In my first post in July of 2007, I asked myself  - What were all these new tools going to be about?. For when the steam engine arrived, I am sure the Steam Geeks, all talked about pressure, bearings etc. But steam changed the world. It forced us to use the clock. It meant that food could move long distance and so enabled vast cities pulling us from the country where we had lived for millenia.It changed war and enabled millions to be supplied and to move.

So back in July of 2007, that is the context that I asked the question “What’s it all about?”

I feel good and bad about how my question got answered by life.  What we have seen is an acceptance of the new tools in many cases. I wrote the Twitter Guide for FF in December of 2008. Then most could not spell Twitter let alone imagine how it would change media and how we get our news. While Facebook can be seen as silly with all its games and pictures that we might regret, Twitter and Facebook have made a difference in the emerging freedom movements in the world. Social Media, especially in the video context, has enabled new ideas to get traction way earlier than before. Web Based Video is surely the Gutenberg Press of our time?

Most people have made the new media part of their lives. Skype is how we old farts communicate with our kids and grand kids. Who does not have a Android or iPhone that enables us to navigate, read books, stay in touch in a way that was impossible to imagine back in 2007.

The area that I am sad about is business. Yes in some cases the tools have been adopted but not the culture that is the game changer. So most large enterprise is really no different than it was back in 2007. Less than half of small business has ven taken the first step! Government also keeps the lid on. Politicians have their twitter handle. Departments have a facebook account. But the need to control everything from the top remains the dominating pressure.

So for me there is this disconnect between the people – who are all of us – and when we get inside a traditional organization.

As the people, we are being empowered and liberated by this new technology. Like Steam in its day, it is starting to change everything. People now can work where they live and chose where they live based on what they want and not have to fit into an office and one place. Very small business now has access to a global market and has tools that are often better than those used by large firms. New food systems are emerging. You can buy Bison meat online. A new education system is emerging. You can participate in some of the best lectures given by the best people at the best universities. New approaches to health are emerging – witness the take off of Paleo and Ancestral Health.

But the establishment is entrenching. Newspapers are putting up paywalls. Politicians praise the use of social media in the Middle East, but want to halt its use at home. Business leaders talk about innovation but do all they can to prevent it.

I think we close the Fast Forward Blog at an important juncture. I and my colleagues have done our best to show you what is coming in a timely and thoughtful way. We have stressed adoption. But now I think a line has been drawn in the sand. It is clear to all that just as Henry Ford invented a model for the enterprise in 1905 that overwhelmed all the artisans, so all the artisans connected in a global network, will overwhelm the Ford model. There is nothing moral about this. It is Darwin. In 1905 the better model won. So it will be again today.

So here is my last exhortation to any of you who push back at the cultural work that comes with using social media to its potential, do you want to be on the right side of history or not?

I know I ask no small thing. For when we change ur core culture, a large art of us has to die and who can face that easily?

So in all humility, thank you for reading us here. Thank you Fast and Microsoft for being so generous as owners. I have never been told to toe a party line. Thank you my dear fellow FF writers. We have known each other for many years now. I will miss interacting with you so much.

In my most recent post I showed how the community and the police are on a rapid learning curve to use social media to help them cope with the rioters – who also use the same tools.

It is ironic that we in the west now are considering shutting down parts of social media as a response to the UK riots – while we encourage its use by people in the Middle East.

Authorities grappling with violent unrest should avoid heavy-handed clampdowns on social media and instead try to enlist the help of the public against the rioters, said John Bassett, a former senior official at British signals intelligence agency GCHQ and now a senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.

“The use of social media in the unrest looks like a game-changer. But any attempt to exert state control over social media looks likely to fail,” he told Reuters.

“A much better approach would be to encourage and support individuals and community groups in identifying alarming developments on social media and even speaking out on the internet against extremists and criminals, and ensuring that the police have the skills and technical support to get pre-emptive and operational intelligence from social media when necessary.” Link

Surely the lesson here is to help the community and the police get ever better at using these tools themselves. To shut them down makes the community and the police blind too! Social Media did not cause the riots – it only makes the rioter more powerful. It can also make the community more powerful too.

Update: Here is how the Police are using Twitter as a Perp Walk:

Lifting a page from the hacker’s handbook, the Greater Manchester Police are naming and shaming rioters on their Twitter feed.

“We promised we’d name all those convicted for their roles in the disorder — here we go …” the police announced, as they began listing the names, dates of birth and partial addresses of individuals tried in connection with the disorder, which flared across Britain.

