Tag: member

Categories
Behind-the-Business

Got a Right to Be Wrong

This is the first installment in a series of behind-the-scenes posts on Kontrary.

Ideas are common, so I’ll tell you now that how I came up with the idea for Kontrary isn’t interesting. What is interesting is how immediately I jumped into a case of “professor syndrome” where I believed that for Kontrary to work, I would have to be less personal and aspirational, and more editorial and analytical. I know better. I know better, but still, I held onto the notion.

I thought business was serious business. And I confused serious with significance in thinking about charging for content. The mistake has cost me hours upon days of sitting fraught in front of my screen with dozens of tabs of half-finished posts. I struggle to provide high value at a level that is interesting and relatable. That is, I struggle with being myself, because myself doesn’t seem good enough.

We all tell ourselves these invisible scripts every day, and they go into overdrive when we try anything new. We literally have a physical and biological reaction that tells us to stop, back away and let it go. Ramit Sethi has a great exercise in one of his courses where he asks people to identify these scripts. Here is a sampling of what people say:

What will I do if I succeed? Do I deserve to succeed?

Not good enough – Just writing those words makes me irritated as hell. But that’s what I battle with.

I can’t charge for my services. I’m not a professional. I have no CFP. I have no client base. No one will pay me.

My industry is saturated with people who have more experience/qualifications than myself.

What skills, expertise do I have that someone will be willing to pay top dollar for? I’m afraid I’m just not good enough, special enough, have great enough ideas to warrant the financial life I so desire.

If we listen to the imposter, we have to be experts to succeed. Nothing could be farther from the truth, of course. You don’t have to be an expert all the time, and really, people don’t want you to be. The saying, “the customer is always right” is true, not because they are, but because it’s always possible that you’re wrong. That your company is wrong. That your products might suck. That you’ll make mistakes and have to own up.

Maybe it’s because I have run multiple organizations and have had tons of people disagree with me, but I know that people are just looking for you to be human, for your company to be human. To recognize themselves in your products and your values.

When I started my last position, I had a volunteer write a tirade against me before she met me and email it to her entire address book. Point by point, she laid out why I was the wrong person to lead the organization. The Board that had just hired me was incensed (it was an indictment on them as well, after all), but my first thought was how invested this volunteer was in the organization and how highly she esteemed its mission. I immediately asked her to have coffee so we could talk about her concerns. Anyone that is that protective of something is someone I want to meet.  You have to care a lot to write an email like that.

When faced with conflict, I’ve noticed most people’s reactions are to do the opposite. Most people will clam up, stand by their ways, and shine their shoes. Good companies understand that they are not infalliable though. Good customer service understands that you will make mistakes, people will be upset and it is your job to make it right. Really terrific customer service, however, understands that sometimes you will not make mistakes, but people will still be upset, and it is still your job to make it right.

I got into a car accident last year (it was my fault), and I remember calling my insurance company Geico crying. The woman on the other end of the line was asking me questions I couldn’t answer and I snapped. The rep didn’t even flinch. She continued to be so warm that just having her on the phone made me feel safe and like everything was going to be okay (which it was). I had many conversations with numerous Geico reps after that and every single one of the calls was similar. Even when I sold my car and cancelled my insurance, I wanted to invite the woman to dinner.

I didn’t have to train Geico to be a good company; the company trained me to be a good customer.

Your product doesn’t have to be perfect. Customers and clients and readers, they will be patient while you figure it out. We all root for you to succeed. And when you succeed, your customers get to be a part of that. And when you fail – but you’re human – your customers are just as proud to be a part of that.

Expertise doesn’t win, but empathy does. The biggest mistake you can make in any position is to act like a know-it-all. Everyone just wants to be heard. No matter your title, your job is only to make that your mission.

You’re good enough because you try. You’re good enough because you care. You’re good enough because you showed the professor the door. Now, go.

Categories
Blogging Innovation Social media

Work is Irrelevant

Work, that of pursuing a specific passion or purpose, has become irrelevant. As technology increasingly gains momentum, we’ve moved from the age of work/life blur to the age of tech/life blur.

For instance, if you’re a writer, it’s not the content that matters (the work itself), but how the content is consumed and packaged. “We are on the brink of accessing digital content through what they call the ‘splinternet,’” argues Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath. “Devices, hardware, software, applications and content, rather than being offered interoperably in a wide-open World Wide Web are increasingly going to be stacked up in proprietary ecosystems in which denizens can talk only to each other.”

So iPad apps like Flipboard, Zite and others like it are becoming the norm and offer “a much more natural way to consume content on a tablet, and the aggregation they provide is like having a customized newspaper available at any time,” argues Matthew Ingram on GigaOm. “The aggregation, personalization and customization that such apps allow is the future of content consumption.”

