New Comm Forum: Weinberger Keynotes

This is realtime, live blogging, so please forgive the typoes I am about to make and the broken links that I'll repair when you tell me about them.

David Weinberger, NPR commentator, a Cluetrain co-author and a founding father of blogging is keynoter.  He is amazingly nattily dressed with suit and necktie. He demonstrates with great humor his short attention span in his talk, "Life after Broadcast" For centures, he tells us broadcast has dominated not just marketing but our entire culture.  Now it is being put in it's appropriate place.

Social media is replacing it.  Social media is not about content.  User generated content is important but it is not THE THING.  Broadcast likes everything to have its place, which happens to be the theme of his upcoming book, Everything is Miscellaneous.  Broadcast decided where everything fit in culture, what would be our common knowledge

Marketing he says is the selective release of information.  When did marketing become a verb, something you do to people, rather than with them? We force messages on people and people hate it. We have remote controls so we can turn them off. "We've been at war with customers for 100 years. Marketing terminology are the terms of war, strategy, penetration, etc."

He describes the tools of social media, about how they let eople find what they want and respond to it.  He talks about how social media is about we are interested in--real conversations, not the articfial stilted ones of marketing or like when you laugh at your boss's bad jokes.

"Weblogs are what we care about."  These are miscellaneous things if you go to Wikipedia you find such gems as how to deep fry a Mars Bar, things that the committee who decides what goes into Encyclopedia Britannica will probably never include. Yes, people care about cats and they want to write about them.  people decide what tey write about, no one else decides.  They decide what they read.

Blogging is not journalism, but there is a relationship.  Bloggers write about what they read in newspapers and journalists use bloggers as  sources. But something has happened.  The editorial boards of middle aged white guys deciding what you will know, is coming to an end.  It is being informalized by sites like Digg where people vote on what is important.

Sites a USA Today piece that shows how many readers gave thumbs up, but they don't report on thumbs down, eliminating what readers want the most--revenge. Blogging is much more democratic.

We read blogs with much greater forgiveness.  We understand that blogs are not written perfectly.  We forgive typos.  We know the writers are human and fallible and blogs reflect that while marketing does not. We use links as little acts of kindness, we send people away because we think there's another place of value and marketing tries to capture you.

In blogging we try to make the world more complex.  The web is a new public space and how often do you come across a new space.  So now we are filling it up. The old authorities used to organize things to their best interests of selling you what they want you to buy.  Now the power is going to them.

"Person to Person communications is much bigger than marketing.  It is about making the world ours, again."

Bravo, David, Bravo.

Comments

[Amanda Chapel]

Aside from the same hype and blather, I just don't want to live in your (plural) little world, one owned by the unruly unkempt mob, one rising to the sophistication of the least common denominator. For those of you who spend your every breath trying to reduce us... there is a special place in Hell.

Regards,

- Amanda Chapel

[shel israel]

Amanda,

You don't have to. Maybe it's time you packed up your skirt and wig put your pants back on and walked out of the Blogosphere.

[Ike]

Shel, I only have one issue with what you wrote -- and maybe it isn't what you meant. If you did mean it, please explain:

"In blogging we try to make the world more complex."

It has been my experience that blogging is a form of communication, and communication works best when simple (tag line to my blog). From the language we use to the analogies we choose, we're all trying to reduce the world through our own lenses and make sense of it. Even if it is to an audience of self (plus the 12 or so people who read my blog.)

Collectively, we make the world more complex, because there is now a cacophony of individual voices, and those of most meager means now have access to bandwidth. But I don't think any of us step into blogging to make the world more complex.

Do we?

[shel israel]

Good question, Ike. This is one problem with live blogging. David was pretty clear but he talks faster than I type and something was lost in summarization.

David, as I understand it, see corporations as highly organized, structured and disciplined in how the distribute information, when they distribute it and to whom they distribute it. Bloggers are a disorganized and slightly unruly lot. They send out information whenever they get it to just anyone who wants it. This allows freer access to more information in a less refined form and David feels this is better and I agree. That is all an aside then the fact that a simple story well told is more powerful and better understood than a complex and unfocused post.

[David Weinberger]

Shel, thanks for the live blogging.

Here's what I meant about complexity. The economics of broadcast leads marketers to try simplify their messages so they'll affect the widest swath of people. Bloggers, however, take what they find and point out the complexities. That's exactly what we all do in conversation: We point out something that maybe someone else hadn't noticed.

My example was a presidential talk to the nation about immigration. 2,500 words, simplifying and clarifying a complex issue. (Nothing wrong with that.) Within a few hours, there were over 2,500 blog posts on the address. Each one, we can be pretty sure, took a simple point and amplified it or disagreed with it. Thus something simple was immediately - and usefully - made more complex. That's what we humans do.

I personally think that much of the enthusiasm for blogging can be read as a reaction against the simplifications and lowest-common-denominator thinking of the one-to-many media, and marketing in particular. I have, as usual, no evidence for this point of view.

[Amanda Chapel]

With all due respect David, "no evidence," as in "unreal."

See http://tinyurl.com/2f374p , The Communications Forum Wrapup: The Incredible Talking Dog.

:)

- Amanda