“Eoin Flanagan (born 01/01/1983), of Carson Road, Burnage, jailed for eight months for stealing clothes,” read one post.

“Jason Ullett (born 15/10/72) of Woodward Court, Ancoats, sentenced to 10 weeks in prison for swearing at police officers,” read another.

And another: “Stefan Hoyle (born 27/01/1992) of St. Stephen Street, Salford, jailed for four months for theft after found with a stolen violin.”

Think of it as a new kind of perp walk, but very much in the tradition of hackers who are fond of outing their rivals online.

The police department’s efforts received both praise and criticism, along with a few questions. The department explained that it released dates of birth so as to avoid confusion with individuals with the same name.

]]> http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2011/08/11/is-shutting-down-social-networks-the-best-response-to-unrest/feed/ 1 http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2011/08/10/riots-in-the-uk-the-lessons-for-all-of-us-you-have-to-be-plugged-into-the-web/ http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2011/08/10/riots-in-the-uk-the-lessons-for-all-of-us-you-have-to-be-plugged-into-the-web/#comments Wed, 10 Aug 2011 13:01:05 +0000 Rob Paterson http://www.fastforwardblog.com/?p=6396

Joe mentioned this week that the use of Social Media still have not taken off in small business.

But we also learned this week that the use of social media and texting is at the core of how the riots in the UK are being organized. The best rioter’s tool – The Blackberry which is encrypted.

Since then, the BBMs regarding Duggan’s death and the ensuring riots have gone viral. The Guardian was shown one message by a recipient which read, “Everyone in Edmonton, Enfield, Wood Green, everyone in north London, link up at Enfield train station at 4pm.” It detailed what items to being–including hammers–for the demonstrations.

The advantage users have with BBM is that the news continues to circulate, but is covert enough that it is difficult to trace. BBMs are encrypted and hacking this network would be incredibly difficult, so protestors are able to stay a step ahead of authorities.

RIM UK has stated that it will help Scotland Yard in any way it can, so the BBM may only have so long to live as a tool for rioters. But most of them are of the young, mobile-minded, tech-savvy generation, and there are a variety of tools at their disposal.

The Police and the community are learning also in real time how to help each other – by also using social media. Citizens are using Twitter and Facebook to help the police have better intelligence and the police are learning this week how best to respond and to monitor.

Here is a Google map that is being run to track incidents

The Police are setting up a Flickr site to help citizens help the police identify rioters

The Guardian has a map that shows incidents all over the UK

The only chance that citizens and the police have to get ahead of this to to get ahead of it – they have to use the same tools better and faster.

I make no ethical comments – this is what it is and there is no going back

This is the reality of our world today – it is rushing to a network state. So if you don’t know how to use this well – you are at extreme risk. You just don’t know what is going on and the pace of your interaction with the world will be too slow. It does not matter how small you are – you will be too slow to know.

Joe wrote this week about how Iceland is using the web to Open up its democracy and then asks the big question – what about corporate life? Will corporations follow?

Geoffrey West’s research suggests that they had better – because it shows that the ultra controlled approach that is the Command and Control Normal now – kills corporations early. They are dying sooner and sooner.

Are corporations more like animals or more like cities? They want to be like cities, with ever increasing productivity as they grow and potentially unbounded lifespans. Unfortunately, West et al.’s research on 22,000 companies shows that as they increase in size from 100 to 1,000,000 employees, their net income and assets (and 23 other metrics) per person increase only at a 4/5 ratio. Like animals and cities they do grow more efficient with size, but unlike cities, their innovation cannot keep pace as their systems gradually decay, requiring ever more costly repair until a fluctuation sinks them. Like animals, companies are sublinear and doomed to die.

The issue is that using a machine model – is that friction builds as well as cost as the corporation scales. The costs rise with revenue. So in the mature part of the cycle, you cannot innovate – you can only manage the numbers/ratios. For example, 10 years ago, Shell set up Shell Renewables. Shell was going to become a leader in non oil energy. Makes sense right? The top people know about Peak Oil better than most and wanted to find a place in the next energy sector. What ruined this experiment was its success. Being a very large organization, Shell did new projects at scale. With two of the largest new Wind Farms online – the CFO and the CEO saw the trap – saw why they had to retreat back into OIL ONLY. Shell had to make the numbers even if by doing so meant that Shell could not position itself to be a leader in New Energy.