The introduction of the tablet has changed the reading experience such that it is now acceptable to charge for content. This is really the way the New York Times metered subscription is set up. When you pay for a New York Times subscription, you’re not really paying for content (the work), but paying to read it on your computer screen, your tablet, your Kindle, and your mobile app. You’re paying to read it how you want to on the splinternet. You’re not paying for the work, but the technology to consume it.

In the age of newspapers, we did charge for information, but now we charge for the customizability of how that information is delivered. It’s the media company’s job to design the experience of their digital offerings, not just create the content and they can’t keep up. So now, even though newspapers didn’t invent the printing press (the rapidity of typographical text production led to newspapers), they’re being pressured to invent the next revolution.

In reality, what will happen is just how the Internet created blogs (and what many are now calling a sub-optimal reading experience), tech start-ups will continue to invent new ways to consume information, and as a result, new companies and creators will come along with new types of content in response.

This is all happening at such a rapid pace (and in all industries, not just media which I’ve only used as an example), that we’re much more concerned with the rhythm and output of innovation than we are of the work itself.

We know most content on the web is crap. We know there’s nothing really amazing or revolutionary about what we consume on our iPhones. The most popular activity is Scrabble. I like to look and see where people are on Foursquare. You might check on the weather. On Google, I rarely find what I’m actually looking for, but I will receive twenty-four million results for trying. The tech/life blur says nevermind the banality of what you consume on technology, just be subservient to the fact that it exists.

That is why there is such a ginormous focus on work fulfillment when we have never cared about such a notion before. We want to work towards something bigger than ourselves, but technology is already bigger than ourselves, and so there’s a certain confusion, an aimlessness and a fractionation of our work. That which tells us that if you’re a writer, you’re no longer a writer. You’re a blogger, and an amateur coder, you can sell, you’re a marketer, you know PR, software and a bit of graphic design, you’re an accountant and you’re a publisher. Your side projects feed into your day job. And all of your jobs feed through the Internet. This is what it means to live on the Internet, consumed by the processes instead of the action.

Work is empty. Technology fills us. It’s not what we do, but how we do it. Of course that can only last so long before the focus on how we do something obliterates all meaning of what we’re doing.

Categories
Women

Women in Tech Need to Stop Segregating Themselves

   I don’t particularly like writing about women and tech. It’s uncomfortable. And it makes me uncomfortable. It means sometimes critiquing people that have been nice to me. It also means critiquing an industry that people like. It’s companies like Facebook, after all, not BP.

It also means that because I know and have experienced exactly how the tech industry is covert – and not in a Chuck Bartowski kind of way – that I should somehow know how to navigate the mines. That I should somehow be farther ahead than I am. But I don’t. And I’m not.

I don’t think it’s just me. It’s other women too. They feel uncomfortable. The simple act of writing about women in tech means I’m asking them to define their relationship with tech as more than their roles in PR, human resources, marketing and community management. It’s insinuating that those roles aren’t good enough. That women need to code. That they need to be the founders and visionaries and C-level execs. There is a sense that women don’t want these roles, but really, there is not even an inch – not even a centimeter! – of a clear path to get there.

So, women in tech are stuck on a career roundabout when men logically take the next exits to code, found, and invest. Pseudo-equality exists, but only to satiate the cries for respect and inclusion, not to actually address or eliminate sexism. For instance, the typical response to the lack of women in tech is to form pockets of women, which just adds more turbulence to the discussion: tech blogs publish posts from women about a woman’s role in tech; a tech meet-up features presentations from female-only founders; women form mailing lists for other women to discuss the problem of more women in tech.

In reality, guest posts from women on tech blogs need to be about topics other than themselves. When women are invited to blog on Tech Crunch, they write about women. They don’t write about tech. Last time I checked, however, our knowledge extends far beyond that of ourselves. And, just because a woman is speaking doesn’t mean she speaks for me. I don’t particularly like talking about shoes and I certainly don’t believe that because women love to shop that we control the Internet. And yet, that’s the message so far, twice-over this year, when women take the pen on Tech Crunch.

Without a voice in these places and without access to leadership in others, it seems women are keen to start women-only groups and mailing lists to promote new leadership and get ourselves heard. But while that’s an easy route, it’s not the most effective. Particularly because existing leaders and power-brokers will never attend your meetups and will never join your conversations. We all just end up talking to people like ourselves.

Too many women-only groups exist now to stop them, but really, I don’t disagree with them in theory, just in execution. So here’s a simple solution now: co-plan and co-sponsor your next event. Bring both audiences and decisions-makers together. Invite a man to your Google Group in exchange for a seat at his CEO breakfast. Separate interests are well and good, but not when you silo dialogue and interaction.

And that’s doubly and triply true at tech events. The segregation of women and men on stage needs to stop. So, if you organize an event an like the DC Tech Meetup and you get complaints about the persistence of your all-male panels, your response should not be to create an all-female panel.

