Web Culture And The New Ethos Of Work [From Enterprise 2.0 June 2008]
I gave a presentation at the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, entitled Web Culture And The New Ethos Of Work. The text below are the slide notes I developed prior to the presentation, but I don't promise that they are truly what I actually said.
[It is starting to feel like I am working on a book. Anyone want to publish it? "Web Culture and The Post-Everything Economy"]
There is something going on out there on the web.
Teenagers are posting revealing pictures on their MySpace accounts, bloggers are reveling in the strangeness of everyday life, and services like Twitter come along and upset people’s notions of what is useful or productive behavior.
We aren’t at a point where the young Web culture has permeated the work place. But we aren’t at the starting gate, like when I started to bang on Web culture in the early ‘Zeroes.
I think we can appropriate Winston Churchill’s turn of phrase from the turning point in WWII: this is the end of the beginning.
So we are far enough along to be able to see the flashpoints in the transition that we are going through.
And I want to tease out a narrative from the attendees, too, so when something occurs to you, raise your hand, and I will be pulling you in, as well.
Apologies. It was blogging that did this to me. No neat conclusions. A barrage of conjecture, wisecracks, and one-liners, disguised as a presentation.
My work is social tools, but my interests extent to what I call ‘webthropology’ -- the anthropology of the web, specifically web culture.
Regarding my work, I am more of a ‘synthesyst’ than an ‘analyst’. What I am offering is not analysis, drawing logical conclusions from a set of data, using the clockwork side of my brain alone.
I am attempting a synthesis, looking for the big picture, based on intuition as well as reasoning, a ‘whole head’ approach to understanding.
This is more art than science, more storytime than than the News at Eleven.
And I am not impartial, I am strongly biased toward finding a good outcome for the mess we are in, moving out of the past into what I am semi-tongue-in-cheek calling the Post-Everything Economy.
What do we think about when we hear the word ‘work’?
On one hand, we have a strong negative connotation to work, like the Studs Terkel line that work is "a Monday to Friday sort of dying”.
On the other, we know -- and some of us personally feel -- a calling to do what they do. A vocation.
But more abstractly, the concept is tied to physical work: expending energy to make things, or to move them around.
As we moved from the agricultural and industrial ages something has happened, noted by Peter Drucker.
Somewhere in the 1990s, in the developed west, the majority of people were making their living by non-physical work: so-called knowledge work. The incredible on-going productivity boom that started in the mid 1800s with the emergence of he assembly line has continued into the present.
And then, the growth of computing arose, growing from giant number crunchers or tools in manufacturing -- part of the industrial revolution.
Michael Porter started to call it the Information age in 1984. But when the web was laid down on top of the Internet, something truly strange happened.
Marshall McLuhan foresaw the web. In 1964, in Understanding Media: The Extensions Of Man he suggested that the speed up of our culture because of new media -- most potently, the ‘global computer network’ -- would push us into a new period of human purpose.
“Our specialist and fragmented civilization is suddenly experiencing an instantaneous reassembling of all its mechanical bits into an organic whole. This is the new world of the global village.” - Marshall McLuhan
The global village is not all sunshine and flowers. It serves as an amplifier of all sorts of things that live in our wiring, the ghosts in our cognitive machine.
He argued that this would lead to a new understanding of the role of the individual in the post-everything future. And relative to work, he suggested that the future of work was art, not toil.
Daniel Pink’s wonderful A Whole New Mind examines the hypothesis that globalization will lead to growing disequilibria in the kind of work that people are doing, with a real concentration in the western world of more creative and conceptual, whole head kind of work.
I don’t mean that industrialism, the Cold War, or information technology have left no legacy.
On the contrary. All of the trends, movements, and waves are relevant in some way. Every thread woven into the fabric of the modern business mindset plays its part. In effect, using the term ‘Post-Everything Economy’ is a slight of hand, a rhetorical trick, a trompe d’oeil. By ‘Post-Everything’ I really mean that we are coming around to an integration of all the business ‘Revolutions’ that have occurred.
