RonAmok!

In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki explains that crowds are only as “wise” as the diversity of thought within them. For example, if a crowd is filled with all similarly-minded individuals, then the decisions of that crowd will be inherently weak.

Marvin Minsky, often described as the father of artificial intelligence, uses a term called “The Investment Principle” to describe a phenomenon whereby our older ideas have unfair advantage over our newer ones. It’s sort of like trying to teach an old dog a new trick. Once the idea is set in our minds, it’s very hard to change — even in the midst of overwhelming evidence!

Therefore, if a group of like-minded individuals comes up with new ideas and then holds onto them for a while, we’d have a nice collection of weak ideas that group members would resist changing.

Welcome to the fishbowl…an ecosystem, consisting of New Media innovators, content creators, and technologists, who consume each other’s content, and then slap each other on the back telling ourselves how smart we are. A place where all new things are cool, and everyone agrees that these cool things will change the world. Oh, and full disclosure — I’m a card carrying member of this fishbowl!

The problem with being in the fishbowl is the fact that we are out of touch with “normal people” who don’t know anything about this New Media stuff. While fishbowlers are moving onto our third and fourth generation Web 2.0 technologies, normal people are still trying to grasp basic concepts of the first round.

Take the building block of New Media: The RSS Feed, for example. For the past year, I have held the title of “New Media Evangelist” at a Fortune 1000 high-tech company. In that year, I have learned one thing: normal people have neither heard of nor use RSS Feeds. It doesn’t mean that they won’t use them - many of my students have harnessed the value of RSS — but the fact is that they all need convincing. They all need to be taught. They all need to understand the relevance of incorporating New Media technologies into their day-to-day lives.

And lastly, of the small percentage of normal people who are actually subscribing to blogs, members of the fishbowl would agree that Google Reader is the tool of choice, right?

Not so fast!

While researching stats for my corporate bloggers, I uncovered that myYahoo subscribers outnumber Google Reader subscribers by a factor of 3.6 to one!

Why? I have a theory. Normal people use the tools that they are comfortable with. If “myYahoo” is where the majority of normal people get their information, why would they add yet another information channel to their arsenal?

Fishbowlers meet the normal people. Normal People meet the Fishbowlers.

Now let’s see if we can help one another.

Tags:

Fishbowl marvin minsky the wisdom of crowds James Surowiecki The Investment Principle New Media RSS Feed normal people new media evangelist Google Reader myYahoo

• Last month I learned through Facebook that my wife was married.
• Today I noticed that I can cancel our relationship with a simple mouse-click.
• I’m wondering, though. Would such a move automatically call up the Facebook “Alimomy” widget?

Tags: ronamok facebook

Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

George Santayana

Remember the first commercial websites? I mean way back, at the very beginning of web 1.0 — back when we really had no clue what to do with them? They were retreads…simply a translation of an old medium (print) into a new medium (online.) A print advertisement translated into HTML. Actually, those were the good ones. The bad ones were simple scans, that took forever to load, due to the fact that everyone had a 14.4K baud modem. Remember those days? Good times.

Historically, we have a propensity to show a total lack of innovation when it comes to a new medium. We do it all the time. What was the first thing that we put on television? Radio shows. Makes sense, doesn’t it? If we gathered around the radio in the living room to listen to The Lone Ranger, it only makes sense that we’d want to watch the cast and crew act it out in front of a camera, right? And don’t forget to zoom in on the Foley artist clapping coconut shells against a concrete slab to simulate horses hooves. They’ll really like that!

Whenever we are faced with a new medium, we always try a translation first. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We just need to remember the following rule:

“A new medium deserves new content.”

We need to take the unique qualities/possibilities of each new medium and use them accordingly. Each has a sweet-spot, something unique compared with the old medium. For the web, it was interactivity through the hyperlink. For film and television, it was the ability to tell visual stories. What is unique about our “New Media” technologies?

There are some innovators who are showing us the way. Those who are showing us how powerful their blenders are by grinding up an iPhone. Those who are making entertaining and educational presentations using nothing more than a camera, paper cut-outs and some thread. Those who are mashing up data and providing innovative ways of visualizing web data.

“A new medium deserves new content.”

What new content will your company create? How will you, as the New Media Evangelist, use the unique qualities of this new media to better tell your company’s story, to better connect with your customers, or to provide them with a service that was totally impossible before the arrival of these new technologies?

Until we answer these questions, companies will still be recording talking heads in front of perfectly lit studio walls. We’ll still be trying to squeeze entire PowerPoint presentations, designed for a big screen, into 320×240 pixels. Until we answer these questions, we’ll never reach the full potential of our New Media.

The good news is that we eventually will. And when we look back on it, we’ll laugh at how foolish we were. And we’ll end up saying the same things that we say now:

“Why couldn’t I have seen that? It seems so obvious.”

Tags: ronamok web new media old new television radio innovation