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Culturability: The Next Big Thing in Web Design

The Year Ahead For...Social media

Social media is antifragile. It is thriving in a world of increasing technological development, complexity and uncertainty.

In 2013, social media will

Our product strategy for ITV News was simple, bold and probably as obvious in hindsight as any good idea should be. We set out to create a digitally native news service, something made for the web and mobile that left behind the Guttenberg-era baggage of ‘pages’, ‘articles’ and ‘editions’ that most news websites haven’t been able to shake off, as well as reworking some proto-web typologies like ‘navigation’, ‘liveblogging’ and ‘galleries’. 

We wanted to make a news service that answered the question: “What would news be like if we had networked digital media (and digital cameras and phones and laptops) but there had never been newspapers or broadcast TV news programmes?”.   

video - would be a massive culture shock. There was nervousness, especially about time and resources, offset by enthusiasm for change and a leadership determined to exploit the potential of real-time news delivered across multiple devices. We also had a strong conviction that opening up the news gathering process - rather than adding new work - would give us the content we needed for the stream. 

Let’s be honest: You have no idea what’s going to happen to your industry. That’s why you build your organization into an engine of possibility.

Management theorist Henry Mintzberg makes a distinction between deliberate and emergent strategy. Deliberate strategy relies on senior leaders to set goals and develop plans and strategies to achieve them. Emergent strategy is a strategy that emerges from all over the company, over time, as the environment changes and the organization shifts and adapts to apply its strengths to a changing reality.

Emergent strategy is an organic approach to growth that lets companies learn and continually develop new strategies over time based on an ongoing culture of hypothesis and experimentation.

In an interview with The Paris Review twenty years ago, Don DeLillo mentioned that “lists are a form of cultural hysteria.” From the vantage point of today, you wonder how much anyone—even someone as routinely prescient as DeLillo—could possibly have identified list-based hysteria in 1993.

prioritizes

The list gives a structure—a numerical narrative—to a text that would otherwise lack any kind of internal architecture. If you wanted to write something about, say, the phrases people use on Twitter that you find highly irritating, you can get away with not making any kind of over-all, analytical point by imposing the framework of a list. The enumeration itself, the getting to the end of the counting, becomes the point of the writing (and the reading). It’s not simply a jumbled heap of complaints about how people talk on Twitter; it’s a list, and in this sense it means business.

This is a very appealing metaphor, because it largely absolves anyone who was involved in the media from any blame for failing to see the writing on the wall or failing to move quickly enough to change their behavior or their corporate culture.

But is this true? Disruption guru Clay Christensen, also associated with Harvard, has written about how industries — including the car-manufacturing business and the steel industry — have failed to adapt because they didn’t appreciate just how disruptive new entrants or new technologies would be. And it’s arguable that the media industry in the 1990s and early 2000s also failed to appreciate just how disruptive the web would be to their business and to journalism in general. Should we blame them for that? I think we should blame them a little, and here’s why: because there were senior people in the industry who saw the disruption coming — saw it clearly, appreciated the implications, and talked about the potential damage. These weren’t voices crying in the wilderness, but fairly powerful players. To take just one example, there was Knight Ridder excecutive Kathy Yates, who ran the company’s digital unit, and eventually grew frustrated with the industry and moved on to Women.com and then CBSMarketwatch.

There are great reasons for why The Stream triumphed. In a world of infinite variety, it's difficult to categorize or even find, especially before a thing has been linked. So time, newness, began to stand in for many other things. And now the Internet's media landscape is like a never-ending store, where everything is free. No matter how hard you sprint for the horizon, it keeps receding. There is always something more.  Nowness also transmits this sense of presence, of other people, that you get in a city when you go to a highway overpass and look down at all the cars at any time of the day or night. Things are happening. I am not alone. Look at all this. 

Schonfeld cited Betaworks CEO John Borthwick's thinkpiece, "Distribution Now," which he wrote in April of 2009, just as all this was really getting going. Borthwick concludes his post on the rise of The Stream with two quotes from musician Brian Eno. The old (and better) one begins like this: "In a blinding flash of inspiration, the other day I realized that 'interactive' anything is the wrong word. Interactive makes you imagine people sitting with their hands on controls, some kind of gamelike thing. The right word is 'unfinished.' Think of cultural products, or art works, or the people who use them even, as being unfinished. Permanently unfinished. "

I am not joking when I say: it is easier to read Ulysses than it is to read the Internet. Because at least Ulysses has an end, an edge. Ulysses can be finished. The Internet is never finished.