Wind farms that do well have an ROI of about 8% they are a utility – like owning a bond. But the Oil business has embedded costs that are linked to the returns on OIL that are much higher than wind. So if Shell did a lot more of these mega wind projects, the ROI of Shell would be reduced and Shell would have an earnings problem. The more wind farms they installed, the more their earnings would drop but their costs could not. They were trapped!

This dooms Shell and all mature companies. We saw that is Big Steel when smaller local mini mills ate into the lower ROI parts of the business until there was nothing left? We see this now with media.

The costs of a press or a studio – are so great that all the majors can do is to defend their existing platform. The New York Times can only hide behind the paywall for a period of time. The studios can only hold off web distribution of video for so long. But their battle to keep the status quo is not stupid – they are stuck with the costs. It is the model of how we do business that is the problem. For in the mature phase, the CEO has to make the ratios and the costs are embedded. In the final phase all the CEO can do is to milk the system.

For all true innovation HAS to start with a modest revenue line. So if you have a large enterprise with high revenues you have also high costs. So a web based news alternative CANNOT earn the revenue that you need to run the Times. So you cannot go there. But of course a new competitor – Huffington? Can and will and in the end will take enough revenue off your top line to kill you.

So are corporations doomed? Well with a sample of 22,000 West makes a good case that the current model does doom you, if you are traditionally organized. So what then is the way out?

West makes the case that Cities live much much much longer. The core of why is the core idea for corporations to study and apply.

“It’s hard to kill a city,” West began, “but easy to kill a company.” The mean life of companies is 10 years. Cities routinely survive even nuclear bombs. And “cities are the crucible of civilization.” They are the major source of innovation and wealth creation. Currently they are growing exponentially. “Every week from now until 2050, one million new people are being added to our cities.”

Cities are much more open as systems and networks. They are much closer to being alive than corporations that rely too much on command and control.

As I write this I am thinking of how Wordpress works. At the core of Wordpress is a for profit organization – but also one of the tasks of Automattic is to ensure the health of an ecosystem that is the larger Wordpress ecology in which thousands of independent developers who do not work for Automattic make a living. I think of Wikipedia. At the core of Wikipedia is a set of rules about how Wikpedia has to work and how people in Wikipedia have to behave. Surrounding this core is a cadre of “White Blood Cells” AKA editors – that ensure that this DNA is kept healthy. I see no way now that Wikipedia will not be here in 50 years.

Why my confidence?

If you look at Wordpress and Wikipedia you will see the key. In a network that really is a network – like Wordpress and Wikipedia – the costs go up in a shallow linear curve while the outcomes rise exponentially. The margin grows so that any bump in revenue along the way – which is of course natural for nothing in Nature runs on any form of straight line – does not take down the organization. But in a traditional organization, the costs rise in direct concert with the revenue and outcomes. This means that once the business approaches maturity, the leadership have to force the numbers, meaning that in the mature phase, the only real focus are the numbers themselves. Not the underlying purpose of the business. The focus becomes defence and self referential. The organization is now doomed. Doomed to suffer a bump in the market or to a new competitor. Look at the case of RIM.  Can RIM come back?

This site has been a place where many of us have tried to see the future for business. We could all agree that more Command and Control would not help. We could all agree that more Social Media used to open up the organization would help.  But what we are seeing now is that for an enterprise to thrive over time – it must become alive! Only a true network can enable this to take place. The few true networks that we can see now, give us a working model of the new enterprise.

Stuart Baker and I are working on what this might be and in the fall we will be posting our ideas.

Our proposition is this. In the 1800’s most business was small, local and unique. The great shift in the 20th century was to consolidate into the enterprise as we know it. This was how to create wealth then. All who stayed back in the small, local and unique died. The efficient machine had to be the model you used. Now we enter a new phase. For the limits of the efficient machine have been reached. The new winners will be those that can adopt the model of the real network.

We all know about how to organize the machine. How to organize the network is all new and mainly unknown. That then is the challenge and the opportunity. Good luck to all of us.

Tesco

Now is this not “thinking”? Tesco bring the store to you – knowing that you have no time or energy left.

I am impressed – now we are seeing Social Media and Mobile in ever more pragmatic ways.

Text Books the bane of all students – now your son can rent them from Kindle

Both these stories show how we can use social media and online to help people deal with real issues.

They are very mainstream – so what is your opportunity? How can you make a real problem go away?

