Social Hallucinations

Did we become 21st century slaves?

"A society that becomes expert in tools and ignorant of reasons is taking the decision of self-enslavement. Curiosity by itself is harmless. It should be curiosity that generates action, that moves us, what finally makes us creative, which humanizes us." (cristian saracco)

Provoking thought. 

21st century slaves, slaves of bit of information that will never be turn into worthy ideas and actions cause no one ever took time to explore it. Scan, check, move on. Exposed to many impulses, endless stream of information and meaningless life-casting, we have no time to explore if we want to keep updated and follow. I actually believe that it's curiosity that stops us on the surface, cause we are curious what will be posted next. We know so many things but nothing really in particular and often one can doubt whether what we have just read was worthy or just bullshit. It resonates actually with H. Rheingold's thoughts on the importance of digital literacy. Giving the deeper thought, giving yourself time to comprehend and evolve, not just re-tweet. We have so much choice that disarms us and we have difficulties handling opt-out and we are continuously give partial attention to everything and in fact learning nothing except facts...

Internet is good because Internet is people and their incredible minds but you have to hit the right stream and have a courage to dive in. Some are exploring the deep blue, others float on the surface.I can't stop asking myself whether is it any different from times before 21st century? or are we really living in the intellectual wasteland turning us into slactivists?

What do you think?

The importance of digital literacy

Howard Rheingold on the importance the literacy in participation and sharing is what will decide whether Internet will be useful tool or garbage. 

The Internet as Playground and Factory - Howard Rheingold from Voices from The Internet as Play on Vimeo.

Virality is not a strategy

"Virality is something that has to be engineered from the beginning…and it’s harder to create virality than it is to create a good product.  That's why we often see good products with poor virality, and poor products with good virality.  The reason that over $150 Billion is spent on US advertising each year is because virality is so hard.  If virality was easy, there would be no advertising industry."

(Josh Kopelman)

Image by aussiegall via Flickr

You can't build your product, communication strategy around viral cause viral isn't something you can plan and decide how it should act. Virality is something that is the result of human interactions which you can't only predict but you can't control either. In stead of focusing on virality, shifting efforts into creating the good products and spreading them / news of them is what matters.

As Noah Brier says "if a tree falls in the forest and there's nobody there to hear ..." . Stuff doesn't become viral per se. It becomes viral cause some people heard about it, tried it, liked it and shared it with others who tried it, liked it and shared it, and so on.

via Noah Brier

Popularity isn't easy - this is also very relevant

Rethink the way how you run your business

Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Incentives block creativity.

Time to build business based on the knowledge of human motivations, it is what can lead to creating the change and making a difference.

Technology and Us

Image via Wikipedia

Douglas Adams’ “rules that describe our reactions to technologies”:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that’s invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.

Online takes your gifts offline

Fantastic postal service: SendSocial. I love the idea. It makes sending gifts so easy and hassle free. The only disadvantage of the service is that it is only available in the UK At the moment, but they are working on expanding into other territories.

Help me choose

Having choices is what we want and expect, but having choices isn't easy. The more choice we have the more difficult is to make the decision and the more irrational our choices become. It's like the very old Polish fairy tale about donkey who got food: oat in one crib and hay in the other crib.
It smelled and beckoned wondering where to start with? Hay or oat? Oat or hay? A difficult choice that made the donkey stay up all night and finally die of hunger. (A. Fredero).

Choice can paralyze us. The advantage companies can gain lies in delivering services that help people to handle the choices they are facing. the services that will deliver emotional experiences, allow overview and give the feeling of having control, making the decision process less stressful.

Here is a good example: Razorfone: Interactive Retail Experience.

Razorfone Interactive Retail Experience from Razorfish - Emerging Experiences on Vimeo.

More hyphen - More perspective

What qualities make a good planner?

Passionate practitioner, who are interesting and are interested in the world around and put the madness in the method and treat their job as a hobby

via PSFK

What's your social nutrition label?

A few weeks ago I wrote about the need of the renaissance of business and its values, about the need for the good people doing good business in the networked markets. We need responsibility.

Unfortunately doing good business is often shadowed by the rip offs driven by greed. Like the latest scam: The Post Transaction Marketing Wall Of Shame: Hundreds Of Well Known Ecommerce Sites Rip Off Customers.

We re-tweet the link to the latest report: Most Fortune 100 Companies Don't Get Twitter and are so obsessed with trying to help companies to get the twitter. But it is not there were problem lies. Problem is that companies doesn't get responsibility and honesty. Problem is that well known companies choose cheating as the way of earning money. I do not expect the Utopian ideal world where we all will love one another and live in peace and harmony. I just expect decency.

I must admit Dostoevsky was right when he wrote "If people have power over everything, the world would cease to exist."

Fortunately there are also some positive things happening around. I've stumbled lately upon the project that is a step in a way of responsibility driven by consumers - Project Label that mission is to provide the consumer with a standardized way of comparing similar products in terms of the products' social impacts.

