A New Year in the Information Age
Hope everyone had a happy new year and fine holiday season all across the world. Like many where I reside, I have been away from business and spending time with family while over-celebrating in this traditional party season of the west. But those are just good memories now (except for that episode where I missed the train and couldn’t find a cab on New Year’s morning). But now I am focused and excited by the prospects of a new year—especially this year. I have a real good feeling about 2010.
The global recession abates, new ideas abound, and there’s much work to be done in setting up new systems and societies after the gold rushes of the past twenty years. I see a year where competition gears up, old businesses fail, and new enterprises supplant the inefficient. A year of glorious birth and destruction. I am planning for the former.
Quick Note: This is my fourth posting on changing ecosystems for technical communicators and content strategists of all types—web programmers, technical writers, knowledge managers, and anyone providing technical content to a new generation of Web 2.0 technologists. See also evolving, adapting, and competing in the Information Age.
New Year’s Resolutions
I resolve to make this a big year for me. I plan to make a lot of friends and collaborators. I plan to take some risks and act on some provocative ideas to work them through to their natural conclusions. But most of all, I plan to confront and act on the dream of possibilities that I see all around.
I plan to be the captain of my own ship, whether a loyal subject, privateer, or just plain pirate. I plan to find myself a place in the high seas of commerce and emerging new marketplaces.
I have a kind of musing about future trends and possibilities that I can’t get out of my head. Much of it comes from bits and pieces of what I hear across many disciplines coupled with anecdotal news stories. Some questions revolve between new ideas in cloud computing, new social interaction possibilities, access to information and real knowledge, open markets, new points of competition—all future trends. And part of my musings cast back to my knowledge and continued study of history. Between the old and new, I can see many, many similarities.
It is clear to me that we are in an epoch of new markets and new platforms from which to launch innovation. We are witnessing the advent of instant, global communication that can improve lives and confront pressing problems—from reshaping education to improving health care to generating smart energy to communicating better in business and science. Some of my ideas are more humble, like providing data and protocols for a mashup to better grow and eat locally, by integrating data from agriculture production, farmers markets, and Google maps. My musings are part utopian fantasy and part momentary flashes of possibilities (and part not getting my medication just right, as some may say).
A Dream of the Enlightenment
I believe a new epoch presents itself for some countries and cultures. While manufacturing settles to lower cost labor markets, the Information Age of a protocol society presents new opportunities. I believe the emergence of a global community and the ubiquitous Internet cloud open new markets and cottage capitalism like past markets. It is the European Enlightenment combined with the American manifest destiny, an ecosystem of open market practices in the cloud with new territory to explore and improve. It’s the combining of Athenian democracy, Adam Smith capitalism, and Ben Franklin energy and innovation. All improved and brought to reality using twenty-first century technology and protocols.
It’s a new age of democratic enlightenment glimmering like a distant shore. Ripe markets. New opportunities. Unexplored terrain. I envision willing trading partners in an enlightened economy based on innovation and hard work, and all devoid of corporate cronyism and the exploitation of peoples and resources. It reduces the monarchs of current corporate mercantilism and moves beyond the Industrial Age.
Don’t wake me up. Let me enjoy this illusion for just another minute.
I see a democratic workplace in the cloud where people work as tribes of researchers, developers, writers, and market specialists bringing all types of products and services to an open and willing market. Associations of innovative, high-tech craftspersons, scientists, and online merchants support each other in open guilds and communities of entrepreneurs and professional peers. It’s like the best parts of 18th Century European idealism and fiscal enlightenment.
Don’t wake me. I walk in reverie with Rousseau.
I see societies springing up around innovative new ideas disseminated through social networks and built from the resources of virtual ecosystems. It’s a place where competition and collaboration strengthens and broadens services to blur the lines between customers, vendors, and specialists. Where automated processes lead to increased productivity. It’s an enlightened marketplace furnishing a foundation for meritocracy unburdened by bureaucracy and politics. It’s a place where Ben Franklin—the consummate entrepreneur, printer, inventor, politician, and revolutionary—would feel right at home with its possibilities and open promise.