This revolution is about cultural reintegration: the awareness that the Information Revolution (and the Industrial Revolution, and the Agricultural Revolution) didn’t happen to us, like a meteor hitting Earth, some extrinsic event. We invented the Information Revolution, and its constructs, as a means to happen to ourselves. In the Post-Everything world, we know that culture – the interpersonal processes within and across business -- is a groundwave of change and the epicenter of the new economy.
The place that McLuhan’s global village is emerging is well, everywhere at once.
One nice thing about the future, as Abraham Lincoln once noted, is that it appears one day at a time. But every day, larger pieces of that terra incognita are now being explored, and inhabited.
It’s an unequal, bottom up and uncontrolled expansion. William Gibson might have been talking about the Web when he wrote that “The future is here already, it's just not equally distributed”.
It is being built by us, for us. And it is being built without blueprints, without any centralized approval, without even any general agreement on what it is for.
The big story of the web isn't the props - the servers, networks, ten trillion web sites, and all the information lying around in databases and in HTML - but what people are saying to each other and how we have been changed as a result.
We are creating the Web to happen to ourselves.
Ray Oldenburg, the anthropologist, based on his work as summarized in The Great Good Place, is responsible for our understanding of the three places: home, work, and the third place.
It’s straight forward to see the web as the cafe or corner pub where people interact with a wide range of others with very different backgrounds, viewpoints, or needs.
What is happening is that the ethos of the third place is bleeding back into the first and second places. But not without some conflict.
This talk explores the impacts of the ethos of work as a result of web culture smooshing into work culture, and where the flash points are, and will continue to be.
The old ways are slow to change. So the subtle repressive powers of conservatism inherent in corporate life are being quietly heralded by the inherently conservative media -- even a hypothetically left-leaning pub like the NY Times -- where it is taken as a given that individuals should jettison any hope for a private life if they wish to work for corporate America. Give up open self-expression, conceal any sexual tendencies that stray from normalcy, and do not be too strident in your protests against idiocy or corruption in government, business, or religion. The message is clear: if you want the benefits of a working career, put aside any personal expression.
In the 1930s, Henry Ford would fire workers for laughing on the assembly line, or for even smiling. His credo was this: “When we are at work we ought to be at work. When we are at play we ought to be at play. There is no use trying to mix the two.”
One major aspect of the clash between the established notions of work are the supposed benefits of making a division between play and work, between rational thought and intuition, between creativity and piecework, and between the search for meaning and connection and the soullessness of meaningless drudgery.
The rise of the web has led to a decentralization, a metaphorical migration away from the mass experiences that are decreasing in importance.
The best example is the dissolution of the power of controlled mass media. Fewer people are ‘consuming’ the ‘content’ media outlets are ‘pushing’ thorugh their ‘channels’. People are moving to indigenous forms of participative media, like social media, social networks, and the like. The direct or indirect control media had in the pre-Web era (depending on your level of paranoia) is rapidly decreasing.
Mass media (mass anything) is 1:many, and radiates out from the center to the ‘audience’. The people formerly known as the audience, we, the denizens of the web, have shifted to a many:many mode of interaction. The edge has taken control of the conversation within media. And we, the edglings, aren’t going to give it back.
From one perspective, people are abandoning mass for social, because social scale is more intuitive and involves more of our brains. Social scale involves empathy, which makes stories more meaningful.
What about work? Can work move to the edge? That’s where work gets done, but we have a fairly engrained notion of top-down management.
What about order that has emerged within the group, not order imposed by fiat?
[I told an anecdote about spontaneous order breaking out once when I was waiting in line for a standby flight on Laker Airlines, back in the '70s. I will write that as a separate post, and link here.]
Web culture is happening: a spontaneous uncontrolled global culture is emerging, and it is largely happening in plain sight.
It is open in many ways. People can easily get online (in most places), get access to all sorts of stuff (in most places), create websites and blogs (in most places), join networks, use Skype and Twitter, and so on. No one is really in charge (in most places), and almost anything is going on.
At the same time a lot of the web is closed. Media companies hide information behind payment walls. Groups can be closed to those not invited -- I only was invited to the SmallWorld social network last week, and its been around for years.
Languages divide us online, and short of reliable instantaneous any-to-any language translation, language groups are closed to non-speakers. (Note that this also is accelerating the death of smaller population languages.)
