My colleagues and I here at SociaLNK were debating David Gillespies deck “Digital Strangelove” this morning. This is a presentation based on the premise that social media and the internet are changing everything.
David points out that the changes we are watching are still in their infancy so we really don’t know exactly where we are headed. He argues that the simplicity of publishing graphics, video, sound and text means that the internet is undermining the traditional silo’s e.g. film, publishing, music. With the advent of social networking we no longer accept the interruption of traditional advertising. Content is now cheap and attention is priceless. He argues that we have switched from an attention economy to an “intention economy” where “we’re not here for you, we are here for US”.
To be honest this bit of the presentation was a bit weak. I had to do a bit of digging on Wikipedia to get a description of the “intention economy” which is originally attributed to Doc Searls. This is a reverse model of the economy where instead of sellers advertising their wares purchasers advertise their intention to buy. I’m not sure this carries across to this talk. David seems to be describing the “intention economy” as a shift from push advertising to more value based pull.
However it was the end of the talk that really spoke to me. He talks about the value of live data streams. He argues that data is the bank and meaning is the new currency. What he is talking about here is stories. Data is what lets us create stories. For me I suddenly saw that Web 2.0 has developed all the tools to allow us to freely publish text, video, photos but what about data. Where are the tools that allow me to explore and publish the stories held in my data?
As an aside one of the things I really liked about this presentation was unlike many slideshares on the web this is a stand alone presentation. You don’t need a set of notes to describe each slide. This is content built to be shared. As a result it is 260 slides long but that is fine because really it is just the equivalent of 260 sentences. The slides in and of themselves are very beautiful and he pulls together some great references.
Have a read and tell us what you think!