It’s all so beautiful…
But. Okay. Time to wake up.
I know all about dreaming, but I also know about abruptly waking up. Nothing this good can be true.
Waking up to the Protocol Society
Good or bad, change is coming. It has actually been here for awhile, but now the bubble has burst and people need results. The global recession of late only accelerated the need for change, regardless of political or social stance. But that may be a good thing. The next economic surge needs to come from wholesale innovation.Those cultures most able to change their cultures and embrace innovative practices from education to business to environment will prevail. Most of us in the west live in a protocol society and are just now feeling its effects and identifying its challenges.
I love the U.S. political commentator David Brooks, whether on PBS, NPR, or reading his NY Times Op-Ed column. One of his latest essays was on the protocol society. It starts out with a clear message:
“In the 19th and 20th centuries we made stuff: corn and steel and trucks. Now, we make protocols: sets of instructions. A software program is a protocol for organizing information. A new drug is a protocol for organizing chemicals. Wal-Mart produces protocols for moving and marketing consumer goods. Even when you are buying a car, you are mostly paying for the knowledge embedded in its design, not the metal and glass.”
Brooks goes on to talk about the currency of ideas: “The success of an economy depends on its ability to invent and embrace new protocols…but they are really talking about how quickly a society can be infected by new ideas.” He argues that the economic culture is key to growth, and depends on “how fast a society can absorb and change to the increased velocity of new recipes [protocols]”
This is a reality the western world has been living with for decades. A protocol society where innovative ideas lead to new software programs, auto and home designs, shared scientific data, contextual knowledge sets, and streamlined processes that constitute a major portion of the GNP.
David Brooks finishes with this: “Economic change is fomenting intellectual change. When the economy was about stuff, economics resembled physics. When it’s about ideas, economics comes to resemble psychology.”
For technical communicators, web developers, product managers, and content strategists, the clear message is that the interaction of groups, authoring of contextual content, and creation of innovative protocols is a social and psychological interaction, an emerging megatrend, and our bread-and-butter for the future. Communicators who engage, support, and gain the trust of users and readers where they live and work opens a whole new avenue of virtual storefront opportunities.
Breathing like Ben Franklin
Benjamin Franklin, the charismatic founding father of the U.S Constitution and all-around commentator, inventor, revolutionary, and bon vivant of his time, never went into any endeavor without coming up with a few new ways of doing it better. He invented swim fins after noticing that his boyhood friend with big feet could swim fastest. He famously researched electricity and invented the lightning rod. He listened to a concert of Handel’s Water Music and then went home and invented his own glass armonica.
Ben Franklin tackled lifelong sight ailments by fathering the bifocal. He worried about ships sinking while on Atlantic voyages so suggested using the Chinese model of dividing holds as separate watertight compartments. He developed a flexible urinary catheter to relieve his brother John’s kidney stones.
But lest we forget his other noteworthy achievements—a fervent apologist for the arguments of the Enlightenment, residing statesman during the Second Constitutional Congress and Continental Congress, diplomat extraordinaire 
winning over the French during the U.S. War for Independence, and as always, the innovative newspaper man and entrepreneur. Maybe it would be easier to say what he didn’t succeed at.
Ben Franklin touched many other disciplines and left them better with his curiosity, hard work, and uncompromising need to discover. Innovation for Ben Franklin was like breathing.
Ben Franklin lived during a time of eroding mercantile controls in a de facto wilderness economy with expansive opportunities and unending resources. Unlike industrial European economies, the New World economy grew as exploration and settlement grew and the brutal replacement of native societies and ecosystems took place.
To support both the new economy and emerging Information Age as a protocol society, a new structure and open set of economic rules are needed. Benjamin Franklin and the other merchants and farmers who railed against the British controls and supported the new ideas of the enlightened economist Adam Smith changed the rules through social and military revolution. I’m only advocating the former, once again.
