It was a nice warm spring day. I ran around the Mall at lunch and had some random thoughts on using the new media. I know that is nerdy, but it is what I do.
Below is a pickup game on the Mall. I am not sure what they were playing. They had a soccer ball, but nobody seemed to be kicking it. They were just wandering around. BTW – I ran past them near the start of my run, and when I got back around them 20 minutes later they had made no progress. Maybe they were just enjoying the warm weather.
The New Media is NOT about technology any more than what you say on the phone or watch on television is about technology. The new media is about using appropriate technologies and techniques with audiences or organization based on cultural, personal social, anthropological or organizational logics. It is – in short – an intensely human paradigm. Technology is the easy part – the transparent part.
The fluid and protean nature of the new media requires more flexibility and individual responsibility than we have seen in the past, and maybe more than many of us are comfortable with.
In the new media, you not only learn by doing but you shape the reality by what you do. That means that nobody merely observing the activities can properly understand the reality because it is in the process of being created.
Most organizations have a fantastic amount of expertise and knowledge locked in our people. Together we can come to good decisions faster and better than committees of experts. Our biggest challenge is to tap that power and channel it w/o ruining it by over directing the resource.
In general, I do not think a plan is possible, if what we mean by a plan is a specific set of things we will do and specific resources we will use. The technological and social tools we will depend on five years from now or even next year have not yet been developed. What we can bring into being is a process that will take us toward our goals, w/o specifying exactly what actions need to be taken. In this way we can take advantage of all our aggregated knowledge, skills and passions for the work.