The Internet's First Golden Age Is Now

Are we entering the 'Net's first golden age?

Wait a minute, you're protesting, the first golden age in Internet Years was the dot-com bubble, no?   I actually think not.

The dot-com bubble (in which I had a role on-stage in the chorus, although my name never made the Playbill), was in retrospect largely about companies trying to do things online that people had always been doing off-line:   Buying books and pet food, booking airline tickets, investing, and so on.  It was fundamentally a one-to-many model, even in the case of an arguable paradigm-changer like eBay, which deserves credit at least for creating a national marketplace that literally could not exist in the off-line world.

One of my theories about a new medium, the 'Net included, is that it starts out resembling the old medium to which it's most closely analogous.  So radio began by broadcasting vaudeville acts, TV by broadcasting acted-out radio soap operas, and the 'Net by emulating broadcast TV's top-down, take-it-or-leave-it, content.

The next generation of each medium arrives when it finds its "true voice," which is by definition not an imitation of something that has gone before.  Thus with radio it's music, news, and talk.  With TV it's sports, movies, and breaking news.  And with the 'Net, it's.....?   This.   (Courtesy of the Wharton School, headlined "Wikis, Weblogs and RSS: What Does the New Internet Mean for Business?")

The shift is from host-provided content to user-provided content: 

• From one-to-many to many-to-many.
• From large, intricate, zealously tended and feature-rich Big App's spanning acres of servers to small, lightweight, low-tech ways of publishing and communicating.  And perhaps in the most revolutionary sense
• From a command-and-control, gating, editing, and triple-checking process to wide-open communities of permissive social interaction driven by spontaneous and unedited expression.

In other words, we can now do with the 'Net  things we could never do off-line:  This is, indeed, "The New Internet."

There are several ways to think of this, but one that sums it up nicely is to characterize the past decade as having built up the physical infrastructure and anticipating that the next decade will build up the social infrastructure.  Now, a "social infrastructure" comes with no guarantees, and as with the LA Times' famous lightning-speed retreat from wiki-editorials reveals, a few vandals can wreck the neighborhood.  The tradeoff for accepting this risk—which within small virtual neighborhoods is de minimis—can, however, be enormous.

Moreover, what's going on is nothing other than the 'Net returning to its roots:

"If you go back to the thinking of the earliest visionaries with respect to the Internet, that was exactly the picture they were painting. [...] The original vision of the Internet being a medium that is genuinely peer-to-peer, is loosely coupled and [which] sparks different kinds of interactions."

Then, the "social infrastructure" was set by the hacker/geek code, with its arcane but effective rules of courtesy and mutual respect enforced, of course, by white-hot flaming when called for.  There is every reason to believe that our most social of all species will be able to evolve an online culture that is both collaborative extraordinarily potent:  Certainly when you think of the intricacies of the supply chain required to deliver, say, your new Dell Inspiron laptop to your front door, a supply chain that touches down in Taiwan, the Phillipines, Hong Kong, mainland China, and Memphis, Tennessee (FedEx), with not even a moment's "command and control" issuing from Round Rock, Texas, you realize what human beings, guided by Adam Smith's invisible hand, are capable of.

Is this all starting to sound a little airy-fairy?  Then consider how business has evolved.  No longer is the goal to achieve Six Sigma perfection in churning out X thousand or million perfectly identical widgets; the goal is to innovate, to steal a march, to cause disruption.

"This changes the way you think about productivity in organizations where innovation, adaptability and dealing with complexity are the key challenges. So much of reengineering, which is what major corporations have been about for the last 10 or 15 years, has been about linear efficiency -- lining everything up in as tight a way as possible along a path. That's wonderful if you know exactly what it is you want to do, and the aim of that task will never change. Increasingly, that's not the relevant challenge. The challenge is adaptability, complexity, uncertainty and your capacity to mine the elements of your business, people and knowledge into different and new combinations."

This brings us back to law firms.  When has it ever been more important to deal adroitly and nimbly with uncertainty, to "mine your people and knowledge?" 

Envision new ways of working; with the New Internet, they just may be possible.