Don’t you feel something big in the air? The Wirearchy amplified events in the Arab world this spring and many regimes have fallen. Do you think the rest of the rulers feel safer now or more vulnerable?

In the last 2 weeks, the establishment in the UK has been rocked. Again the amplification and openness of the Wirearchy has prevented the old system from being able to contain the firestorm. It is also early days, but it is not just the Murdochs who have been shaken but the entire establishment. Do you think that this will blow over and all in the UK will go back to normal?

In the US our political system is log-jammed at a time when it has to cope with all sorts of real problems – do you think that we will avoid a crisis here at home?

Are you ready as a individual or a CEO to cope with what is unfolding?

This global meltdown and systemic failure of our system is I think the real context for social media and its tools and your adoption of them. The Wirearchy is the only way to survive. The Hierarchy is the sure way to die.

Many have thought that they could adjust slowly to the Wirearchy.

It was great to see how they are slowly being adopted in the enterprise. It is now common knowledge that we have to be more human in our work and how our work must do something that offers real value to all not just to a few owners.

Many know that we should go here. But maybe not just yet – so much risk in changing right?

Bu now all the risk is in not being there. The system has tipped and total turbulence is here.

Chaos is our new normal. Will the Euro continue and what will happen if there is a default? How will America get though its own financial and fiscal crisis? What will this mean to the election. What new weather event will affect us and the global system? Will the millions of underemployed, unemployed sit quiet?

And in this context a new kind of competitor that has been forced into being by the evolutionary pressures of this time.

An entirely new economy, based on the small tribal networks, will emerge very quickly out of the desperation of the people who have no alternative. They need no capital. They don’t need what you needed. They can get the best people. They can go from an idea on napkin to your doom in 5 years.

All organizations who rely on concentration will be too slow to keep up as the pace of change accelerates.

If you as a person cannot find your way through this and if you the CEO of a large organization cannot be agile enough, these waves will take you down.

So it is now “Change or Die”.

We have had a lock out of the postal workers here in Canada for about a week – preceded by a series of rolling local strikes. What the unions want of course is job security and to hold onto their pensions.

But the result appears to be that they have cut their own throat. The heart of their business is business mail – principally bills! What we have seen is a massive switch to online billing that is being made ever easier by the billing companies. (Globe and Mail)

Count Nicole Mackoway among the people who saw the strife at Canada Post as a good time to make a switch. Ms. Mackoway, a stylist based in Edmonton, decided to get rid of all her paper bills – two power bills, two credit card bills and three phone bills.

“I hate getting bills in the mail anyway – this way any mail that comes will be fun,” she said.

ING Direct, a bank that conducts its business by Internet or phone, had 350,000 customers switch to online banking in the past two weeks. Almost half of its 1.8 million Canadian customers now receive their banking statements exclusively online.

“The postal strike created a small catalyst at a time when it’s already easy to make a change to online,” said Peter Aceto, chief executive officer of ING Direct Canada. “Canada Post has gone from the thing we relied on most to communicate a few decades ago to becoming a smaller part of our lives.”

Canada Post will lose at least $2,352,000 a year in revenue from ING Direct on stamps alone, assuming the company sends each of those 350,000 people one letter a month at the commercial price of $0.56 a stamp.

It isn’t just banks that will save from the switch to online bills and statements.

At Shaw Communications Inc., a telecommunications company, about 70,000 people signed up for online billing in June.

“That’s probably 10 times more than we would normally see,” said Peter Bissonnette, Shaw’s president.

“Clearly the labour disruption has driven that behaviour,” he said. “We’re very pleased that customers are finding other ways to do their billing.”

Enmax Corporation, a Calgary-based utility, had 5,000 customers enroll in its online billing system – a “very dramatic increase,” spokesman Ian Todd wrote in an e-mail.

Soon, like the telephone the only mail we will get is junk mail. For the only calls I get these days are spam too.

In many countries the post office has been privatized. The call to privatize Canada Post will escalate.

The US Mail is not exempt from any of these pressures and surely the clock is ticking here too. (Link to an excellent article and infographic here)

The web takes no prisoners.

A key principle of the web is anonymity. But there is a dark side to this too. Here is a snip from an excellent article in the Australian on this topic that contains elements that I cannot post here.

