Here is my second post in the discussion about a new communications model, cross-posted from the IAOC blog.
In the introduction to his book, Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold wrote: "The 'killer apps' of tomorrow's mobile infocom industry won't be hardware devices or software programs, but social practices." [p.xii, Smart Mobs, 2002] I open our discussion today with this statement, because I believe that "social practices" is what has historically been given short shrift in the world of technology -- and technology-based communications. We professional communicators adopt the latest-greatest tech tools (often rather slowly!) but we don't generally give much deep thought to what these tools mean to those we apply them against, nor do we have any sense of what the consequences (unintended, especially) are of using these tools over time. I will be getting into a discussion about the politics of tools later, but for today, I want to look at social practices within the frame of "cooperation."
Our free market economy is based on the idea of cutthroat competition. Companies fight each other in the marketplace to win customers, gain revenue and defeat their adversaries. Politicians do the same. Non-profits and NGOs fight it out for funding. It is a war out there, where, despite promises that the "customer" will benefit (from lower prices, etc.), it often seems that the winners are generally the "fat cats." Now, I am not intending to get into an argument about economics here. But what I want to do is to consider the flip side of the coin of competition: cooperation. In the late 90s a term arose -- "coopetition" -- as companies, particularly in the high-tech sector, realized that it might be more fruitful in the end to cooperate on some things (standards, especially) while they competed on others. The growth of the internet was a key player in this move. With today's networked economy, we are now well positioned to consider a greater level of cooperation. People like Howard Rheingold have launched projects to investigate this possibility. What I want to do here is to begin a discussion of what a cooperative communications model would look like.
The first thing to realize is that we are not only talking here about business-to-business cooperation. In fact, that has been moving along in a wide variety of ways (as mentioned above). What is more interesting to me is what is happening with the "consumer." What happens when consumers want to cooperate with companies? Maybe they want to share ideas about new product features or give them feedback on their customer service. Maybe they want a company to play a greater role in the community or provide funding for an important project. What happens when consumers begin to cooperate with each other? Maybe they meet up in groups to protest a company's action, demonstrate a faulty product or demand a recall. Or, perhaps they are huge fans of a company's product and link up with others to discuss it, hack it and share with others what they learn. Does this cooperation always have to occur outside the influence of the company itself? Or can the organization do something to incubate it? I ask these questions in terms of producer - consumer relationships, but there are many other variations of organization - audience relationships we can ask the same questions about.
When we start digging into what cooperation means, we run into some interesting conundrums. Perhaps most obvious is that of secrecy. When you cooperate, you have to share information. The questions become: What information, and how much? Today, most organizations take the stance that, if they could, absolutely everything should be secret. They grudgingly give out some information...just as much as they need to to participate in their communities of interest (standards groups, industry associations, etc.) and to sell their products. [Again, I write about this in terms of corporations, but this applies equally to NGOs, politicians, etc.] If you have ever tried to get the price of a product or service from a website, tried to get a phone number to call the organization or contact information for an individual, you understand exactly what I mean. I would argue that this default to "secrecy" is more harmful to market success in the long run than a broader degree of competition would be. Bruno Latour studies science, probably the discipline most ill-connected to the public (it often seems that scientists have a vested interest in keeping us stupid non-scientists out of their pure little world. More on that another time.) His work offers an interesting baseline case for those of us who seek to understand the benefits of cooperation. He writes,
"If the traditional picture had the motto "The more disconnected a science the better," science studies says, "The more connected a science, the more accurate it may become." The quality of a science's reference does not come from some salto mortale out of discourse and society in order to access things, but depends rather on the extent of its transformations, the safety of its connections, the progressive accumulation of its mediations, the number of interlocutors it engages, its ability to make nonhumans accessible to words, its capacity to interest and to convince others, and its routine institutionalization of these flows...It is not a question of truthful scientists who have broken away from society and liars who are influenced by the vagaries of passion and politics, but one of highly connected scientists...and sparsely connected scientists limited only to words" [p. 97 Pandora's Hope, 1999]
In other words, success depends on a highly connected, deeply multi-directional communicative interaction that brings many people (and things) over to the scientist's side while integrating the science more deeply in the community. If a laboratory isn't getting their research funded, they might want to look at this issue.
For our purposes of developing a new communications model, we should ask the question: What if we took as our default total openness? What then, are those things that absolutely, positively HAVE to remain secret, and why? Product development plans? Employee lists and salaries? This is fodder for good future discussion.
This discussion of secrecy also relates to another conundrum: boundaries. What is the "inside" vs. the "outside" of a company? This is a difficult question, and becoming ever more so as an organization becomes more networked. From the standpoint of total secrecy, the "inside" might be 10 people around a boardroom table. Maybe even fewer. So, you have boundaries inside the organization too, depending on role and position. Then there are the boundaries between company and customer, company and investor, company and journalists, etc. It used to be that you could treat each of these audiences differently, as they had fairly impermeable boundaries around their functions as well. Now you cannot, given they are likely to be interconnected via the internet.
From our point of view, each boundary that exists can be seen as a gap that must be bridged through translation. It has been our job as communicators to translate the corporate messages to the "outside" -- but always with the knowledge of how we expected the outside to react. (Unfortunately, that advice has been often ignored as companies find out to their detriment when the scandal hits.) We are not the only translators, of course. Every time a receptionist talks to someone who called the company or an executive gives a speech, she is translating. Every time an employee posts to his blog, he is translating. Fan clubs that form around a product are translating and, often, seeking to cross the bridge back to the inside of the company to share their ideas. People, organizations, etc. take defending their boundaries to be a very serious matter. All you have to do is look at the often vicious war between journalists and bloggers to see boundary battles at work. This is because boundaries are a visible indicator of power, and when that power is threatened, war breaks out.
