global stage, numbers like this prove that we haven’t really begun to tap into and engage these markets. We might think we’re quite clever with our user-generated branded content and social networks built around albino-marmot farmers, but now it seems like we’re hardly even breaking the surface of engaging this newly-awoken audience. This doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going about it wrong, it just means the waking up is happening slowly. It’s certainly not about to slow down, so the lesson here is that we need to effectively measure and evaluate everything we’re doing, because as time rolls on and we gain larger and larger slices of this cognitive surplus, it’s going to be easy to miss the boat.

“It’s precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.”

The experiments have begun. Just go have a look at TechCrunch if you need proof. A lot are failing, but some are working. And the great thing about using technology to consume the surplus is the low coefficient of friction (data is almost free, bandwidth is only getting cheaper). The challenge here though is that as people abandon passive media, they go from pure consumption to something more.

“media is actually a triathlon, it ’s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.”

And it is at this point that anyone working on marketing a brand online faces their biggest hurdle. People are producing and sharing more and more. They are consuming the same amount of information, but they are choosing what they consume. And they obviously aren’t choosing your 30 second TVC (unless you’re Nike, or Sony, or selling Blenders ). So why do we keep on creating what is essentially a 30-second TVC in all our online communication?

In a perfect world there wouldn’t be a single piece of digital communication for your brand that didn’t include all three events; consume, produce, share. And the perfect world needs to start becoming a reality. The audience is changing, regardless of whether or not we’re ready for them. The myriad startups out there are providing engagement for this audience, and if brands aren’t doing the same then they just get left behind. The kids are just doing it. The kids are also growing up, and they’re not buying your product. They don’t care, nor do they realise, that what they’re doing is utterly revolutionary.

Looking back on what’s been done in digital so far is, in a sense useless. Looking back on how advertising and marketing has functioned throughout history is, in a sense, useless. There are certain things we can learn from looking back, and I’m willing to say that some of these lessons are critically important, but it’s from holding on to the past that we are disallowing ourselves to really engage with our future consumers.

I’m sorry if people feel I’ve hijacked what is a culturally aspirational idea and turned it into a discussion on advertising. I realise that what Clay Shirky is talking about is way bigger than how we can sell more soft drinks/cars/insurance. So instead of finishing up with some quasi-prophetic marketing 2.0 pontificating, I’ll just finish with a couple of the best paragraphs I’ve read in a long time.

“Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.
And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message–I can do that, too–is a big change.”

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Comments

May 8th, 2008.
awavaRache

favorited this one, brother

November 20th, 2008.
Art. | Uneven Distribution.

[...] on insights from Clay Shirky (which I talked about in For Love or Money and Getting a piece of the cognitive surplus), and a 50 year-old economic theory, I created something which has no immediate, obvious, [...]