There are no make-up tests for equality. You can’t just show up with all the available women in one room and expect a gold star. It is far less important to see all the women in tech at once than it is to see all the women in tech as speakers over time consistently and often. There are a minority of women in tech (for reasons we’ve talked so far about here and here), but that doesn’t beget special gloves. Such an event is unavoidably condescending, and it also means you won’t have any women for your next event; the cycle of men on stage continues.

(Case in point, of the seventeen speakers and panelists scheduled at yesterday’s DC Tech Meetup, the event following their all-female panel, only one was a woman. That’s not good enough.)

I don’t think that the majority of men, or women for that matter, are intentionally holding women back and fencing them out of the tech industry. But no one is being particularly smart about the issue either. It seems everyone is throwing spaghetti on the cupboard to see what sticks. But we can do better. This is start-up land, after all. We know how to test and evaluate, to solve problems and find solutions. And we already know, the only way to have enough people working on the big problems, is to solve this little one.

Categories
The Internets

This is Your Tech Life

The weather has turned, and now I am feeling restless. My eyes are glazed as I look down at the timestamp on the lower right-hand side of my screen. There is a mere splinter of sunlight on the brick wall outside our window and oh, how it makes my foot tap, my chest tighten. Can I stand another moment on my computer? I wonder.

It used to be that if we could escape the cubicle, we could escape the aimless sound of settling that ticks off nine-to-five. Now, we want to escape the sitting. We want to escape the screen. The poor cubicle isn’t forcing our dreams to hunch over; the screen inside of it is.

People are envious of me because of the cubicle thing. I work remotely, which means my dining room table is my office. Ask any other remote or freelance or location-independent worker however, and they will agree with me: it’s lonely. When you can work wherever you want, the path of least resistance is to sit inside your house all day and meet people through the Internet.

Social disconnection isn’t really the Internet’s fault though. People waved to neighbors from their porches until air conditioning arrived. Now, I don’t meet my neighbors until the fire alarm goes off and we all wait outside for the fireman’s clearance. I don’t even bring my computer; everything I own that matters is in the cloud.

Back online, here is my indulgence: I like visiting a person’s About page and studying their photo. I like turning my head to examine the wrinkle on their chin when they smile. And I like looking into their eyes. Indeed we are on the Internet, in part, because it allows us to stare.

I am intoxicated with my Internet life until I live my real life. Where all the senses inform my experience, not just what goes on inside my head. I particularly like going out for dinner and drinks because the service industry has not let go of looking you in the eye – their tip depends on the mysterious and momentary connection that results. And then there is running and because I recently sold my car, bicycling. I like when the humidity suffocates your lungs and you can feel everything in the air pushing back on you and yet, you move forward.

So, there are days I want to take the web middleman from his place between me and the rest of the world never to return. But my relationship with the web is a paradox. I can’t imagine life without it. And it is here that I want to say we should stop looking down at our computers, and down at our phones, and down at the rest of the screens that will inevitably arrive during the the rest of our lives. We should rebel.

We should look up.

But I cannot do this myself.  And so I feel the stillness pooling in the bottom of sitting muscles no matter if I go for a run or a drink. And the glow of the screen lights my face. If we were in a movie, this would be the doomsday ending. But somehow, I think it will all be okay.

Categories
Women

The Buck Stops With Generation Z

Gender inequality exists, but only in the workplace. Young women grow up believing in equality, but when she enters the workplace, she hits a brick wall.  That will stop when Generation Z joins the workforce. Not because gendered roles will somehow evolve in the next decade, but because technology will.

Generation Z is the most technologically immersed and advanced generation ever. They are known as “digital natives”  because they have never known a world without iPhones, laptops, video games, chat windows, tabs and texts. On airplanes, toddlers are abated with digital shows and video games instead of stuffed animals and paper coloring books.

Such tech-ubiquity means Gen Z holds the following traits above and beyond any other generation, all of which will eliminate gender inequality:

1. Multi-tasking. Gen Z are innate multi-taskers, and are primed to want instant and immediate outcomes. It also means that Gen Z wants clarity and simplicity – some say they tend to oversimplify – but this is good for inequality. Gen Z won’t have the time or patience to engage in the nuances of gender, and thus, will simply allow people to just be “who they are.”

In the “Becoming Chaz” documentary, Chaz Bono remarked it was the youngest members of his family that took his transition from female to male the easiest. In fact, these youngsters said it wasn’t a big deal at all. That’s just “who he is,” they said.

2. Globalized empathy. Part of their ease with gender is that Gen Z is well-educated. “They are much more connected to the outside world than previous generations,” says Alec Mackenzie, an eighth-grade Spanish, language arts and film teacher. “They know what is hanging in the Louvre because they’ve seen it on the Internet. They know more about the world because they visit it on the computer.”