What would Ben do?
Like Ben Franklin’s economic world, new expanses lie ahead. Today they exist virtually in the form of Web 2.0 communication delivery and practices—social networking, personalized delivery of information, open cloud computing, interactive real time communication, independent online merchants, virtual research partners, and the reach of global communication. Unlike Benjamin Franklin, we are not on the verge of the Industrial Age but rather moving past it to an Information Age. But I think these passing times share some characteristics. For fun, let’s go back and see if we can learn anything.
Question for the Past: What would Ben Franklin do in the emerging Information Age?
- Use many Avatars—From the anonymous Silence Dogood letters that Ben put on his publisher brother’s stoop to his pretense as a gentile, coonskin-wearing American charming the French court, Ben always liked to hide behind a good stereotype and nom de plume to get the job done. Whether he reused the anonymous Celia Single or Alice Addertongue, Ben would be coming out in all voices, all with selected graphic attributes.
- Promote democratic web access and publishing. Sure, Ben made good as the owner and publisher of the Philadelphia Gazette and then sold out for a comfortable retirement. But I have to believe he would NOT be doing as Rupert Murdoch and threatening lawsuits and subscription walls. It’s a time for innovation for newspapers. We really do need the genius of enlightened commercial thought to get the fourth estate on its feet again.
- Use the web to sell. Franklin was the consummate salesman. He became an expert at selling as a young shop owner of twenty and handled rough competition in his later newspaper years. However, he saved his best salesman skills for the political years in the Continental Congress and ambassador for the colonies enlisting France to help secure the U.S. War for Independence.
- Publish controversy. Like Poor Richard’s Almanac published as a commercial spoof to generate interest and profit, Ben would have stretched reality for entertainment. He may have been a movie director, come to think of it. He most definitely would have gone toe-to-toe with competitors in publishing or politics. He probably would have still forecast his main competitor’s death as a business calculation. But would not have still taunted the man after his death about the prediction. We are no longer THAT cold-blooded.
- Advocate common sense. The commercial, sometimes prosaic, but always sensible advice from Poor Richard’s Almanac would be welcome relief to blog readers. But then again, maybe Oprah has taken over this market. Ben would definitely not throw out past wisdom for the promise of new technologies without first identifying the advantage. He most certainly would blend common sense with each changing technological or social fashion.
- Join several social groups. Ben Franklin was nothing if not a civic-minded man. He was gregarious and a believer in society and the civic duty of all. He would now as he did then connect to as many social groups as possible for business, politics, and I’m sure to meet babes. Ben loved people. As his alter ego Poor Richard warned, “He that drinks cider alone, let him catch his horse alone.” Today, maybe that truism would be more, “He without Facebook friends let him drink his cider with his horse if he can catch him alone.” Or something similar.
I’m still working on this list. I think I will email Walter Isaacson, author of a fine biography titled Benjamin Franklin An American Life and quoted throughout this posting, to see if he will add to the What Would Ben Do? list.
I am starting to see our current world of change and turmoil as a time for opportunity. It’s time to move on to the projects of 2010. We need to take these where Ben Franklin and others of his time of enlightenment would have gone—Gov 2.0, Press 2.0, Med 2.0, Jobs 2.0, and maybe Peace 2.0. A lot of innovation to ask for. As Benjamin Franklin would have liked it.
Check in to my next posting as we kick off our projects and the revolution begins. It’s time to bring all these dreams to reality.
January 4, 2010
Posted in: Enlightenment, Information Age, Mashups, Post industrial age, Real-Time Web, protocol society, technical communicator
One Response
I think technical education solves the problem of unemployment. Technically educated people will at last earn even their bread in honest and honourable way. Many people think that this education lowers their dignity. They prefer to be hungry lawyers than well fed mechanics.
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