Guest Blogger: Jonathan Salem Baskin
Endless arguments. False identities. Hidden agendas. Regulators chasing after the latest innovation. People thrown together in explosively novel, sometimes threatening ways, in a place where the rules of normal society don't seem to apply.
Welcome to an early 17th Century English marketplace. Replace the corsets with computers, and throw in somewhat more regular bathing, and you have our experience of the Internet.
It turns out that this kind of change happens fairly often.
Society was forcibly thrust into the future after various plagues erased everything in the 14th Century. The telegraph reconstituted institutions and habits in the mid-1800s. Generations of people have experienced unprecedented changes in how they saw themselves, and interacted with one another.
In fact, every generation thinks it lives on the cusp of a future that's exceptionally unique. I grew up expecting to fly a PanAm space shuttle, and sit on Scandinavian art chairs at the orbital Hilton.
But then the future(s) get experienced and become history. Patterns emerge. So do truths, usually guided by the accrued history of human behavior. Time and place change, but what we homo sapiens try to do tends in many ways to stay the same.
So replace our chat rooms and virtual avatars with Victorian stock quotes and love-letters in Morse Code, and there appear behaviors that turn out to be consistent, irrespective of how technological or other circumstances may vary.
Maybe we can learn something about social media, gaming, and online commerce if we look at the the history of the last half-dozen times those underlying behaviors have been enabled?
Here are three thought-starters:
- Communities become meaningful, or they disappear. Guilds were partially an organizational substitute for communities that had once been feudally defined and controlled. Same goes for the trades during the Renaissance, or unions during the Industrial Revolution. All of these groupings got ever-harder to join, and required things of its membership in exchange for real benefits. How might this color how we understand MySpace, Facebook, or any customer loyalty program?
- Mobs don't rule forever. The idea of self-regulating commerce (or conversation) has fascinated theorists forever (Ben Jonson's play Bartholomew Fair toyed with the issue in 1614). Yet each time a free-for-all marketplace has emerged, people have developed objective authorities to manage it, my affection for "Anarchy in the UK" aside. At what point(s) does this suggest limits to current concepts, like crowd-sourcing or vertical search? How does this intersect with the further development of communities?
- Reality matters. We've craved communal experience ever since the first caveman oog'd through a hunting story by firelight. And while people have been inspired (or addicted) to "live" completely in, say, the hubbub of a medieval marketplace, the miracle of Shakespeare performed live at the Globe, or the buzz of telegraph operators playing dot-and-dash games with one another, the inevitability of a return and connectivity to geophysical reality has inevitably factored into the experience. Can anybody say Second Life?
It would be interesting to get some medievalists and art historians blogging on this subject. A deeper analysis of medieval markets, the telegraph, and guilds/unions might reveal some really interesting results, relevant to marketers, regulators, and the inquiring minds of We of the Blogosphere.
Lots of what we otherwise observe isn't really new, as much as it is new to us. So when we try to understand the function and implications of online communication, we risk missing deeper truths -- and actionable observations -- because weÕre enamored with the uniqueness of our own experience.
Some kid wearing ruffles and an uncomfortable codpiece once saw a new, unprecedented future filled with change emerging from the chaos of an open-air marketplace that today is paved over by a parking lot. He just didn't have a blog to narrate it.
We're not the first ones to wonder.