As such, they are much more empathetic and knowledgeable to the plights of their peers. Generally known to be wise beyond their years (“12 has become the new 22,” says one Gen Zer) and living in a fully postmodern era, they are especially aware that everything is a social construct, particularly gender. They shy away from sharp classifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black.

3. Lack of ambition. Their elders are already bemoaning Gen Z’s lack of ambition, but that is really their dis-enthrallment with traditional power structures and control. Gen Z is growing up in a world where the old power structures have already fallen apart (marriage: divorce, wealth: financial meltdown, security: terrorism), so there is nothing left to put on a pedestal.

Climbing the ladder will become less important as a result. Gen Z will job-hop in their careers to find satisfaction, just like they multi-task in their daily lives. They’re expected to have at least five careers and more than 20 employers in positions that don’t even exist today. It’s hard to be ambitious when you don’t know what the future will hold.

“They are very collaborative and creative. They will change the workplace dramatically in terms of work style and expectations,” argues technology professor Larry Rosen. While Gen Y strived for team-oriented work approaches and collaborative environments, it will be Gen Z who really reaps the benefit. As old power structures melt away, and the status quo becomes working together instead of in competition, women and men will find themselves on an even-playing field.

4. Pleasure-seeking. Those power structures will shift from the workplace to personal lives. Previous generations have paved the way for a workplace that was first live to work (Boomers), then work to live or work/life balance (Gen X), and is now live with work or work/life blur (Gen Y). Taking this to it’s natural conclusion, Gen Z will live. Work will take a backseat to Gen Z’s hedonism.

Already Gen Z has a reputation as pleasure-seeking and consumerist. Not to mention anyone can be a star now and have their own following due to the decentralized web. Consumerism used to confer status (which was traditionally wrapped up in a man’s success and career), but Gen Z will buy things simply to feel something. When that happens, when men and women care less about power and more about pleasure, equality will be easier.

5. Remote workers. “Computers have blurred the line between the workplace and home for adults, and the same is true for today’s students,” argues Duane Mendoza, a technology resource teacher. Via web-based lessons, students in Mendoza’s yearbook class are able to work from anywhere.

Gen Y blurred work and life to work remotely because they wanted flexibility and fulfillment. But Gen Z will work remotely because they know no other way. They prefer to communicate via email and text. While replacing side-by-side and eye-to-eye human connections with quick, disembodied e-exchanges may seem counter-intuitive, it will allow sexual innuendo to stop. Not being in the same physical location alone will decrease harassment. And when Gen Z isn’t working in person, they won’t be able to see the perpetuity of men in power that keeps men in power.

Gen Y believes in equality, but can’t have it because they’re stuck in a workplace with outdated paradigms. Gen Z won’t be stuck there though. They’ll be at the coffee shop with their friends on their laptops. As a result, Gen Z will be the first generation where women and men are mutually respected not just in their personal lives and relationships, but also at work.

In the comments below, let me know me know the single biggest insight you gained from today’s post. Of course, if you have additional ideas or resources about Gen Z, technology, and the future of equality, share them below as well.

Categories
The Objectivity Myth

Old Media Needs an Opinion

Journalists are objective. Bloggers are not. The two have been duking it out since the dawn of the Internet age. Journalists think objectivity will save their jobs and bloggers know that is nonsense. Old media is not irrelevant, but they are digging themselves into a hole. Let me explain.

First, understand that journalism has never been objective. Newspapers first emerged as political publications funded by partisan parties and read by the top of society’s pyramid. Then in a move to both democratize media and increase profits, newspapers dropped their prices and attracted multitudes of immigrants and workers as subscribers in order to sell those eyeballs to eager advertisers.

That should sound similar to today’s content farm with one big exception – newspapers were written by an elite group of thought-leaders (and still are), and so the power to create and distribute information remained in the hands of just a few.

Fast-forward a century, give or take a few decades, and you have the media industry that politics and technology built. But now the Internet has given everyone the opportunity to create and distribute information. No longer is news controlled by large media conglomerates, but by anyone who wants to contribute to the conversation.

On the Internet, we have largely admitted that individual and institutional objectivity is impossible. Not even Google tries to offer impartial news results when you search, preferring instead to offer up “the most articulate and passionate people arguing both sides of the equation,” says Google News’ founder, Krishna Bharat. Today we trust algorithms to deliver objectivity since humans cannot.

Objectivity is null on the web because the reader can always self-verify and fact-check themselves. That is what the proliferation of information is there for. You will be tracked. “Objectivity is a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links,” technologist David Weinberger argued back in the day. “Transparency is the new objectivity.”

Fair enough if you have the time to click on all of those links, but none of us do. Not to mention transparency often stifles meaningful dialogue. Nevertheless and despite my own bias on it, transparency is just as useful as objectivity in holding individuals and companies accountable, and as a big bonus, it doesn’t require you to act like an impartial noob.

