Strategies for Surviving and Thriving in Challenging Times
Strategic Action #3 for Surviving and Thriving:
Adapt Your Life to Web 2.0 (Part 1)
Turning Your Company into a Complex Adaptive System
The real miracle of life is arguably not as much its existence per se – a California biotech company announced last week that it had created a human embryo from adult skin cells – as the complex system of biofeedback on which organisms depend.
Now, in a case of technology
imitating life, the Worldwide Web has evolved into a higher cyberlife form called
Web 2.0 that is animated by Web-based software in contrast with Web 1.0, which depends
on external software such as browsers for its viability. Exactly how biofeedback systems work is still not completely understood by scientists.
Web.2.0 operates with a highly complex system of cyberfeedback that gives users instant readings – kind of like what happens every nanosecond in your body to keep it on an even keel on a proper course.
Among the most prominent expressions
of Web 2.0 are Wikipedia, Facebook, My Space, Flickr, YouTube, Second Life and
World of Warcraft. They are collectively known as social media because participants are co-creators of the content. Before the advent of social media, website owners were the primary producers of online content.
Web 2.0 takes the Internet as a complex adaptive system to soaring new heights of complexity. This is analogous to what happened three billion years after single-cell life showed up on earth: life began blossoming in higher, more complex multi-cell forms.
Take Wikipedia, for example. Like all organisms it functions in a continuing stream of change and adaptation. Of course, there are those who say, "Wikipedia cannot be as dependable a source of information as its primeval ancestor, Encyclopedia Britannica because you have all those people going into entries to change them at will."
Seen through the lens of traditional consciousness (see the previous two posts), there is every reason to assume that Wikipedia is subject to enough error to justify healthy suspicion about its accuracy. But, operating in the fashion of complex adaptive systems, Wikipedia has a self-correcting function that draws on feedback from participants in its organic evolution. The British science journal Nature conducted research last year and found Wikipedia generally comparable in accuracy to Britannica.
Web 2.0 has exponentially increased the available options in service of more productive and efficient use of the Internet. With the cyberspace equivalent of biofeedback, Web 2.0 enables people to share, collaborate and interact as social communities with a richness of experience and bounty of benefits not achievable at the Web 1.0 level of cyber evolution.
From a marketing perspective, Web 2.0 has generated a new calculus of supply and demand. The neat boundaries that have long had actors on the supply side in one sector of the transactional territory and the actors on the demand side in another sector are dissolving. Much as with a Mobius strip there is no front-back, forward-backward, or top-bottom dichotomy.
In the absence of the traditional supply-demand dichotomy, consumers have become active participants in creating value and shaping and mediating supply chain activity. Producers have become active customers of produce from the demand side.
If all this sounds a tad confusing, it’s mainly because it’s not very understandable seen through the traditional lens of economics and marketplace activity (see two previous posts).
An excellent treatise on the impact of Web 2.0 on business, on culture, on just about every sector of human activity can be downloaded from the Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society Program. You will want to download The Rise of Collective Intelligence.
No one really knows where Web 2.0 is going to take us, but a broad consensus holds that performing all the functions of business enterprise from research and product development to marketing and service will be radically different in the next decade than it was when this decade began.
I will speak more to the subject of collective intelligence, which is at the very core of Web 2.0's transformative powers in my next post.
As a marketer, I have to say "Amen"! = )
Posted by: Shama Hyder | January 30, 2008 at 12:12 PM
Hello,
Your blog is very interesting.
I want more... ;-)
To your success
Martin
Posted by: How to increase traffic | February 12, 2008 at 02:40 PM