Uneven Distribution.

The 2.0 Rebound

October 17th, 2007

Have we maybe gone a bit too far? Has information overload gone from a speculative media buzzword to a reality? Has the pace of online development advanced to the point where just because what’s possible is cool doesn’t mean it should become a reality?

I’ll admit that it’s cool that when my phone rings I can see the caller’s last few twitters, their current location and their latest Facebook activity. It’s cool, but do I really care?

I will not be surprised if over the next two years we see a certain amount of rollback in the broader online community from the territory we’ve gained on over the past two years. So much of it is simply cool for the sake of cool. It’s a fad. And fads don’t last.

Every time I think about this I recall that historically, every generation going back hundreds of years felt that theirs was the penultimate of human civilisation. People have always felt that science and technology has finally advanced to the point that we’re about to wipe ourselves out. So my initial reaction when thinking about an online rebound is to think it’s just me getting older and losing touch. Surely the kids growing up with this technology will think it’s quaint in 10 years when we struggle to grasp their holographic spatial locator projectors on their communicators? Possibly. But right now, in today’s online world I don’t think this is the case.

I think we have possibly reached a point where the progress of the online world as a whole is out pacing our individual ability to process and deal with it. I’m going to offer two short paragraphs to illustrate why. But if you buy me a beer I promise there’s many more.

The development of the internet is unique in history. It was imagined, developed, executed, and built upon by the very people who required it’s existence. From 1969 to 1993 almost every person accessing the internet was directly involved in computer science. Every tool created for the internet was done so with a specific need in mind, and was created by the very same people that had that need. The same is essentially true today. This is how we ended up with YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and GMail. Of course the problem we’ve encountered over the last couple of years is that tools are not created to answer a need, they are created to answer a proposition. Where we once checked out a new online development and had the response “I’ve always wanted to do that”, we now usually respond with “I’ve never really wanted to do that, but damn it’s cool!”.

Dunbar’s Number. It’s 150. Dunbar refers to Evolutionary Psychologist Dr. Robin Dunbar. His number refers to how many people you can actively maintain sustained social relationships with. Essentially, it’s the theoretical maximum number of people in your social network that are really in your social network. Many people have talked about this, and because Malcolm Gladwell and Duncan Watts are much better writers than me, I’m not going to elaborate more. The point is, this number of 150 is not unique to humans living in today’s society. It’s evident throughout history, and throughout different species. So if it’s essentially immovable (as much as a conjecture can be), surely pushing our LinkedIn/MySpace/Facebook/Orkut friends up towards a thousand is a waste of time? And surely once over the fad of these social networks, the majority of users will simply stop using them? After all, there’s no financial investment, no real brand loyalty, and very little emotional investment in the tool.

So is this rebound really going to happen? Would it signify the Bubble2.0 bursting, allowing ad revenue to tumble only moments after billion dollar deals go through? Should we all start looking for a new industry to work in?

Probably not.

One thing the last 2 years has shown is that online, the long tail is at it’s most powerful (and profitable). So although there might be a rebound, there won’t be digital apocalyptical horseman featuring Wagnerian overtures.

This post also published on B&T’s Big Idea and Digital Ministry Champions Blog

Comments

But surely the truly useful ideas will emerge from the “cool cos we can” ideas like slime mould - a process which doesn’t validate the individual ideas but does justify the rapid rate of progress?

Maybe what is really happening is that the web is lowering the barrier to entry for entrepreneurship, thus flooding the market with more ideas both good and bad. And because there is always substantially more bad ideas than good, it seems like the whole thing is lacking depth. So rollback - I hope not. Smarter investment and more accountability when reporting usage stats, bring it on.