In-group versus out-group dynamics are very prevalent online, in politics, religion, and every other human interest.
The Third Space notion of Oldenburg: the Web can be a place where you can interact with people with significantly different social circles, background, geography, age, etc., and gain from the exposure to different perspectives on issues of shared relevance. The opportunity to argue about a local zoning issue at the corner barbershop may have passed, but people can have the same (more or less) discussion in a local paper's online forum on the topic, or at Facebook, or in Change.org.
Again, its possible to find wide diversity in Web culture. My Twitter contacts include people from all over the world, for example.
But they all type primarily in English, since that's a primary consideration for me.
I also weed out people who talk too much (in my opinion) about pets, sports, or celebrities, so that has a tendency to enforce some sort of uniformity on the group, who are mostly left-leaning liberal edgling types.
There is a seeming natural progressiveness to Web culture. People who migrate to the Web are likely to think the future might possibly be better than the past, and that our activities can help redress inequalities and wrongs.
Many have argued that the Web is inherently conservative. Despite the flamboyant Facebook pages and sex-saturated blogs, the great majority of web inhabitants carefully moderate their behavior online to avoid drawing the attention of family, employers, political parties, governments, or religious groups. Just the issue of blogging unpopular (although totally legal) opinions can get you fired in the US, and in other locations could lead to death, harassment, or exile.
The Web is not some magic talisman that counters prejudice, hatred, or intolerance. The ills of the world have not been squelched by the Web's mere existence, or our increasing participation there (at least not yet).
While some have thought deeply about the role that the Web could play in disasters. The reportage of people caught in the Thai Tsunami, for example, raised awareness in a way that traditional media might not have. The disaster in Katrina led to some discussions about Disaster 2.0 (later amended to Recovery 2.0), where we could plan to use the Web in a sensible fashion during disasters, but little headway has been made yet.
Web culture is a return to earlier elements of human social life, especially the importance of social relationships and the central importance of self-expression through art, principles that have been devalued for the past few hundred years.
This is almost a reversion to tribal norms, which are traditionally affiliation and kinship-based networks. Networks are inherently non-democratic and non-authoritarian, where connectedness and personal relationships count for more than titles or office. Note there s a dark side to tribalism, where the sense of shared grievance against others can lead to the strongest enmity imaginable, and a capacity for brutality and genocide.
On the other hand, a person's tribe may be a diffuse network of woodworkers that you submerge into everyday via Yahoo Groups, or the collection of people planning to attend Burning Man together next year.
In a real sense, the economics of old media are failing. The benefits they offer us are too small to warrant the costs they want to have us pay. Classified ads, music distribution, and television are all flashpoints in the disappearance of markets -- or at least the people formerly considered targets in market segments.
Recent examples of the inability of governments to actually do what they are supposed to do -- protect the well-being of citizens -- is leading to real questions about government. Katrina is perhaps the most glaring example, but global warming is the potential catastrophe that represents a terrifying challenge to the old culture form of governance.
The reality is that nationalism is organized around an industrial era zero sum game. Each country is supposed to work for the betterment of its own citizens, to the exclusion of non-citizens. This has led to the industrial age spree that has poised the world on the edge of a cataclysm.
Now that people in developing nations are demanding their own refrigerators, automobiles and summer vacation homes, things look pretty grim.
And the old culture mainstay of government -- war -- is all over: there is no peace on earth these days.
The notion that we are stuck together on spaceship earth doesn’t seem central to any political party’s platform, or any government. We have a United Nations, but it has only modest impact on the world.
Of all the institutions that need rethinking, government will likely be the last to change.
Real change will emerge from people’s lives, their work and play, and only at the very end will it propagate into government. Although the impacts that web culture will have on government are an interesting area or inquiry, for a different talk.
[Update: Discovered a very interesting white paper by Phil Williams of the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College, called From The New Middle Ages to a New Dark Age: The Decline of the State and U.S. Strategy via Bruce Sterling via John Robb. Seems to portend a dramatic decline in the central role of nation states in policy and individual's lives.]
This movement is driven both by the failure of traditional organizations -- media, government, and religious -- to cope with the modern world, and the stresses we, as individuals, are confronted with.
