Its amazing how much one can see the waves of public opinion forming with social media.
I think it must have been about two years ago that I first started reading about the risk of a sub prime meltdown in the US. There are a lot of people who have built significant businesses from promoting FUD. What is interesting now is that the cracks are appearing more regularly in what I would call the ’social fabric’ of the US. And since the US is in many respects the key influencer of thought on line - purely because of the sheer volume of people who blog, who spruik, etc - there is a significant amount of US thought influencing other English language cultures.
Globalization of ideas is very real. So the subprime crisis in the US has impacted Australian companies too. Look what has happened in the last few weeks to Centro and to Allco and most recently to ABC Learning. All of them have found sources of debt financing hard to get, and all have had their share prices savaged as a result.
In the press that globalization of thought has started to see the letters section of the Sydney Morning Herald featuring comments by readers about the State Government’s handling of transport referencing the concept of Peak Oil.
We are all starting to understand that we are part of a global system.
Another interesting thing that I noticed this week was on the Insight program on SBS. A representative of A.V. Jennings, the house building company, called for the Federal Government to regulate the specifications of houses so as to make them more sustainable!
I read recently that it is not the tipping point that is important - it is what caused the tipping point to take place, and what happens immediately after the tipping point has been reached that is important. We are in the process of reaching such a tipping point right now.
Imagine for a moment that trends and fashions and public opinion is like a pendulum. Like the pendulum they reach a peak point in the swing and then change direction. With a pendulum there is a change in energy at that peak. The kinetic energy of motion turns into potential energy at the moment that the pendulum reaches its peak. I believe that society is not dissimilar. When CEO’s have margin calls that cause them to sell shares in the companies that they have built, investors change their level of confidence in the CEO and the company. Confidence energy changes to potential and then to negative. This kind of thought ripples through society causing surprising results - much of which we should be able to predict if we are looking in the right places.
We had a partner meeting yesterday to brainstorm about how to address the needs of one of our clients…
Somewhere along the way Bruce started talking about the roots of the word “sharing” and since so much of the online experience is about sharing, I found it fascinating. If you want to check out the etymology of the word you can do so at the online etymology dictionary.
The story is as follows:
“Sharing” is derived from the old English word scear. As a noun scear is an iron blade of a plough, and as a verb it means to cut. So the whole concept of ’sharing’ is literally about dividing. Since we tend to think about this word conceptually as an act of ‘uniting’ which is the opposite, I think this is a tremendous example of the active need to examine the counterintuitive when addressing the way that things are versus the way that things seem. Language plays a huge part in how we can so easily misunderstand the position we occupy in a business ecosystem.
Fascinating and extremely insightful essay by Kevin Kelly here about new business models.
This is the general thrust of it:
From my study of the network economy I see roughly eight categories of intangible value that we buy when we pay for something that could be free.
In a real sense, these are eight things that are better than free. Eight uncopyable values. I call them “generatives.” A generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. A generative thing can not be copied, cloned, faked, replicated, counterfeited, or reproduced. It is generated uniquely, in place, over time. In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.
I recently discovered a fascinating 4 part documentary made for BBC 4 in the UK. It is called The Century Of The Self.
It deals very specifically with the influence of the teachings of Sigmund Freud on society - particularly the creation of the modern consumer society that we live in. It is fascinating watching for anyone who is interested in society and what motivates it.
With the advent of the social web - or Web 2.0 - whatever you want to call it, I wonder how much of the programming that has taken place is going to be a problem for the current and next generation. If you take a lateral view, you might consider that the whole subprime mess is in some respects a result of consumerism taken to its logical conclusion. Or perhaps that is the penultimate step.
If you read this blog there is a sense of what may come next. It deals with the hypothesis of collapsing cities and provides a rationale for what will happen and why.
Is it possible that the deprogramming of people will lead to a great unravelling of society?