Now, here’s what’s important.

The real reason newspapers can’t transition online is because they’re holding onto the veil of objectivity as the reason for their relevance. Readers, in turn, cry foul because they know objectivity is unreasonable, and instead uphold the virtues of new media. Then everyone declares traditional media is dead.

Sad face.

The thing is, objectivity is irrelevant, not news organizations. Rule number one in running a business is to determine the value you provide to your customers. A newspaper’s value doesn’t lie in it’s impartiality, so it’s ridiculous that traditional media continues to place those virtues on a pedestal. The traditional news model is not outdated, but journalists’ ideologies are.

Why do news companies continue to praise impartiality? Well, the veil of objectivity did allow newspapers to have a successful advertiser-subscriber model. And being profitable subsequently allowed newspapers to fund long investigations that readers came to rely on. So media organizations often confuse their business model, objective reporting and actual good journalism – that is, investigative reporting, news that is highly crafted and cared for, and that continuous sifting and winnowing for the truth at all costs.

A journalist doesn’t ask “Why? What? How?” because they’re impartial. They ask because they care. They ask because they have passion for the topic. They ask because they want to uncover injustices, right wrongs and make a difference.

There’s no reason why the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and New York Times should insist on objectivity as superiority. It has nothing to do with the actual amazing content they provide day in and day out.

The real travesty is not the loss of impartiality then, which never existed anyway, but the fact that without big profits, there are no big budgets, and no big investigations. Only half of the states in the U.S. now have even one full-time reporter in Washington, D.C., for instance. Can we keep our politicians accountable through our computer screens if a smaller and smaller number of people show up in real life?

No, we cannot. Nor can we uphold fair labor practices or ensure financial rigor at banks or keep up with everything else that’s important to our society. Blogs don’t have big budgets either. So journalists and bloggers both end up having to pander to page-view journalism, which serves advertisers alone (witness the devolution of media).

Here’s what the New York Times and the rest should do. Let go of objectivity. It’s elitist, it’s unattainable and it’s not important. Talk about real benefits. Charge for access and load up on advertisers to make mad money and deliver mad value.

It’s okay to have an opinion. In fact, it’s what makes us human.

Categories
Economies

3 Drawbacks of Reputation as Currency

Three facesPhoto: Ygor Oliveira

We talked about how reputation as currency on the web has the potential to be quite powerful. But there are drawbacks to using reputation so fluently. Here are three:

1. You Can’t Have a Bad Day.
Our current economy uses money as a currency, which is great because you don’t need to know or trust me to exchange value. With money as a currency, it doesn’t matter if you’re in a good mood all the time or if you snap at the Home Depot cashier or not. It’s an impersonal exchange.

Reputation, on the other hand, doesn’t allow such flexibility. In fact, your reputation’s value is based solely on so-called “good” actions which are defined by a larger system’s expectations rather than what benefits your individual values or goals.

Reputation as the web’s currency (currently in use as the reviews you left on Amazon, your eBay seller ranking, your Klout score, etc.) sounds great until we realize it is a universal truth that you can’t have pleasure without pain.

People do have bad days (even on the Internet). More than that, people make mistakes and fail often. A system that ignores the very basis of how we learn and solely focuses on the positive is a difficult system to keep up with.

2. You Can Be Someone Different Entirely.
Which leads us to the next issue… reputation as currency forces everyone online to fit into a certain mold and exhibit certain behaviors until we have a web dripping in happiness. And a bunch of trolls. People can create a web presence that has nothing to do with their true selves. And on the flip side, they’re also forced to create anonymous profiles to express their real ideas.

Either way, people can create and manipulate who they are and their reputation easier than ever. That’s important because reputation is based on trust, and the more that we force people to be different than who they are, the more difficult it will be to rely on reputation as reasonable indicator of credibility.

3. You Have To Be Large and In Charge.
Trust development is being outstripped by technology. Whereas trust used to occur over a period of time as a result of working closely with another, now we feel like we can “trust” someone with a quick glance at their Google trail. And that’s a problem for the un-plugged.

“The people who have the highest reputation scores are usually the people who are the most public,” argues Paul Adams. Those who are willing to live their life more freely on the Internet are the reputation winners. No one is re-tweeting your stellar shoe recommendation to the stranger on the Metro. If you’re building relationships in real life or want to maintain some semblance of privacy, too bad.

Online reputation is inherently unbalanced toward the happy, fake and loud. It’s good enough for now, but if we want our social architecture to scale in any sort of useful or meaningful way, we need to re-program how reputation works on the web.

Categories
Future of Work

Fare Thee Well, Boss

The boss-employee relationship is defunct. Managers think young workers aren’t willing to pay dues, but really young workers aren’t willing to be employees. Managers dangle the lure of a raise or a title, but young workers just want to build something together as a team.