Mass religions have adopted all the industrial forms of media and government, and will proceed along the same declines, as people migrate to edgewise expressions of spirituality.
I make a distinction between Centroids -- people who conform to the views of mass media -- and Edglings -- people who have adopted the social media mindset. This is a turning away from mass, asocial media and a migration to the edge, where individuals and their relationships (via networks) creates a new sense of involvement, and a dissolution of the alienation of mass affiliation.
In the next series of slides I contrast various themes form the perspective of Centroids and Edglings.
Note: these slides are based on a table first published in Edglings: A Well-Ordered Humanism and The Future Of Everything.
Note that I don’t say the web is democratic. It isn’t democratic at its core, although the Web has some democratic ideals.
Web culture is based on networks, and affiliation. All people are not equal on the web: there is a decided inequality, based on reputation and influence, just as in tribal cultures. This is a force that is both positive and negative. It has strong conservative tendencies, since reputations are built over time.
However, new people, companies, ideas emerge on the web all the time, and some catch on. There is constant change against a conservative backdrop. The cream can rise to the top. Actions and words matter more than position or organizational position. So, its egalitarian in the sense that anyone can jump in, but not everyone can swim well, and some will sink altogether.
The shift to immediate and personal means that point of view becomes subjective and partial, unlike the hypothetical impartial, supposedly objective viewpoint espoused by mass media, pre-web. As people disconnect from mass, they discover their own self-oriented perspective again, with both positive and negative impacts.
Massive centroid organizations are hierarchichal, with authority increasing as you move from the edge toward the center.
Organization of the edge is a network: every node is the center of a part of the network, and the authority associated with that node is based on the relationships with others. Or, in human terms, "on the web everyone will be famous to 15 people," as David Weinberger styled it.
On the web, we are defined by our relationships with others. To the degree that others think (and act) as if what we do matters, we matter.
Family life is moving away from the nuclear norm, to a looser sense of who are one's closest 'kin'. The industrial era, and affiliation with mass organizations, all played up the nuclear family, and played down other relationships or eroded them altogether. The sense of 'family' will become more Polynesian as family will create 'new-familial' roles in the absence of large families and the fall of mass affiliation.
Nationalism is a mass organization that directly parallels the rise of industrialization and mass media. The overthrow of monarchies and the emergence of democratic nation states is an artifact of mass media.
The post-everything economy is one where the preeminence of nations -- as a principal element of self identity or as a means of governance -- is decreasing quickly. The rise of anti-national movements, 'feral cities', ungoverned regions controlled by warlords, brushfire revolutions, UN occupation or intercession in sovereign internal issues -- all these suggest the waning of the nation state, and the rise of global and local identities: glocalization.
Edglings will increasingly identify with small regions -- like the Bay Area, Catalonia, or Vermont -- and less with The US or Spain, for example. At the same time, they will identity with international movements or networks more strongly than with the country's name stamped on their passports.
This transition will lead to great cultural clashes, as more traditional views about citizenship, patriotism, and the role of the individual in a democratic state come into contact with edgewise notions that question the basic premises of industrial, mass government.
Note that the established political parties are unlikely to foment dissention about the role of mass government, since professional politicians are exactly those who would fall out of power as we move past mass government and put power back in the hands of amateurs, on both a local and global basis.
Since they are unlikely to play along, the most likely scenario for Western countries is a several decade decrease in importance as people begin to directly support alternative allegiances and bleed mass governments through tax revolts, or other referenda that invalidate mass government.
Movement form mass to social media, where edglings become participants, authors, artists, and producers.
The groundswell of ecological ewareness is one of the most radical shifts worldwide, and one that will hasn't the weakening of nations states whose inaction has brought us to the brink of ecological catastrophe.
Another outgrowth of the move from mass to social scale: spirituality will increasingly be a personal relationship with the cosmos, and not mediated by a mass religion, and its focus will be about the search for meaning and purpose. More enigma and less dogma.
Looked at form the viewpoint of 'plain old work' our orientation toward industrial era conventions are changing rapidly.
Our sense of time is changing in many ways.
