pic c/o brandi.org
Top conversation with Jon Mac this morning (hope to be able to join his Every Single One of Us meetup tonight - a really laudable attempt to stimulate substantive change in our little world)
But it prompted me to repeat something that I've been trying to say around the "social media isn't media" posts recently: that the old ideas about communication involving the sending and receiving of messages, transmitted down channels/media/tubes or whatever are just plain wrong in trying to think about the new world.
Russell touches on in his latest brilliant New Schtick posts
"the assumptions about how advertising works we're baking into our media
tools are wrong. And so we're making bad media tools. Things that will
piss people off. I think that's largely because while Google and the
rest of the clickonit scientists were relentlessly implementing a
mechanistic, message and relevance based model of how advertising works
the thoughtful bits of the advertising business (admittedly not large
in number) had their head in the sand denying the existence of anything
digital"
The thing is about the new technologies is not that they provide new, more efficient - better targetted or more relevant - messaging opportunities for businesses to exploit, but rather that it connects people to each other and that allows us to see each other (which you will hopefully remember allows us to emulate and thus drives the spread of behaviours and ideas)
(Also - as Russ points out - increasingly the technology is bringing people and objects into new kinds of connections (which leads us into a whole other set of things)
Maybe it's just another one of those examples of Mcluhan's adage that we use new technology as if they were old technology