Largest increase in expressing capability in history

Clay Shirky’s latest presentation is inspirational.

How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history

What is changing is that the people formally known as the audience (in broadcasting terms) or the user (in telecommunications terms) can connect to one-another to talk and ‘do media’. It’s these networks of inter-personal connections that is the driver of change.

The ‘Telecommunications Age’ was one of one-to-one communication. The ‘Broadcasting Age’ was one of ‘one-to-many’ content distribution. The ‘Networks of Inter-Personal Connections Age is ‘many-to-many’.

Those institutions that were in control are no longer. They can convene groups of networked people but cannot control them. Adapting to that change involves a mature realisation of that social phenomenon.

Future of communications

I’ve come across a presentation and a qualitative research study exploring the future of communications in a high speed broadband/networked economy context.

Gerd Leonhard, a media futurist based in Switzerland, gave a presentation on the future of content and telecommunications. Gerd anticipates the emergence of a new ecosystem where content and applications creators, search engines, web portals, social networks and telecommunications collaboration will determine a new balance of power. What is driving that?  The web has removed barriers to content copying and distribution. New forms of IP-based communication  – like email, IM, chat, text messaging, social networks – are substituting for voice, particularly traditional voice over the public-switched telecommunications network. Growth (in terms of use and revenues) is coming from creating added value around content, not from content. The wheels are falling off traditional business models based on centralised networks and centralised distribution of content.

Getting attention (via platforms, applications and location) is increasingly about taking user context into account. For the advertising industry, this means display ads are the past and engagement, involvement & interactivity are the future. It’s about pulling attention to ads rather than pushing ads out broadcast-style. Getting attention means developing trust. The new ecosystem is a convergent system based on collaboration between all of the industry players in the value-chain. The beneficiaries of trust are those than can collaborate.

Accenture (a management consulting and technology services company) released research on the future of the telecommunications industry earlier this month. My source and a link to the research results are here. Views expressed in the study are consistent with taking a more collaborative approach, although there are some interesting twists. Accenture postulates that companies are likely to “find themselves collaborating and partnering one day and competing against each other the next”.

According to the Accenture study, many telecommunications executives still assume they will retain control through “intelligent networks” (i.e middleware like IMS). To quote a telco exec “We will be delivering and controlling a great deal of multimedia…” (i.e. in response to declining revenues from voice services, telcos want to control content). Contrast that with an IT executive view noted in the Accenture paper: “I don’t think the carriers are on top of IP transformation”. And then there is the IT view, that nodes on the network will be communicating with each other quite nicely without the need for middleware. Accenture concluded that “the stifling effect of legacy business models and cultures is another obstacle to be addressed by the carriers” (page 2). I think that is right. In fact it was five years ago now that telecommunications culture was identified as a barrier to change.