The new org chart shouldn’t be based on hierarchy then, but a horizontal ladder of peer-to-peer management, where employee and boss teach and learn from each other. They share, knowledge, experience and ideas.

Working together in service to a larger vision is a more human way of employment, but it is antithetical to how businesses currently run. A business is successful – no matter what it’s product, salsa or insurance – because it can replicate a system to make that  salsa, distribute the salsa and find customers to buy the salsa over and over again. The 5,674th jar of salsa has the same chance at delighting a customer and turning a profit as the first.

Start-ups call this the secret sauce.

That’s why many people love working at start-ups so much (and why many people don’t). At a large company, you advance your career not on the originality of your own ideas, but because you can showcase increasing familiarity and understanding of the company’s secret sauce. You’re the company man.

At a start-up, particularly in the beginning, all ideas are equal. The secret sauce is unknown. It’s a mystery. The mode of work is to test, experiment and recycle constantly. Will it work to do it this way? How about this way? It is a puzzle, an unfinished essay, half of a log cabin. The end result is only known as something great in the mind’s vision. A large company buys a start-up because the start-up figured out the replicable system.

When a company finds the secret sauce, it is institutionalized because it works. A hierarchy is put in place to ensure it continues to work and that no one deviates from the system, because that would put the company’s success at risk.

Originality is siloed into its own department, but companies do have to keep pace with innovation, so orders to add to or subtract from the secret sauce are handed down from those who are most familiar with the company’s system, typically upper-management.

You usually have to advance through a company’s hierarchy to change the system, because factory workers don’t have their own widget factories to experiment with, for instance. In order to know all there is about creating a widget you have to continue to be promoted. Hierarchy makes sense.

But wait, we don’t make widgets in the knowledge economy.

The Internet gives everyone connected to it the same opportunity to experiment on the same platform, whether you’re a company or individual. Now low-level employees have front-level, do-it-yourself access to the tools that create the systems and sauce on a scale more omnipresent than ever before.

A blog is an experiment. How do you bring in consistent subscribers? Does commenting on other blogs work? What about guest-posting? Does emailing other bloggers work? Should you build relationships with Blogger A or Blogger B? Why? What is quality content? How do you write it? Does it matter?

An Etsy shop is a test. What headlines work? Does it matter how the crocheted plastic bag holder is photographed? Where do you advertise your products? Google? Facebook ads? What is good SEO? Which color is better? What is the customer’s feedback? Which shipping method is cheapest and fastest? Does including a personal note give you a better rating?

Expertise is no longer institutionally created, but self-made. And it is no longer systematized but shared in the open for the rest of the web to adapt, change and build upon.

There is no need for hierarchy. Decision makers, yes. Titles and responsibilities, yes. But hierarchy, no. Leadership is now inclusive and collaborative.

Fare thee well, boss. It was nice to know you.

Categories
The Internets

Being Always On, Always Right and the Case for Anonymity

There are a lot of reasons I stopped writing my last blog. Primarily though, it was because the Internet takes a lot out of you. It expects to be able to dissect everything. The Internet wants to pull you apart. Everything should be accessible and out there for all. In the Interneted world, you have to be always on.

I don’t particularly want to be always on. For starters, I am incredibly moody. Most people on the Internet seem like happy people or are on their way to being happy.

I am not happy. At least not today. Try again tomorrow?

Still, I soldiered on with my last blog until it petered to its end and took the last bits of me. And then after some distance and perspective, I started this new blog. I started showing up on Twitter. I logged onto Facebook more. But it’s even harder to be on the Internet than I remembered.

It’s exhausting. There hasn’t been a day when I didn’t crave the freedom of anonymity, if only to escape for a moment the pressure to be always right and available.

Not that I even hold anything back. I am not someone different in person. (Although how would you know, right? Or do you trust the identity I’ve put on the web?) What I write is what I experience. Perhaps a temper tantrum or two doesn’t make it in to a post, but well, now you know.

Point being, if I were anonymous, I would write the same things. But I think it would be easier.

There are a great many people, however, that cannot or do not express their opinions and thoughts and ideas so easily. Those people are forced into the category of degenerates on the web: trolls.

Many believe the trolls’ online anonymity “is a treatment of a symptom rather than a cure for the disease. The disease is a total lack of tolerance for the differing views of others in our society. The symptoms of our disease are things like racism, ostracization, unjust reprisal, stigmatization and persecution. [Anonymity] does nothing to address the root causes of these maladies.  On the contrary, it gives people carte blanch to revel, indeed to roll around gleefully, in them. [Anonymity] allow people to be their worst selves, to perpetuate the cycle of hate, fear, and cowardice that has gripped western societies, without the need to face the consequences of their words and actions.”

