Week 7 Reflection… November 19, 2009
Posted by gjchatalas in Reflections.trackback
The thrust of Benkler’s “The Wealth of Networks” is how the wired world is changing the way in which society communicates and creates. Another influential book about the Internet era is “The Cluetrain Manifesto” which laid out a series of statements challenging business status quo amid this tech revolution. Among the points put forth in that book is that people don’t want to be marketed to anymore; instead, they want to be part of the conversation.
“Cluetrain” came to mind while listening David Hanley of Banyan Branch talk about the many methods his company uses to interact with the public on behalf of clients. While he covered many cutting edge techniques for doing such, a casual comment resonated with me: referring to one of his employees, he said that she spent her time selling benefits rather than building relationships.
This reflected once again that a shift is truly taking place within the walls of business, not merely being expressed within the pages of books. The fact is that we are tired of being treated as targets of a message; we see through the marketing and cheerleading both as consumers and employees. We want to be leveled with, not patronized. And online tools make finding the facts easier than ever. We don’t glance at an advertisement and buy the product or visit the restaurant. We research it, looking for reviews, and turning to those whose opinions we trust. As a result, the approach of engaging a community is gradually becoming a business norm, not just a corporate buzzword.
The discussion of Comcast’s prospective purchase of a majority share of NBC was timely. I’ve subsequently read Nicholas Carr’s article in The New York Times Magazine about the topic, and was impressed that many his insights were included in our conversation the other evening. He points out that television was initially thought to be the medium that would suffer least in the Internet era, due mainly to the size of watching video online. But as bandwidth has increased, tv is now scrambling like news and music have previously. And Carr agrees with us that net neutrality is crucial to ensuring that overzealous owners of “programming and plumbing” won’t use their power to control or infringe upon the information we seek to access.
Thanks for the link to the article by N. Carr. It helped me, for one, understand why you considered the discussion so timely. The supposed anger with which consumers might or will respond to big companies cramping their Web-surfing styles brought to mind Deborah Tannen’s argument that we need a better quality of things to be angry about, and on a more pedestrian level, it brought to mind Gabriel Iglesias’ quip about how “American’s don’t vote for president but they’ll vote for American Idol,” and how the presidential election would be more popular if marketed as made-for-TV competition named “Who’s Gonna Run This Bitch?” But I digress. I always thought of the BluRay as the next step of technological proggression that in my lifetime began with the 8-track, but seeing as to how the executives of TV are-if not quaking in their Bruno Maglis- at the least a bit worried. In my opinion, they should not be the only ones worried. The era of mergers has not been a happy one for the consumer, at least in my point of view and I’m frankly a little bit terrified of ending with a scenario where everything is owned by Rupert Murdoch or someone else Murdoch-like.