Tag: abstraction

Categories
Expertise

How Amateur Content Makes Us Dumb

newspaper collagePhoto: mypixbox

It’s a misnomer that the web was the innovation that gave amateurs their place alongside experts in credibility. We were actually primed for this during the industrial revolution when things like hot dogs became an abstraction of real food. Processed and pushed into its casing, hot dogs look nothing like and have no relation to anything they are made from. As meals go, this is one for the amateurs. Real foodies eat sweet pork sausage that is made on-site at the restaurant. And the real, real foodies (experts), make sure that the pork didn’t come from an industrial hog.

The web did however reinforce what we already knew – that you can’t define expertise by whether you are a blogger or a journalist, whether you have a PhD or not, or whether you have put in your 10,000 hours, so the distinction between amateur and expert remains along the line of abstraction – or hot dogs vs sustainable sweet pork sausage.

Here’s how I look at it —

Amateur content is 1) written for a mass audience and 2) does not make connections between larger systems or ideas. Just like you don’t care where your hot dog came from or what it’s made of, amateurs write in a silo and on the surface. This has nothing to do with size. Both Oprah and a small personal development blogger can distribute amateur content on any given day (and do).

Expert content on the other hand is 1) written for a niche audience – but in a way that a mass audience can learn from – and 2) does make connections between those larger topics and ideas.

Amateur content has devolved into meta content, where it’s increasingly abstracted to the point where everything is “how to be rich, be happy, quit your day job, have sex every day and live well” and in these five buckets (happiness, money, work, life, relationships), we’re seeing people repeat the same things over and over to the point where there is no value anymore.

Oh it is alluring to read, again and again, how you can incubate and execute an idea or motivate yourself on a Monday, especially when can’t quite seem to master these seemingly elusive tasks. But it’s also a self-referential profanity of the mind.

And rather pointless I might add, as you would not still be consuming such content if any of it was of any value. All processes are the same – pick one and go with it. Or develop your own if you want to be teacher’s pet, but don’t ignore the deep dive that getting your fingers sticky with actual knowledge provides. Expert content drives a whole other level of learning and discovery and questioning.

The five buckets of furthering your own sparkle and hustle are only meta descriptors for the actual beef of living. Work, life, love, money and happiness are useful insofar as they are labels or subject headings to the intricate web of understanding. But when amateur content insists that we relate to our lives on this meta level, it ignores well, the rest of the iceberg.

This isn’t to say amateur content isn’t entertaining or necessary in some contexts. I like a good hot dog from time to time, love Oprah all the time, and generally consume amateur content for different (and good) reasons throughout the day. But we need more writers to create expert content and more publishers to distribute it. Not only for the sanity of our selves, but for the evolution of media.

Content will have to be that which cannot be easily copied, and that which cannot be abstracted into a big meta bow. And it will have to dive deep into the many sub-headings and levels, continually sifting and winnowing through energy innovations, media, healthcare, philosophy, the sharing economy,  technology, fashion, the food industry, political history and much, so very much more.

Categories
Economies

How the iPad is (Thankfully) Destroying Our Economy

iPad 2 - HomescreenPhoto: connorsmac

There are a cohort of people who are still buying McMansions in the suburbs; I see the photos on Facebook, “Our New Home!” revealing beige wall-to-wall carpeting (still mysteriously associated with upward mobility), reminiscent of the early 90s, chosen to soften the echoes of monstrously high ceilings usually reserved for public spaces. The outside of the home is similarly beige with french windows framed by a brick veneer and a peaked roof that inevitably evokes some strange sense of American pride and envy… for it does look nice if you’re just glancing by in a car.

But despite the constant commercial endorsement of this wearisome American Dream, such idyllic photos no longer sway the hearts or pocketbooks of the majority of young people who have made it clear they will not be the ones to save the housing market. Even the young billionaire Mark Zuckerburg rents, and in the city, not the suburbs.

It wasn’t too long ago that people flaunted materialism. “Goods [were] exclusive or status related rather than universal, private rather than public” reports economist Tyler Cowen. But whereas the automobile enabled freedom for previous generations, today’s generation use digital devices as a means for self expression. That has made possible an economy focused on knowledge and experiences, not consumer goods.

E-book author Ev Bogue took a photo of every single item he owns and encourages visitors to his site to “count, there aren’t many.” His belongings total a fundamental 32 things. Bogue is a proponent of augmented humanity, and encourages his readers to “cultivate presence at the intersection of life and Instagr.am,” a popular iPhone photo app.

