Are we entering the ‘Net’s first golden age?
Wait a minute, you’re protesting, the first golden age in Internet Years
was the dot-com bubble, no? I actually think
not.
The dot-com bubble (in which I had a role on-stage in the chorus, although
my name never made the Playbill), was in retrospect largely about companies
trying to do things online that people had always been doing off-line: Buying
books and pet food, booking airline tickets, investing, and so on. It
was fundamentally a one-to-many model, even in the case of an arguable
paradigm-changer like eBay, which deserves credit at least for creating
a national marketplace that literally could not exist in the off-line
world.
One of my theories about a new medium, the ‘Net included, is that it
starts out resembling the old medium to which it’s most closely analogous. So
radio began by broadcasting vaudeville acts, TV by broadcasting acted-out
radio soap operas, and the ‘Net by emulating broadcast TV’s top-down,
take-it-or-leave-it, content.
The next generation of each medium arrives when it finds its "true
voice,"
which is by definition not an imitation of something that has gone before. Thus
with radio it’s music, news, and talk. With TV it’s sports, movies,
and breaking news. And with the ‘Net, it’s…..? This. (Courtesy
of the Wharton School, headlined "Wikis, Weblogs and RSS: What Does
the New Internet Mean for Business?")
The shift is from host-provided content to user-provided content:
- From
one-to-many to many-to-many. - From large, intricate, zealously tended and feature-rich Big App’s
spanning acres of servers to small, lightweight, low-tech ways of publishing
and communicating. And perhaps in the most revolutionary
sense - From a command-and-control, gating, editing, and triple-checking
process to wide-open communities of permissive social interaction driven
by spontaneous and unedited expression.
In other words, we can now do with the ‘Net things we could never
do off-line: This is, indeed, "The New Internet."
There are several ways to think of this, but one that sums it up nicely
is to characterize the past decade as having built up the physical infrastructure
and anticipating that the next decade will build up the social infrastructure. Now,
a "social infrastructure" comes with no guarantees, and as with the LA
Times‘ famous lightning-speed retreat from
wiki-editorials reveals, a few vandals can wreck the neighborhood. The
tradeoff for accepting this risk—which within small virtual neighborhoods
is de minimis—can, however, be enormous.
Moreover, what’s going on is nothing other than the ‘Net returning to
its roots:
"If you go back to the thinking of the
earliest visionaries with respect to the Internet, that was exactly the
picture they were painting. […] The original vision of the Internet
being a medium that is genuinely peer-to-peer, is loosely coupled and
[which] sparks different kinds of interactions."
Then, the "social infrastructure" was set by the hacker/geek code, with
its arcane but effective rules of courtesy and mutual respect enforced,
of course, by white-hot flaming when called for. There is every reason
to believe that our most social of all species will be able to evolve an
online culture that is both collaborative extraordinarily potent: Certainly
when you think of the intricacies of the supply chain required to deliver,
say, your new Dell Inspiron laptop to your front door, a supply chain that
touches down in Taiwan, the Phillipines, Hong Kong, mainland China, and
Memphis, Tennessee (FedEx), with not even a moment’s "command and control"
issuing from Round Rock, Texas, you realize what human beings, guided by
Adam Smith’s invisible hand, are capable of.
Is this all starting to sound a little airy-fairy? Then consider
how business has evolved. No longer is the goal to achieve Six
Sigma perfection in churning out X thousand or million perfectly identical
widgets; the goal is to innovate, to steal a march, to cause disruption.
"This changes the way you think about productivity in organizations
where innovation, adaptability and dealing with complexity are the key
challenges. So much of reengineering, which is what major corporations
have been about for the last 10 or 15 years, has been about linear efficiency
— lining everything up in as tight a way as possible along a path. That’s
wonderful if you know exactly what it is you want to do, and the aim
of that task will never change. Increasingly, that’s not the relevant
challenge. The challenge is adaptability, complexity, uncertainty and
your capacity to mine the elements of your business, people and knowledge
into different and new combinations."
This brings us back to law firms. When has it ever been more important
to deal adroitly and nimbly with uncertainty, to "mine your people and
knowledge?"
Envision new ways of working; with the New Internet, they just may
be possible.