From the point of view of this conversation, however, what if we took the stance of identifying and deliberately breaking down boundaries in the name of cooperation? I am not advocating a universal destruction of all boundaries and setting up some Utopian ultra-cooperative state. That would be as bad as a completely non-cooperative state. I am seeking something quite different, something that acknowledges people as people, not objects. Something, as well, that is pragmatically workable in today's society. I find Donna Haraway's work on situated knowledge very fruitful as applied to this topic. Yesterday, we talked about Jurgen Habermas' theory of communicative action: if we get together in a truthful, sincere way and communicate using discourse to solve arguments, we can come to a rational conclusion. Now, Habermas tends to be a bit universalist and idealist. What Haraway's work adds is a highly personal standpoint we need that enables us to move away from impersonal, objectifying action even further.
Haraway uses the metaphor of vision. She deplores the "seeing everything from nowhere", the "god-trick" of our traditional command/control industrial society. [p. 189, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 1991] Rather, she wants to situate vision in the body, where it is, by necessity, partial, as compared to the all-seeing (power hungry) eye. She writes, "I would like to suggest how our insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision (though not necessarily organic embodiment and including technological mediation), and not giving in to the tempting myths of vision as a route to disembodiment and second-birthing, allows us to construct usable, but not an innocent, doctrine of objectivity." [p. 189, Simians] This partial vision inherently gives accountability: "So, not so perversely, objectivity turns out to be about particular and specific embodiment, and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all limits and responsibility. The moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objective vision." [p. 190, Simians]
So, what does this mean for us as professional communicators? Basically, this type of partial, embodied view prevents us from practicing "mass communications." There is no way we can have such personal interactions with masses of people: it doesn't scale. But do we really need a "mass communications"? Ask yourself, how much of that work is wasted? You send out 20,000 emails for a 1 to 3% return. You broadcast an ad to millions of people, and maybe receive a handful of sales. We have honed our technology, our metrics, our demographics to this world of mass communication, accepting the waste that ensues (it doesn't cost us that much anyways, in the larger scheme of things). What if, instead, you could focus on the 1-3%? As a consumer, I'd love to see the resulting decrease in message bombardment that I get every day!
In practical terms, how can we develop a model that is based on this type of partial, embodied vision? I believe it has to be based on creating a network of people, who are connected to your organization, but more importantly, are connected to each other. By identifying the people who are influential in this network, you can talk to each of them on a personal level, and they will then translate you to their network, etc. You put the network to work for you, relying on other people, traditionally "outside" of your organization to do your communications for you. From an infrastructure perspective, then, our attention needs to be on developing and nurturing that network. This is a very different set of activities for communications people than they have previously practiced. It requires, for example, more autonomy to converse with people, and a giving up of control. It also requires actively recruiting people from both the inside and the outside of the company, bringing them through boundaries and cooperating with them in a bi- or multi-directional way.
This brings me to my third, and last, conundrum (for today): reputation. As we have learned, completely open networks are highly vulnerable to abuse in terms of spam, trolls, etc. Rheingold wrote, "Reputation marks the spot where technology and cooperation converge." [p. 114, Smart Mobs] We have to be careful here, however, as we want to avoid universal reputation as much as we want to avoid universal surveillance (one is the flip side of the other).
Michel Foucault equates surveillance to discipline, and demonstrates how it expresses itself in terms of power, first from above, then from within: "...you have the system of surveillance [Panopticon], which...involves very little expense. There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself." [p. 155, Power/Knowledge, 1980] We live in a society today where we are increasingly under surveillance. I would argue that the most prevalent surveillance we are under today is not via cameras, but via our finances, represented by the credit report (now investigated for employment, insurance, mortgages, rent, bank accounts, and, of course, credit cards). But wait! The credit report is also a concrete pointer to your "universal" reputation. Frankly, this type of power (both externally and internally expressed) scares the hell out of me.
In my quest here to find an alternative communications model to the universalist, objectifying model we have today, the last thing we want is some kind of universal reputation system. Therefore, we need to think about what a partial, embodied reputation would look like expressed in technology (as I am not, by any means, anti-technology). It is obvious that any person is knowledgeable in some areas, and not in others. Additionally, if someone is interested in an area they know little about, but seeks to learn more, he or she shouldn't be disqualified from participating in a community of interest due to some lack of "reputation." How can representatives of an organization (say the PR person) open up a space to converse with people in his or her audience, without it being overrun by abusers, but without denying entry to people who truly want to contribute? Rheingold writes, "Everyone in a group has to know who else is contributing, free riding, and sanctioning in order to solve both free rider and coordination problems on the fly with maximum trust and minimum function. This is the key to the group-cooperation leverage bestowed by reputation systems and many-to-many communication media." [p. 176, Smart Mobs]
Today, I am not sure how to implement a system like this. There are a wide variety of people thinking about these same issues, and I am following them closely.
In my view, cooperation is a hell of a lot more complicated than competition. With only three issues discussed today -- secrecy, boundaries and reputation -- we run up against some significant challenges. However, the benefits to this type of approach are increasingly apparent, and, in many ways, our "audiences" are already moving rapidly to cooperate, leaving the organization out of the mix. As professional communicators, we have an obligation to figure out how to deal with this situation. I'd like for us to deal with it in a new way vs. ham-handed attempts at wresting back control.
As always, I look forward to your thoughts on all of this. Our next discussion will take on the politics and meaning of the tools we are increasingly adopting in this new networked communications environment.
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