That comment is fairly reflective of the values of the open web. Radical transparency is linked to the promise of a “more tolerant, peaceful and profitable digital world.” Besides, would trolls ever say the things they do if their real identities were attached to their comments? Probably not, goes the usual argument.

Online authenticity and transparency forces you to live a certain kind of life. First of all, it forces you to live at least part of your life online. For anyone on Facebook, it’s a large part. Add anytime that you log in with your real identity to buy a product on Amazon, or use Twitter, or blog, or sell something on Etsy and it’s an increasingly large part until you don’t have a distinction between public and private identity.

Not only does such transparency force you to live your life online in order to complete basic tasks on the Internet, but it also forces documentation, so you have to live a certain kind of life that can be documented. You have to be right. And good. Online, all the time.

Sure, this allows you to Google yourself and the guy you met at the bar Saturday night, but it also allows you to make judgements based on that data trail. At its best, when we follow our friends’ profiles around the Internet, it is little more than novelty and entertainment. At its worst, employers and potential lovers decide our fate in just a few clicks.

Either way, it’s not hugely beneficial to you.

Companies, on the other hand, retain a large benefit from your identity. They are the ones that want to collect your real identity so they can use that data to their advantage. Facebook’s crowning virtue is authenticity and it seeks to control the web by poo-pooing anonymity at all costs. Now Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and everyone else who wants you to login with their account follows you everywhere on the web and collects every bit of data it can about you.  Mark Zuckerburg famously once told an interviewer that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” How very virtuous… and profitable.

What’s real authenticity anyway? Is there room for you to change your mind on the Internet? One anonymous commenter argues, “Having to log in or authenticate myself makes me less likely to leave a comment. Having to identify the comment back to myself in a traceable way makes it less likely as well. My mood or sentiment about a topic might change, but that post will be written in stone.”

4chan, a site where “roughly 90 percent of all messages on 4chan are posted under the site’s default identity, ‘Anonymous,’” is generally known as the scurds of the web. But “those messages are not only anonymous but ephemeral, because 4chan has no long-term archives: old message threads are automatically deleted when new ones need the room. This mechanism was originally meant to save storage costs, but as [its founder Chris Poole] notes, ‘it’s both practical and philosophical.’ Among other things, it challenges the idea that digital identity should follow you across time, linking what you say when you’re a teenager to the middle-aged business owner you might become.”

Novel, that. People actually change and grow? Say it ain’t so, Internet! Anonymity allows people a place on the Internet to be wrong, Poole says. That’s important because while trolls may not say their real opinions to you in person, they’re still thinking it. And when we take away the place to test those ideas, we take away any chance of tolerance for differing views.

So do you prefer to live in a world where people don’t speak their minds at any cost? Or do you want to allow anonymity? One is decidedly more virtuous.

Categories
Predictions

What Comes After the Social Web?

   I am worried about how the Internet defines social.

There is a big difference between shopping online and shopping in seventy-degree weather, when someone brushes your bag, and you run into your friend on his way to a soccer game. Online shopping is solitary; real-life shopping is social. Seeing that my friend “liked” a new laundry solution on Facebook is not a social experience.

I rarely shop alone. Even on utilitarian trips to the grocery or Target, even if I don’t have an accomplice, I am still out and among other people. I want my best friend to tell me what to wear and that the very short shorts look good on me and encourage me to buy a pair when I would never do so otherwise. I want Ryan to tell me that the color of the bike I’ve chosen is great and for the bike salesperson to tell me that the particular model I’ve picked out is hot across the country and is almost sold out. I want energy. I want exchange. I want life.

This simply doesn’t happen online at the moment. There is no thrill of interacting with another human being. The experience is stale, stagnant and one-sided. It is the worst of consumerism.

I am worried that online commerce is mistaking data for social. When you use my interest graph to connect me with the exact person in California who has the vintage wine I desire, that is not social. My interest graph is not social. My reputation is not social. My identity is not social. These are important as currencies on the web, but only as currencies of social relationships. They are not the social relationships themselves. They don’t form the experience of shopping. Too many sites nowadays are defining social commerce as a like, a share, a review. That is not social. That is data.

Data is good for the company, not the user. Data is good for targeting, personalization, and aggregation. Data is good for marketing, but it’s not social.

“Nothing beats targeted relevancy,” argues one online enthusiast. “And social serendipity will not beat targeted discovery.”

That is so sad. Surely if the web has taught us anything, it’s how much, as a race, we humans love to go off on tangents? To be distracted? I certainly don’t go on Twitter and Facebook to be efficient.

Most people don’t know what they want anyway. I can type in my interests and style preferences until my fingers go bare bone, but what I really want is the summer dress my girlfriend wears out on a Thursday night. She looks so good!