Cyber-bile takes many forms: from people posting pornography or sexually explicit comments on Facebook memorials to murdered children, to the person who set up a Facebook site which promised the return of abducted Queensland schoolboy Daniel Morcombe if the page attracted one million members. To most right-thinking people this sort of stuff is unbelievably cruel, surely the outpourings of a small number of sick minds. Hoaxers regularly hack into Facebook pages, defacing pictures or spreading rumours that can cause untold pain, panic and embarrassment. And then there’s the constant background chatter that eats away at people – mostly women – in the public domain. It seems everyone has an opinion now, and they want to be heard. But when did they become so mean and, in some cases, downright terrifying?

Sydney newsreader Jacinta Tynan calls them the faceless brave. “When people want to give me a compliment, they tend to email me directly,” says the journalist and author. “Those who want to say really horrible things will go online and do it anonymously. They’re suddenly very brave when they don’t have to attach their names or their faces to their comments.”

Trolls have made it harder for the corporate world to enter social media. I think that this is why so many sites now ask for a Facebook or Twitter ID as part of the commenting process – pure anonymity is a call to Trolldom.

Why is this happening and what to do?

Why do so many act out as Trolls? Why did so many “Good Kids” riot in Vancouver? Might an answer be again part of the paradox of our way of life. So many have no role, no status and so no real voice. For is not a real voice always attached to your own personal authority? You don’t have to be a CEO or a Government Minister to have real authority either. You have to have real confidence in your self and be part of something that has meaning. Your name then has power and adds power to your words. Viktor Frankl found this power even in Auschwitz. His captors could kill him or abuse him at will. His life was not in his control. He was scum to them. But he would not let them take his spirit. This is what I mean by “Real” power.

In pre industrial society, you lived in communities where you were known by many. This might have been oppressive in some cases but this being known also gave you your name and place. On PEI where I live, people know not only you but your family back 3 generations. What they “know” about you is a part of you that you can control – they know about your character. Such a society is how humans have lived for all time – except for now. We live today in a society where most of us mean nothing to even a small group let alone to our wider community.

This is why I think there are so many Trolls. I think that Trolls are an expression of the despair of how lonely and without meaning life can be in Industrial Society.

Perversely, this is also why I am also hopeful. For the web gives us all a chance to start to find meaning in what we do in public again. It gives us a chance to be known for what we do and how we behave. It gives us back our name. We don’t have to be “important” we just have to be true.

It is best on the web to use your real voice. And this then leads me to my final point today. If you use social media for your employer and you use a “corporate” voice. You are in effect a troll too.  You seek to interact with real people but you are not present at your end. If you seek to have influence, you too must have a name and be you.

This is why people like Jordan Miller at Kotex and Baochi Nguyen at Boingo have such a following.

So what to do? Maybe a good first step for enterprises is to offer up a chance to have a real voice on your site – allow for opinion but don’t allow vitriol. Debate the issues with a real voice your self. It will be interesting to see how President Obama does this.

Be the change you seek. The more real you are the less place for Trolls. Few if any on the Kotex or Boingo sites.

Twitter and Facebook is still foreign territory for most politicians. Not for long I think

President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign could get a social media boost after some major changes announced today.

The big news: the president himself will be tweeting on occasion, according to TechCrunch. Each presidential tweet will be signed “-BO.”

To this point, Obama’s White House staff has been posting for him to @BarackObama. He’s joked in the past about having never tweeted (though he didtechnically tweet this), but that will soon change.

Also notable is that the President’s 2012 campaign staff will start managing his Twitter and Facebook accounts, effective immediately, rather than the White House staff.

The announcements were detailed in a blog post on Obama’s campaign website, which notes the re-election campaign is underway and Obama is “counting on all of us to lead this organization from the grassroots up.”

After Vancouver lost the Stanley Cup – riots broke out. This is not new but what is new is that every aspect of the riot was caught on people’s cell phones. The normal anonymity that rioters have has gone.

The rest of the city has erupted in a new way in anger about the rioters. Over a million still photos have been put online and/or sent to the police and the city has declared that all who are recognized will be prosecuted.

It is also harder for Police to act badly too – A Toronto Policeman is being prosecuted for assault after the G 20 meeting. And the same happened in London.

I find it interesting – I think we are seeing the re-emergence of “Civic Policing” where the abundance of cameras, the use of social media – makes it harder for both vandals and police to behave badly. Of course this was always the case in small communities where we all knew each other and there were “Eyes on the Street”. But social media is enabling this in large cities now too.

I think that this is a good thing. Just as online anonymity gives Trolls a free pass – so it does in cities.