David Cushman on The Edgling Future

David Cushman does a masterful job of pulling together thoughts from Doc Searls, Alan Moore, David Reed, and, yes, yours truly, into a great post. One snippet:

[from Faster Future: Don’t just witness the network. Be part of it]

[…]

What characterizes the new world we see emerging?

It is inhabited by what Alan Moore refers to as the We Species, what Stowe Boyd calls the Edglings. These people are nodes on the network. They are constantly connected to groups of their choosing and creation. They expect to co-create, rate, share, shape, design, engage - participate.

In this world there’s no need for mass media. Mass media is about the lowest common denominator – pleasing as many people as possible for as much of the time as possible.

But the possibilities are now much greater. Now there are tools available which allow anyone to please themselves – and their self-selecting groups of shared interest - all of the time.

Mass Media was always about offering you a load of content you didn’t want (literally in the case of magazines) stapled to content you did.

Where digital content applies, now the user can choose exactly the content they want, and only the content they want.

This disaggregation leads to one-to-one relationships between relevant content and relevant selling opportunity. Advertising is no longer about reaching the maximum number of any-old eyeballs. Now it is about reaching the optimum number of the exact right eyeballs. And if there’s no need for a mass audience for advertising eyeballs, what role is left for mass media?

Interruptive ads on TV aren’t working, we’ve stopped looking at the banner ads on websites and we tune away the moment an ad appears on radio - if we are still putting up with our listening choices being made centrally for us!

Now we are seeing that it’s more important to be famous for 15 people, than for 15 minutes.

[…]

There are new rules:

1. Serve the community first

2. Niche global NOT mass.

3. Two-way flows – NOT broadcast

4. Networks NOT Silos

5. Power of the node over power vested in hierarchies

6. Adhoc, self-forming communities over directed teams.

7. Persistent conversation trumps ‘capturing’ ID.

8. Real-time, niche-community-focused, user-generated information over News

9. We should all act as shared contributors to and users of common pool resources.

10. We should learn to cherish Group Forming Network Theory (Reed’s law).

Read it. Amen.