The 9-to-5 mentality doesn't play in the Web, where we are interacting with a global network of contacts and sources. We do all sorts of timeshifting -- as with Tivo -- we work at night, leave work early for personal reasons. The hard boundaries between their time and our time dissolve.
We are increasingly aware that all minutes are not equally productive, or interesting, or creative.
We are increasingly likely to accept interruption as the side effect or handmaiden of being connected, so time slips to accommodate.
In a real sense, we are breaking away from a linear, industrial age notion of time, and moving back to a earlier sense of time.
Maybe more importantly, one aspect of flow -- streaming applications that serve up status and information -- is that they shift the time sense, as well. Just like the studies that show that playing video games lead to measurably better situational awareness in the real world -- like driving or bicycling -- the social awareness that arises from flow apps (e.g. Twitter) leads to a attitudinal shift. With the same number of minutes in a day you can remain connected to a larger number of people than before, so the day seems denser, or longer without feeling longer. An "in the zone" experience.
Continuous Partial Attention, as Linda Stone styled it, is an effective adaptation to a world in which more is happening in real-time. In her earlier writings, Stone considered CPA a disorder, although she currently seems to hedge stating that splitting your attention over a range of things may be ok in short doses.
My sense is that this is a new skill set, a reworking of various cognitive structures in the brain that collectively allow us to subtly shift our consciousness into a different gear ratio, and to expand the social bandwidth to significant degree. We are in essence pushing the Dunbar Constant (Robin Dunbar was the anthropologist who posited the notion that we are wired to be able to keep track of 150 friends, more or less, in Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language).
The notion of what collaboration is is changing pretty quickly based on Web 2.0 models.
The Team metaphor -- with the implied coach on the sidelines, and the roster being determined by those not on the team -- is being replaced by the agile development and hollywood models.
An increased reliance on open web-based communication moves from authoritarian to post-egalitarian network dynamics for decision making. Simple examples: using an active backchannel empowers those that are less assertive and dominant in social contests like meetings.
If you want to have better ideas, start by having more ideas (large groups). Then work hard to pick the best ones (small groups). Different scale for different kind of social intelligence.
Personal versus network productivity. What is being measured?
The myth of gossip and how it always comes up when personal communication tools come into the business context. Just like Ford’s reaction to smiling, people will continue to get fired for IM, Facebook, blogging, and other things that stress personal relationships (many:many affiliation) over the business (1:many affiliation).
How should we measure productivity? Is it just about money? Is business inherently a zero sum game? Perhaps the best measure for productivity should be maximizing the tenets on the Edgling side of the table a few slides back, especially creating a context for people to live creatively, produce things that matter, without adding to the worlds problems (like producing more CO2, exploiting laborers, or dumping plastic in the ocean).
I am not 100% namby pamby. I know companies need to make a profit, but it has to be done within the context of a set of ethics that inform our laws, and in a way that supports our human needs, as well.
Ultimately the most important productivity measure might be creativity, which leads to solutions and products, not counting piecework and plotting it against linear time.
Kevin Kelly suggested years ago that any work that can measured based on pieces/hour should be handed over to robots, and that people should work on creative and novel problems. There are certainly enough ot them.
How will web culture impact the organization of the near future?
All new media destabilize old organizations as communication paths and modes shift.
Email led to the reengineering craze (and it’s schizophrenic sister, knowledge management), and a move toward timeshifting across multiple projects.
What’s next? A crazy patchwork of glocalized work. Like a software startup involving developers in Bangalore and Dublin, outsourced PR, software running on Amazon’s stack, relying on open source software, and rolling out new releases every six weeks. Each team member is deeply embedded in a local scene where they live, but deeply enmeshed in a fluid set of projects. And in different project, the same person may be a designer, or a manager, or a liaison between groups, a standards expert, or a community ambassador.
Virgin might be a good example of the sort of enterprises that will emerge in the future. A collection of businesses, each focussed on doing something fairly constrained, like providing food for travellers or train service, which cooperate wherever possible.
How will businesses or professional measure corporate or personal success?
Companies will have to drop zero sum models (and we hope governments will be impelled to do so too), and will snap into a whole head appreciation of their entire business, including what people do with all the bubble wrap, the negative impacts of moving production to less regulated countries to skirt environmental impacts, and a fuller appreciation of the benefits of challenging workers to be more creative, and to find meaning in work.
