6/17/2011

BACK TO OUR FUTURE - THE HUMAN NETWORK



The genie is out of the bottle and there is no going back. Every day with every new technological evolution in mobile communication, internet availability, broadband accessibility, the speed of life seems to move incrementally into warp drive. In a paper written in 1968 by Internet pioneers J. C. R. Licklider and Bob Taylor, called “The Computer as a Communication Device.” they envisioned the time when real-time interactivity was possible.


They expected an acceleration of our abilities to innovate and work creatively. That time is now. Internet technologies have opened up new frontiers of communicative methods and techniques enabling user-generated content, creativity and shared documents resulting in an explosion of possibilities, which never existed previously.


The Relationship Economy is a knowledge-based economy without borders, where the race is between companies and locales over how to learn faster and organize more flexibly to take advantage of technology-enabled market opportunities (Kelly, 1998; Best, 2001). Within this Relationship Economy, the World Wide Web is ubiquitous. It has transformed geographically separated locales into a “global village” for information sharing, social interaction, and economic exchange.


Technology, in particular, ever-expanding digital bandwidth, has resulted in the creation of new-economy forms of intangible, knowledge-based capital, the value of which now exceeds that of the physical capital that once dominated old economies (Castells, 2000; Tapscott, et al., 2000). (1)


In a culture which some have described as information overload, it is impossible for any one of us to hold all of the relevant pieces of information in our heads at the same time. Because there is more information out there on any given topic than we can store in our heads, there is an added incentive for us to talk amongst ourselves about the media we consume. This conversation creates buzz and accelerates the circulation of media content. Consumption has become a collective process and that is what is meant by collective intelligence. None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills…. Collective intelligence can be seen as an alternative source of media power. We are learning how to use that power through our day-to-day interactions within convergence culture.


Right now, we are mostly using collective power through our recreational life, but it has implications at all levels of our culture. Jenkins book explains the cultural shift that is occurring as consumers fight for control across disparate channels, changing the way we do business, elect our leaders, and educate our children.


To quote Victor Hugo, “You can resist an invading army, but you cannot resist an idea whose time has come.”


Conclusion


The medium of social networking accelerates human interaction across all divides and faster than any time in the history of mankind. These interactions are creating exchanges of thoughts, ideas and emotions. One can expect that this acceleration of exchanges will introduce new dynamics of creativity, connectivity and possibilities never before anticipated, experienced or expected.


The Relationship Economy taps into the collective ability of the human thought, emotion and spirit. These three elements of human possibility leveraged by the medium of social networking technology makes everything previously envisioned as impossible possible. The Relationship Economy provides a pathway to abundance with no boundaries, no limits and beyond today’s comprehension and definition of any other form in the history of our existence. A new era has been born, the human network and it enables individuals to maximize thoughts, emotions and the human spirit to a universe of possibilities.


Jay Deragon
The Relationship Economy
06/15/2011

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