December 27, 2006: Identity Meets the Cluetrain Manifesto

What is Hecuba to you or you to Hecuba? This injunction (shameless appropriated from Shakespeare's Hamlet) applies not only to actors but to all of us in the “roles” we play (our “presentation of self,” as Goffman called it) in everyday life. However, there is also a grander scheme of things that I introduced some time ago. This involves what I feel is the most important lesson from Plato’s “Theaetetus” dialogue. This is that, while none of the four definitions of knowledge considered can survive Socrates' critical examination, Socrates does demonstrate how the concept of knowledge is tightly coupled to three other key concepts: memory, being, and description (λόγος).

I would now like to pick up where my last discussion left off and examine the concept of “Being.” I would argue that this concept needs to be sorted into the being of objects and the being of subjects, i.e., the agents who engage with objects; and this latter class of being has to do with identity. In other words any inquiry into the nature of identity involves pulling at a thread that is tightly woven to many other critical threads, including the thread of knowledge itself!

These couplings have been particularly well appreciated by George Herbert Mead, particularly in his exploration of the concept of symbolic interactionism. I like to say that the motto of symbolic interactionism is: “No perception without personal interaction.” For my money this is the underlying premise without which the assertion that “markets are conversations” cannot make any sense. Indeed, it is also the premise behind Habermas’ theory of communicative action, which argues that “communicative action” (as Habermas defines it) is the fundamental prerequisite for understanding. Since it seems valid to assume that markets can only operate effectively within a context of understanding between buyers and sellers, Habermas’ theory ultimately explains why markets are conversations; but I am afraid that this kind of foundational thinking has gotten lost amid the 95 theses of the Cluetrain manifesto!

October 11, 2006: Without a Cluetrain

Perhaps the greatest virtue of postmodernism is that it has taught us how to combat an overly-used slogan by inverting it. Consider the Cluetrain Manifesto. It is as easy to chant "markets are conversations" as it was for Orwell's sheep to chant, "Four legs good; two legs baaad!" This is not to devalue the insight beyond all recognition. As the Wikipedia entry points out, this really boils down to a healthy historical appreciation of the marketplace. Unfortunately, cheerleading based on slogans has little time for history; which is why the cheerleads occasionally need a healthy postmodern kick in the rear.

So, consider this, conversations are markets! The lesson of history is that conversation used to be an integral part of the delivery of goods and services. While it is all very well and good to talk about the power of the Internet to enable conversations, what has actually happened is that IT has disabled conversation from the domain of customer engagement, leaving nothing behind but the linguistic deception of "customer relationship management!" Now, in fairness to the Cluetrain founders, the verb form of "engagement" does rear its head in Thesis 45. This is an appropriate and powerful Thesis, even if many of us recognize it as an "insight into the obvious." Unfortunately, in the age of the short attention span, one can only wonder how many of the cheerleaders ever get as far as Thesis 45!

The real point however is that we have become so starved for conversation that we are willing to pay more for it. We still have old-fashioned instincts that prefer dealing with a salesperson who "knows the stuff;" and that knowledge emerges from our conversations. The same goes for dealing with a service representative who can do more than read from a script. In other words the power of the Internet to enable conversations really does not signify unless we can have the conversations we need when we need them, and there is no doubt that one can build a market around satisfying that need.

August 29, 2006 (1): The Next Economic Bubble?

Rafe Needleman came up with a great title for his Web 2.0 blog yesterday: "Are there any Web 2.0 businesses in the real world?" After reading his argument, which involved a critical reading of the values of the Cluetrain Manifesto, I decided to follow up with my own TalkBack entry. I called it "Bubble 2.0," because I am always on the lookout for the inflation of the next economic bubble. As I put it, I wanted to argue that "the primary source of gas" for the current inflation is Web 2.0. Here is an edited version of my reasoning:

We should have learned from the last bubble that sobering concepts such as "the real world" just do not signify during bubble inflation, probably because the very act of inflation in grounded in an arrogant utopianism. ("Don't worry about the real world--or the 'old economy' or whatever--because after the changes you won't recognize it any more!") Consider Needleman's account of the Cluetrain Manifesto and its "shiny new values competing with reasonable but conservative older values:"

• Simplicity over Completeness
• Long tail over Mass Audience
• Share over Protect
• Advertise over Subscribe
• Syndication over Stickiness
• Early Availability over Correctness
• Select by Crowd over Editor
• Honest voice over Corporate Speak
• Participation over Publishing
• Community over Product

There is (at least) one entry missing from this list. It's absence discloses the dirty secret of the whole story. The entry I have in mind is:

• Confidence over credibility

Bubbles are inflated by claims that, when viewed in retrospect have little, if any, credibility; but enthusiasm over the inflation dismisses any reasoned attempts to warrant those claims. Rather than reading The Cluetrain Manifesto, folks should be reading Mark Taylor's Confidence Games and its attempt to argue that our daily life, particularly as shaped by advanced technology, now plays out as one confidence game after another.

This not to say that we should hurl our wooden shoes into the works of the new engines of these confidence games. However, the Internet can help us to be more critical readers, rather than just more "clued-in" ones. If we read those ten enumerated value shifts more critically, we shall probably be less enthusiastic about embracing them. Some of us might even think our way through to dialectical syntheses that might play out in the real world!