Every once in a while Doc comes up with memorable statement and this is the best one for a while. 

THERE IS NO DEMAND FOR MESSAGES

Let me see a show of hands: who here wants a message? Right: none. And who wants to shield themselves from messages they don’t want? Exactly: everybody. TV advertising has negative demand. It subtracts value.

Source: The Doc Searls Weblog : Sunday, December 17, 2006

This ties nicely to Shel’s overview for his new book.

…..  It explains why power is shifting from large organizations into self-organizing communities and why businesses and public officials need to generously serve them rather than try to command or control them. ……

A question that intrigues me is this. 

• What is the relevance of internet in all this?

The root cause cited, implied in both comments above is that people, particularly GenY are more and more disillusioned with large corporates, and with their advertising.  ‘It is not believable.’  ‘It is too much.’  And worse everyone is a marketer, has taken some course, or knows someone who did, and recognises the tactics to address demographics, levering emotion in advertising etc etc.  Of this there is no doubt.

My question asks about the relevance of internet.  Are the shifts occurring because of:

1. disillusionment as above
2. internet and technology provide a level of such control, that we can be protected from the advertising.

Time Magazine just announced “you” are person of the year. That was smart, and was an attempt to answer the question, but they speak of community and collaboration, framed in technology.  They refer to it as an experiment fuelled by Web 2.0 etc.

But if the real root cause is 1) ….. that means the drive to community would have happened anyway, which is a powerful message.  The implication being that a systemic shift has occurred, in how people are thinking about things.  So any shift to internet social networks will be a permanent shift to alternatives.

Its an important distinction, because in the frame of “there is nothing new in the world, consider this quote:

“If beatniks and not illuminated Beat poets overrun this country, they will have been created not by Kerouac but by industries of mass communication which continue to brainwash man.”

Ginsberg wrote that in 1957.  Yet what came in the 60’s – 90’s was the explosion in marketing messages that Ginsberg already thought was getting out of control, as he considered the growth in “beat” versus the media’s concept of “beatnik”.

Those were times that young people were disillusioned with the world, which happened to be at that time, large governments, structure, and rules, but still, disillusionment.  So they “dropped out”, and abandoned the understood structures.

Back to the question “What is the relevance of internet in all this?”.  I believe Ginsberg was a little early in assuming mass communication was brainwashing man.  It took man another 40 years to figure that out, but now that he has, he is seeking alternatives to inform himself in his world understanding, and internet and the tools it supports, offers that alternative.

The trick will be to build those tools in a way that meets the expectations of ‘you’, the people.  Alternatively we could see a resurgence in coffee shops!