Digital Grapevines

It can be very difficult sometimes to understand what new technology actually means when it comes to changing the way people lead their lives.  Partly, this is because technology is created by techies.  By which I mean that the clever folk who create new widgets are, naturally, more interested in the gubbins inside the box than what consumers (aka people) are going to actually do with it. This leads to the classic marketing error that the technology industry makes on a continual basis – talking about Features Not Uses.  Nowhere is this viewpoint more prevalent than in the world of smartphones, tablets, mobile and wireless web development. The mobile space has a lot of the standard desktop web jargon but with its own additional lexicon bolted on for good measure.  For instance, Geo-Location, Augmented Reality, BBM, Accelerometer, Bluetooth, QR codes, RFID, or the cryptic, ‘Web of Things’.  And let’s not even get into the world of wireless OS upgrades : Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyon and now Gingerbread.  It's enough to make your Google Goggles glaze over. However, now that smartphones have finally become a part of the mainstream, ten years after the UK’s 3G licence auction, it’s helpful to think what they mean in terms of people's lives beyond Steve Jobs’ bank account and the VC-driven, jargon-heavy dreams of Silicon Valley.  One aspect that’s of interest is that people now are increasingly connected to their friends and family - all the time.  This may sound obvious but it’s a fairly new phenomenon with far-reaching consequences.  People from small villages...

...sometimes note the downside of such cosy communities is that everyone knows your business and that people live in each other’s pockets.  Today, however, even folk in the largest cities are carrying their friends, family and acquaintances around in their pockets and bags, sharing tiny pieces of information with them on a continual basis.  And whilst this was true for some big fans of SMS, the rise of the smartphone has sent these digital grapevines into a new league.  

This was brought home to me by a recent conversation with my 14-year old niece about her use of BBM aka Blackberry’s Messenger.  After a quick demonstration of how she uses the service, I asked how many people she was connected to at any one time.  She seemed very confused by the question, but after a short pause replied with a furrowed brow, ‘Everyone’.  I then enquired how long she spent each day logged into the network.  Once again she was a bit baffled by this query.  After a few minutes of her adopting the air of someone being terribly patient with a confused elderly relative, I realised that it was like her asking me how much of the day I spent breathing.  My niece tried to enlighten me by explaining that she didn’t need to use the vibrate facility to alert her to new BBMs.  She could just ‘tell’ when a new message had arrived.  In reality, this mystical ability may have been explained by the fact that she was getting a new message every minute.  

Increasingly, we are all carrying these powerful digital grapevines in our pockets and they are our first port-of-call for news, gossip, content and recommendations. Indeed, after a few minutes of chatting with my niece and marvelling about the youth of today and their strange modern ways, I reached for my phone and logged onto Twitter.  Similarly, for others, Facebook is the village square of choice where they can spend several hours a day comparing notes and gossip.  

When aggregated these digital grapevines become the new information and recommendation systems that drive our lives.  They are the lifeblood of the burgeoning share-and-compare economy where people share information with their trusted networks and compare what comes back as a way of navigating their way through a world of limitless information. Be it personal, commercial, local, national or news from around the connected globe, it's our personalised grapevines that decide what matters.

Comments

[Brad Bell]

"After a quick demonstration of how she uses the service, I asked how many people she was connected to at any one time. She seemed very confused by the question, but after a short pause replied with a furrowed brow, ‘Everyone’."

I recall reading about a principle from a networking expert, which suggested the only way to find the value in a network is to 'waste' it, much as your niece is doing. It is a way of experimenting to find out what value the tools have. It also keeps supply high. Like processing power and storage, bandwidth needs to keep doubling if we are to extract the full economic value from it. This is the inverse of the normal approach, where we try to conserve utilities like water and electricity.

On the supply side, what we tend to do is marketing: we declare an artificially high price which creates a psuedo-scarcity and therefore value, purposely inhibiting use. The goal is fewer people using less, paying more. In other words, reduce the network effect that makes the network valuable!

Apparently when the phone was invented it was priced for business, and it never really took off. When the phone companies finally gave up trying to extract the higher 'business' value from the service, and allowed that it could be 'wasted' on the lowly gossip and chit chat of housewives, adoption finally rose.

I have a smart phone, which is really a tiny, mobile computer. The device is one of the great achievements of the digital age. It also makes phone calls. The networking - the unremarkable phone bit - represents half the cost of the device (Yikes!) despite the fact that it's too slow for its primary use as a mini-computer. I try not to waste it. (According to our wasteful Korean pioneers, 4G is also too slow for smart phones, and there's nothing faster to replace it.)

Gossip and chit chat are the engines of the information economy :-)

[James Cherkoff]

Thanks Brad, love that. It makes a lot of sense to me that people need the room to waste time, aka experiment, to find out how a new environment works best for them. I suppose this is really the net neutrality argument in personal micro-terms - more convincing I think than some of the loose innovation chat going on about a level playing field for business.