Individuals will trend toward deeper edgewise affiliation with networks of others, and a looser relationship with any central disembodied organization, like a business. As a result, as in tribal culture, success will be more a matter of respect and reputation within the tribe, and less a matter of individual wealth. And respect and reputation comes from work in the context of others, to some extent in service to others.
It is through other people that we are made human. Our deepest joy comes from strong bonds with others based on empathy.
As Helen Giangregoric once said, “He who laughs last doesn’t get it.”
In the world that web culture is making, success will be a very different thing than the cut throat avarice of the late 20th century, and not a minute too soon.
The pace of life seems to be moving faster, but it is not the increased speed that is defining our brave new world. The world isn’t really spinning faster, and the speed of light is still the same.
We are adopting new modes of understanding the world, which is what media does to us. The written word, newspapers, radio, telephones, television, and now, the web. Each of these has made huge changes in culture, and then in us, since culture is a tool we use to shape ourselves.
And social tools -- like instant messaging, Twitter, blogs and social networks -- are another way we are shaping our culture, and then ourselves. “We make our tools and they shape us.”
What we will have once this wave of web innovation has been stewing for a few years is something better than we are leaving behind. A more caring, creative, and healthier world, where people are more engaged locally but concerned and involved globally.
Business leaders in the Post-Everything economy we are spiraling into will be motivated and informed by the mores of this cultural soup bubbling on the web. A generation raised on video games, instant messaging, and Facebook will lead to a strong upshift in many behaviors that would be considered career ending a few years ago, but which will be commonplace in the near future.
In the world of work, new theories of purpose and obligations will lead to a new ethos, one that is post-capitalist at its core. We know that work shouldn’t be a “Monday to Friday dying” but something more, an integral aspect of our search for meaning and purpose.
Let’s make that happen.
Hi Stowe, great grist for the mill, as per the usual. Two comments on the "publishing" thought:
1) please don't use a publisher, instead consider doing this yourself. The best model for this is http://www.fonerbooks.com/pod.htm
2) For the design, consider doing just what you are now, and take a peak at The Brand Gap by Neumeier, with the "presentation zen" "whiteboard" style of writing: http://www.slideshare.net/coolstuff/the-brand-gap became http://www.amazon.com/Brand-Gap-Distance-Business-Strategy/dp/0735713308 and http://www.slideshare.net/Neutron/zag-part-1 became http://www.amazon.com/Zag-Number-Strategy-High-Performance-Brands/dp/0321426770/
Cheers,
Jeff McNeill
http://twitter.com/jeffmcneill
Posted by: Jeff McNeill | June 15, 2008 at 07:10 PM
Hi Stowe, great grist for the mill, as per the usual. Two comments on the "publishing" thought:
1) please don't use a publisher, instead consider doing this yourself. The best model for this is http://www.fonerbooks.com/pod.htm
2) For the design, consider doing just what you are now, and take a peak at The Brand Gap by Neumeier, with the "presentation zen" "whiteboard" style of writing: http://www.slideshare.net/coolstuff/the-brand-gap became http://www.amazon.com/Brand-Gap-Distance-Business-Strategy/dp/0735713308 and http://www.slideshare.net/Neutron/zag-part-1 became http://www.amazon.com/Zag-Number-Strategy-High-Performance-Brands/dp/0321426770/
Cheers,
Jeff McNeill
http://twitter.com/jeffmcneill
Posted by: Jeff McNeill | June 15, 2008 at 07:10 PM
i am late to this party, since i have had my butt parked in india the last 12 or 14 years ... since you started rapping about the web, probably .... but i can say that both you and i have missed nothing, in the sense that you are speaking truth, and i can understand it
all this stuff is just consciousness in action, pretty easy to figure out, get coders for the bolts, yogis for the direction, it all should be ok
there really aren't any problems, just some interesting stuff to observe and occasionally play amidst
thanks for your work
gregory lent, hanging out in the usual places, twitter, friendfeed etc.... maybe see you around
Posted by: gregory | June 18, 2008 at 04:23 PM