As sites increasingly recommend only what they think you want, you lose out on the spontaneity and delight of finding something new and different. Anyone who has used Pandora realizes this is the service’s strength and weakness. You discover new music initially, but eventually the site just plays the same things over and over.

Personalization isn’t just useful at times then, creepy at others, but also annoying. Only boring people hang out with people just like themselves and do the same things over and over and never step out of their bubble world.

The social aspect of shopping is in that real-time discovery, spontaneous input, and watching of people. The movement, the behaviors of another person. I can’t see that on the web. All of our normal cues are missing. So, we go ahead and rely on algorithms? That’s fancy, but there are easier solutions.

Let’s talk about Amazon’s new flash shopping site, MyHabit; it was just launched this week and it’s in the same vein as other private sales sites like HauteLook, Beyond the Rack, and Gilt. You might think Amazon is behind, but really, Amazon is always just a wee bit ahead of the curve, and man, do they get it right with this.

Okay, first, on those other sites, I can see the front of a shirt, the back of a shirt, I can hover and zoom or use my mouse. Pretty standard nowadays. On a slightly different site called JewelMint I can even watch a thirty-nine second video about a pair of earrings.

But here’s how Amazon, in a rather genius move, instantly differentiates the experience. In addition to upscale photography, the site features videos of the clothing on live models. So the moment you visit a product detail page, the model starts to move; she shifts, she turns, you see her back, and then she shifts and turns back around. I don’t have to hit play and the whole thing lasts about five seconds.

It’s non-intrusive and the user experience is really just brilliant. I can actually see how the model moves and how the clothes move on her. I have a one hundred percent better experience in judging and assessing the piece of clothing that a photograph can never give me. And that is social.

You may be thinking no, that’s UX. You may be thinking you’re not interacting with the model – and certainly I am not talking to her – but really I am. I am watching her just as if she were on the street and seeing how the clothes move and look on her. It is live and it is a humanizing online shopping experience.

This is only the beginning of how user interfaces and experiences, not data will redefine online commerce. I would love to see an interface that allows me to see what strangers and my friends are browsing in real-time. I’d really love to invite my best friend in Madison to go on a shopping date while I’m in DC and browse a site simultaneously while I glance at her and what she’s browsing.

If you try to imagine these experiences in the web’s current architecture, it seems clunky, unrealistic even, but I assure you, the interfaces that use the data of web 2.0 will evolve and become increasingly important in web 3.0. And that’s what will define social on the Internet.

So everyone else is busy prophesying that while “the first phase of e-commerce was the utilitarian hunt for staples, the next phase of e-commerce will be about recreational shopping where the merger of social and interest graphs will drive buying decisions,” but here’s my prediction: it’s not going to be about data. Data is useless without a meaningful experience to plug into. How the interface and experience of social is formed will drive the next evolution of online commerce.

Just you wait.

Categories
Paywalls

You Like Mainstream Media Now, Don’t You?

Osama Bin Laden was killed yesterday and the reactions ranged from revelry to relief to wondering why the New York Times didn’t take down their paywall. C.W. Anderson, an assistant professor of media culture at CUNY tweeted, “NYT has a public obligation to place articles out from behind paywall in cases like this.”

Why on earth would they?

The Times has ten-thousand employees, all of which I’m sure will work over-time this week. In any other industry, when workers do more work, when they do more quality work that is life and earth changing, we pay them overtime. We reward them. We give them a raise.

But journalists? We devalue.

I don’t know where you were getting your news all day, but I was getting mine on NYTimes.com.  And yes, in one day, I read through all twenty articles of my monthly limit.

The Nieman Journalism Lab reported that the New York Times has the ability to take down the paywall for breaking-news, must-read stories. But I imagine that would only be relevant for issues of public safety. “You should pull down your paywall when it will save lives,” argues Brian Boyer, an Editor at the Chicago Tribune. “If you pull it for big news, you’re missing the point, right?”

Right. I imagine that Anderson tweeted The Times should remove their paywall because he values the quality, in-depth and expert reporting that The Times provides and wishes that to be available to as many as possible. But there are already twenty free articles, and so those many aren’t going to be affected by the paywall on a day like today.

NYT readers are like adolescent children, wanting their freedom, ignoring the hand that feeds them at will, but come running back in a crisis. We may like our conversations and opinion on Twitter, Facebook and blogs every other day of the week, but when it comes to what’s important, we still turn to the big dogs. Twitter, Facebook and blogs don’t supplant mainstream media as the best source of news, they amplify it.

Which is why it’s ever more important to support the media as an institution, despite the power and meaning behind citizen journalism. If we don’t, the next time we want consistent, reliable and trustworthy news, we risk finding a site that has shut down. Ultimately we do need expert content.

It is not the New York Times’ public obligation to put their paywall down. It is the public’s obligation to ensure the paywall stays up.

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.