"Project Label strives to produce people-powered social nutrition labels. Just think food nutrition labels, but instead of only showing the impact on your health, our labels will show a company's social and environmental impact. Unlike many “green” labels out there, WE don't build these labels, YOU do. Using the power of the Web, we provide simple tools to allow consumers, businesses, and organizations to add, discuss, and vote on credible news, media, and research to help build our labels."

We don't compare just prices but turn our attention to more universal and long-term oriented values like companies' social responsibility. It will be interesting to follow the project grow and see its impact on consumer behavior. It is also the right step in the direction of adding more human and responsible face to consumerism.

Let's hope decency wins and business' social nutrition labels will be very healthy...one day :)

"Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."  Vaclav Havel

Inspired by: @misEntropy, @charlesfrith, @futurescape

why does it have to be that way?

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”

Winston Churchill

Simplicity

This morning I've stumbled into the simple and clean ads from Adidas. and I like it a lot. It doesn't say a lot. I says what needs to be said. Create you Adicolor.

via Cecilie_FB

The Near Future Agency

"(...) the future agency becomes virtual and led by superhero planners and creative thinkers. Behind the superheroes, it's all virtual. All shared."

(John Ebbert)

The media fragmentation, increasing number of channels and ways to communicate with people that live liquid lives is followed by the increasing number of agencies that offer their "expert" service to

Image by michael.heiss via Flickr

solve a piece of your communication problem and get a piece of marketing budget. Roles get blurry. Advertising agencies think media, media agencies think creativity, etc. More experts emerge. More silos get built. We can't face the near future with the silos organizations that are characterized with the lack of flexibility.

What we can do to survive? Implement flexibility, strong leadership and work the way that reflects how people live and think - seamless. Ordinary people don't think in communication channels, they seek for the ways to satisfy and fulfill their needs.

The seamless life of agency can be reflected in the way we organize ourselves into flexible and versatile teams and collaboration across different disciplines is the key. 

After all, we together in the business of helping our clients to connect with people.

More interesting related read: Markets are Networks

Average Consumers: The Product of Single Story

"There are lies, damned lies, and statistics" (Churchill)

Who is the average consumer? Does he / she exist? How do we define it? Or does average consumers exist, isn't just a mathematical construct that was aimed at making easier for us to explain world?

People are different, we are the individuals with different stories that shape us, stories that are driven by our mind, our bodies and social environment we are living in. Every human is the patchwork of different stories that make him/her a person, not an average consumer. The average consumer is a type of urban myth to me. 

Woman, 34 years old, urban, modern, income above average, lives in apartment, career oriented, heavy user of internet, buys organic food, interested in technology, owns mobile phone, heavy consumer of culture, blah blah...Yes, it could be me...but the above description brings more questions. 

Can a human being amount to this?

Average consumer is just a construct that derives from the single story and is intended to make easier for us to work out things like strategy, advertising, etc. But the concept of average consumer doesn't really 'disenchant' the world, it makes it single storied and mass produced.

...listen to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie inspiring talk about the single story as the source of misunderstanding and stereotypes that keep us away from seeing the whole picture

Yes, I am aware it is difficult to work with the concept of individual when we talk communication, it is difficult to capture the complexity of people's lives but we can try with replacing or at least enhancing demographics with needs, motivations and more focus on the social aspects of human's lives.

Thanks for inspiration: Eskimon

Walking Makes a Difference

2 days ago I wrote about the need for companies to give back to society, about the approach that is not about planning, modeling but DOING. Seeding in order to harvest. And this morning I stumbled upon this interesting solution - Pavegen.The idea behind is simple: creating energy from people's footsteps. So in fact people save energy, make a difference without any effort...well they walk but they would do it no matter what, so it is a win win for all parts: people and the Earth. Great idea!

Capitalism, Collapse and Renaissance

Alienation - one of the causes of the current crisis - the notion of human was replaced by models and greed of producing more. The system focused its all energy on producing profit and neglected society needs. Hundred years ago Max Weber wrote in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, that wealth can lead to salvation. Somewhere in the race to become saved, we've turned the wealth into hedonism. #System fail. It is time to rewire and reboot, cause we can't continue the same way we did before Lehman&Co collapsed.

The change is constant but this time it accelerates and often raises fear and distrust. Some companies feel lost and are reluctant to the change, and stay attached to the old way of doing things... probably to feel they are still in the control. But the world needs the new type of companies; companies that are socially useful, as Umair Haiq puts it. Companies where the question is not longer how much you produce but how much you manage to seed. The more you seed the more growth you create.

It is about finding a balance between generating profit and giving a part of it back to the society, doing good things for people, making communities life better, improving society.

Profit and wealth are positive aspects of business, cause they are means to doing good, to doing socially useful things. What we need is the renaissance of business and its values. Good people doing good business in the networked markets. Well, it may sound like the utopia right now when we are looking at the world around us crashed by the dehumanized models that should generate endless profits. But the change will come once the fear of the unknown disappears, we rediscover that real value lies in other people and society and reconnect the private with the public.

There must be hope for us...