In a recent talk at Creative Mornings, New York, Jonathan Harris said every promise we make has a cost associated with it. When it comes to communication and self-expression, the four forces that are shifting our culture are:
1. Compression
Even before the Internet, we started using tools that made our communication shorter and faster. Now we're at an interesting point where we tweet. We’ll get to a point where we’ve reached terminal velocity, maybe grunts.
2. Disposability
We get what we need, consume it, and throw it away. We're okay with the fact that what we put out there is consumed quickly and thrown away, even culture and information.
3. Curation
Has by and large replaced creation as a predominant mode of self-expression. Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, etc. made it very easy to assemble lists, put together boards, and ping things to use to express yourself. It’s a bit like walking into someone's apartment and judging them as a person by the stuff they have hanging on the walls instead of speaking with them.
4. Self-promotion
We’re all living our lives as advertisements now. We assemble these online personas through our Facebook profiles and our online Web sites. And it’s like this sort of big species-level pissing contest where everyone is trying to see how
awesome they can seem to the people they meet online.
For these forces, Harris was interested in offering some counter forces: deepening to compression, timelessness to disposability, increasing the amount of creation, and self-reflection.
We live in an age where there is a very small number of people who are mainly guys, mainly between 22-35, mainly living in San Francisco, New York maybe a little in London and Berlin. And these people are having a really big effect on the behavior of hundreds of millions of humans through the software they design and introduce into the world.
When you do that, it's important to understand how technology functions.
All technology extends a human functions, a piece that is already in us. What is the urge we’re extending or exaggerating through software?
Harris classifies tech companies mainly in two buckets: healers and dealers.
- The healers are marketplaces that connect people –- Kickstarter connects creators to backers, Etsy buyers to sellers, AirBnB travelers to hosts. They solve a problem quickly.
- The dealers aim to harness attention to either sell ads, or leverage the data. They aim to build attention economies.
However, attention is a finite resource, and data in the present form gives you the ability to confirm things you already know. It’s pretty superficial.
[hat tip SwissMiss]
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Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a speaking engagement click here.