Record Your Entire Life

Flashier Mobs?

A lot has been written about technologies, such as Facebook Causes in bringing people together and rightly so, it’s an excellent platform. Fast forward to a world of rich profiles and location awareness. At what point does the cost of identifying and bringing together like-minds in a crowd become so low as to be deemed trivial? In what contexts will the process be sufficiently automated/rapid that a significant % of ‘mobsters will be unsure what they’re mobbing about? (via Future Perfect)

Paul Isakson has a brilliant, and I think quite on-point, take on where the social web is today, and where it’s headed. You’ve likely seen a great deal of this before, albeit perhaps in slightly different contexts.

The clincher, for me, is this gem:

The best way to get people to do stuff with you, is to first join them in what they are already doing.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the mojo of this discussion that one loses rational perspective on the basic nature of human interaction. This simple tenet is a great rule by which to operate, and one far too often overlooked. Kudos, Paul.

Despite the current troubling economic times, which affect the media industries and the academy alike, I can’t help but find myself personally optimistic. The primary reason, I would suspect, is that I am just naturally an optimistic person, or so I’ve been told. That can perhaps lead to some naivete, but I’ve always hoped to err toward finding the best possible outcome of a situation, or at least a guarded optimism.  I realize as well that my own personal optimism within the current economic climate is tempered by my own good fortune.  In my academic life, the publishing of a book project (on the current state and future of the soap opera industry) and my involvement in ongoing projects with the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium has given me plenty of stimulating issues to mull over and have been quite intellectually fulfilling.  Meanwhile, I started a new career in the past two years in the public relations industry, working as an in-house academic of sorts to connect the work I’ve been doing in media studies with industry practice. That has likewise provided me with promising new projects and a fresh way of looking at issues I’ve long researched, making this a professionally rich and exciting time for me.  On a very personal note, I have a daughter who is coming any day now, and I have a strong support system of family, friends, and a wife of eight years this week that all contribute to my positive state of mind.

From a media studies perspective, I see trends like NBC’s continuing commitment to Friday Night Lights and realize that there are still commitments outside the economic.  Even in my own research on the current state of the soap opera industry, where Guiding Light has just been cancelled by CBS after being on the air on radio and then television since 1937, our book focuses on what’s still unique about the genre and why there is still cause for hope and ways to “save” the genre.  Online, new communities and initiatives have continued, and industry and academic sites and conferences are as vibrant as ever. If anything, the difficulties presented by the economy have made people feel more desire than ever to act, and to get fulfillment outside of just monetary compensation.  Combine with that the collective drive and intelligence pushed forward by the Obama Administration and a prevailing attitude that we can’t rely on government nor especially on corporations to take care of us but rather on our own communities and you have a grassroots sense of community that helps counteract the despair one would expect from following Wall Street.

In the industry, it’s no secret that times of economic uncertainty can also prove quite beneficial, weeding out outdated ways of thinking and clearing the path for the most innovative business models. For those companies that innovate during a down period, there are unprecedented possibilities, as many are finding, for instance, in new authentic and transparent ways of communicating online (to use two buzzwords I actually like).

In my mind, maintaining optimism throughout both one’s professional and personal lives requires having the proper balance of what’s important and not trying to live your professional life as if your personal self doesn’t exist. It requires taking on projects that you personally believe in and finding work, whether it is one’s “day job” or not, that is intellectually and emotionally fulfilling. It means having a good sense of humor and a strong sense of self. And it means finding professional and personal networks that one is loyal to, no matter who their current employer or what their current project is. In uncertain economic times, I feel blessed, personally and professionally, and I think there is much hope for the future if we all channel our collective energies into making the world a better place and doing work we are passionate about and driven by.

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Sam is Director of Customer Insights at Peppercom, and a Research Affiliate with the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium. You can read a number of his contributions to the C3 weblog here.

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This post is a selection from The Optimist Conspectus – an ongoing not-for-profit attempt to both quantify and qualify resurgent optimism. To learn more or submit your own sources of optimism, click here.

I posted last week about Jeffrey Sachs comments regarding the potential good that will eminate from extended mobile reach in Africa.
Today, something quite similar, and altogether different, via a post from Chris Muscarella1, in which he quotes Ethan Zuckerman of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society from Mobile Tech for Social Change:
“If you pair [...]

Two very insightful interviews posted this morning:
Chris Wilson over at The Marketing Fresh Peel interviews Piers Fawkes of PSFK as part of his Future of Work series. Fawkes opens up on his views of the changes in the workplace that Gen-Y will face:
Gen Yers are going to work for scores of companies and they need [...]

Helge Tenno, always about six hours ahead of the rest of us on 180360720.no, has a great post today summarizing a panel from the PSFK Salon this past weekend focused on the mobile user in which he relates a discussion about a patchwork approach to location-based solutions.

Put more eloquently: Mobile is about people, not technology, and the intersection of these two will be increasingly-defined by applications and tools that are uniquely combined by people to suit their individual needs and desires – not provided from a single, global source.

Helge writes:

The Patchwork implies that it is the combination of intelligence in and sensing by these local applications that the “grand machinery” will be produced. Not by a dumber, global, giant solution.

This is wonderfully well-put, I think.

More:

It’s about understanding my life, the activities I perform, which ones are relevant for your company. And discovering how you can ad value to this based on presence (being accessible when the situation occurs, not on the laptop four hours later), people (person + herd = culture) and place (location + time).

Click through and have a read. While you’re there, poke around. Tenno is right on top of things, and a heck of a good writer.

When Jonathan MacDonald suggests that we ought to be talking about what mobile does, not what it is, he makes a fantastically salient point – a point that people are finally beginning to grasp as the discussion moves from platforms and hardware to a million simple, highly-configurable pieces of software.