“The incentive with these apps is to live a more extraordinary and present life,” Bogue argues. “If you aren’t living, there’s nothing much to Instagr.am, and thus people will forget about you. No one necessarily wants to see an Instagr.am of a desk. We know this, so I don’t often see photos of desks on Instagr.am.”

While Bogue may fall on the side of extreme in the experience economy for his privileged stylings, his penchant for walks in the forest over a new dining set is shared by his peers. We prefer to live by our screens, not among objects, and so the knowledge economy is just that – in our minds (and on our iPads) and not in the revenue-generating sector of the economy.“The funny thing is,” Cowen argues, “getting away from materialism on such a large scale – whatever the virtues of the switch – really, really hurts. It is the hurt that we in America are living right now.”

We assumed innovation would arrive the way it always has, but technology gave innovation new forms, and insistence on the-way-it-always-was kind of economy subsequently delivered the situation we’re in today: a growing income inequality, stagnant median income, and the financial crisis.

Cowen admits “you can be an optimist when it comes to our happiness and personal growth yet still be a pessimist when it comes to generating economic revenue or paying back our financial debts,” and “even if we can, at the personal level, manage to feel fulfilled under slower economic growth, it is not compatible with how modern politics [and economics] is structured, namely as a ravenous beast.”

Obviously Cowen knows something screwy is happening. But for all of Cowen’s awareness of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole, he never goes as far to eschew the current economic framework, a system simply not suited for a knowledge and experience-based economy.

That system is legacy-based, and its “operating system for money is obsolete,” argues media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. “It is optimized for a different era than the one we are living in today. It is incompatible with Web 2.0 and the Interneted world.”

The Internet has allowed an economy where money, the dependency and abstraction of which has caused the financial crisis, is not the singular centralized currency. On the decentralized web, reputation is a currency. Authority is another. Data, influence, badges, credits and identity are also currencies. There are several currencies on the free and open web in fact – none of which are widely recognized at J. Crew. Increasingly that’s because the point is not to exchange value for consumer goods, but for the stuff inside our screens.

I’ll take a deeper dive into the economy and currencies our digital lives are creating in part two of this post later this week.

Categories
e-Commerce

Why E-Commerce Needs to Stop Aggregation and Start Getting Social

Most of us would agree that the internet is biased towards social connection, yet many e-commerce or f-commerce experiences are not. In the olden days, bazaars weren’t only about consuming “stuff,” but were a social space to meet up with friends and exchange information.

Today, instead of a peer-to-peer economy, we have relationships with our brands. We don’t learn what’s happening in our world, but instead learn how much smaller the new iPad is.

The mom blogosphere in particular has risen to fill that void, up to a point. Bloggers and readers exchange ideas, rumors and facts that matter to them, but companies quickly co-opt the majority of well-intentioned blogs to sell more stuff instead of creating more social value. Ultimately, such actions have degraded blogs to what we have today: a list of product features and giveaways.

Companies do this because of their inability to embrace nuance, being solely dedicated to the dollar. You can see this play out in how companies structure themselves. Many companies create an e-commerce site that is simply an inventory list with no social value whatsoever. This means that many other companies can then take advantage of those sites because they don’t offer anything except a price on a product. So those other companies rise up another level of abstraction and become a search engine or aggregator, which creates even less value than before.

What we’re seeing now, as a result of the recession, is that you can’t just keep abstracting how you make money at a higher and higher level. Indeed, each time we distance ourselves from the most basic of human interactions – that is, a face-to-face conversation – the more dangerous it is for our economy.

Take a look at Appaloosa, a hedge fund that employs 250 people and Apple, a company that employs about 35,000 people and earned around $6 billion in 2009. “Appaloosa, the hedge fund, earned about as much as Apple in 2009 by speculating on… well, we don’t really know,” argues Jeffrey Hollender.

And many would argue it was just that kind of speculation – or abstraction – that got us into all of our financial problems in the first place.

For e-commerce and f-commerce, this means an opportunity to pivot to new models by combining commerce with community to replicate the peer-to-peer economy, where value isn’t limited to dollars and point of sale, but expands to include the concept of sharing and access just as it would in real life.

Ultimately, that is what every e-commerce site should be doing – not attempting a relationship between brand and customer, but enabling connections and conversations between customers.

Which even in this age of social media, very few companies do successfully.