A thought while writing "Fragmented."
Jun. 15th, 2010 08:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsI had this realization while assembling thoughts between Linda Stone's presentation and a recent article that appeared in the Times.
The current iteration of the Internet audience, after fifteen years of being on-line, is now fully connected and knows how to be fully connected. We are not merely informed, we are knowledgable. We are just now emerging into a market where the super-savvy know how to integrate vast amounts of information, how to construct accurate visualizations and abstractions of that information, and can correlate the key elements of than information to make informed decisions. What the audience needs right now is education in understanding what all that knowledge means, in order to anticipate what comes next without fearing they may make an irrevocable mistake.
The previous iterations of our culture have been ones of self-expression ("I am") and then networking ("We are"). We are entering a time where we've learned that over-networking, over-sharing (see: Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline), is itself a danger, and just as we had a post-70's hangover, now we're having a post-Facebook hangover. The next challenge is to create the meaningful "we", so that when we network, when we reveal, we know with whom, and why, we are doing so. Winners in this race will be those who most clearly, accurately, and honestly educate (see: Kathy Sierra, You Can Out-Spend, or Out-Teach, the Competition) their users as to what it means to use the offered service.
The current iteration of the Internet audience, after fifteen years of being on-line, is now fully connected and knows how to be fully connected. We are not merely informed, we are knowledgable. We are just now emerging into a market where the super-savvy know how to integrate vast amounts of information, how to construct accurate visualizations and abstractions of that information, and can correlate the key elements of than information to make informed decisions. What the audience needs right now is education in understanding what all that knowledge means, in order to anticipate what comes next without fearing they may make an irrevocable mistake.
The previous iterations of our culture have been ones of self-expression ("I am") and then networking ("We are"). We are entering a time where we've learned that over-networking, over-sharing (see: Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline), is itself a danger, and just as we had a post-70's hangover, now we're having a post-Facebook hangover. The next challenge is to create the meaningful "we", so that when we network, when we reveal, we know with whom, and why, we are doing so. Winners in this race will be those who most clearly, accurately, and honestly educate (see: Kathy Sierra, You Can Out-Spend, or Out-Teach, the Competition) their users as to what it means to use the offered service.
