‹ “Social collaboration is the future of the Net.” •
… just sitting here thinking about the lastten or fifteen years or so, and the preceding post titled “Social collaboration is the future of the Net”.
I hope any readers will pardon me for being so presumptuous, but this just seems so bleedingly obvious to me.
… at the same time I keep being surprised by how deeply anchored in existing structures and the dynamics they generate are most peoples’ consciousness and daily work/life habits.
First, we shape our structures/tools … then, our structures/tools shape us (attributed to Churchill and McLuhan, and others)
I keep thinking about how easy it might be, and how useful and constructive it could be, if people, organizations, businesses would/could just re-frame their notions about buzz-word driven high performance, emotional intelligence, six sigma, talent war, intellectual capital execution, and suspend judgmentabout the pajama-porting, free-think, personal diary-publishing people online, and just try letting and helping people collaborate more easily online (and using telepresence).
How can millions and millions of younger digital natives, used to text messaging, IM, cell phones, sharing whilst playing games or doing their homework not end up using an easier-to-use and more integrated set of capabilities on the Web, say 5 years hence.
For an interesting initiative in its formative stages, take a look at this call to experiment by my friend Chris Corrigan.
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March 16, 2005 at 8:00 pm
Anonymous
McLuhan’s laws of media show us that any medium has four concurrent effects - Extend, Retrieve, Obsolesce, Reverse. We usually see the new medium in terms of the old, hence the “horseless buggy” syndrome. You are already looking at what the Web is retrieving - collaboration. Pushing this even further, we may want to be looking forward five years, and predict what will the Web Reverse into?
It seems that the cycle of technology adoption/rejection doesn’t change much though.
March 16, 2005 at 8:25 pm
Anonymous
Do you think so, Harold ? I know the four McLuhanistic effects well, and like that conception (maybe we’ve both read McLuhan For Managers .. New Tools for New Thinking, by Federman and deKerckhove ?). I’m not at all sure that we’re seeing yet anything but the very very early signals of retrieval … and the way i tend to view ‘collaboration”, I would suggest few people are truly *co-labouring* or *collaborating* .. tho’ I would agree thatthe word is bandied about much .. it’s as if people know they don’t have the choice but to, given current conditions. Personally, I think making much work into projects and team-based whilst still retaining much of the old *work design* prionciples in org structure and management processes, means that *we* are still in the first half of the journey towards relatively full-blown and consistent collaboration … but I’m only one person with one POV, and quite likely to be ill-informed and/or plain wrong.
I do think we see more *collaboration* with the under-30’s (or under-25’s, or whatever the appropriate generational cut-off point is).
So, I agree we are/will be retrieving collaboration, and I will spend some time noodling on what the intersection of interconnected Web capabilities and altered social psychology will Reverse into .. what are your thoughts or best guesses ?
March 17, 2005 at 7:26 am
Anonymous
I agree Jon, with the Web, we are mostly Enhancing what we have already done, and are at the early phase of Retrieval - and that is sporadic.
I was just thinking that this medium too will some day day go into Reversal on a large scale. I’ll have to give this a lot more thought though. I do know that any time that I have used the McLuhan lens, it’s usually bang on.
I’d also recommend McLuhan & McLuhan’s “Laws of Media” as a reference for “McLuhan for Managers”. I’m sure that a major Public Library would have a copy.
Keep up the interesting posts