Content Plus Conversation Equals?
In his post yesterday, titled Misdirected Facebook backlash, Seamus McCauley says,
“the Internet isn’t about the content, it’s about the conversation.”
and
“That (Facebook) taps a fraction of the potential value of the web: the fraction that is about the content.”
concluding that the goal is
“adding relevant commercial value to online conversations”
Accepting the unstated premise here (which I don’t), that the potential value of the web is only a commercial/dollar value, I recognize that, to the media, marketers, and ambitious entrepreneurs, it is the aggregation of online relationships that will further inform and direct their strategies.
It is a cynical viewpoint. Just as the tools of individual expression such as blogging, offered for ‘free’, represented an opportunity to amass a billion dollars worth of eyeballs, so do the developing tools of ‘personal networking’ represent an opportunity to identify and follow groups and trends. Leading ‘friend’ groups as hosts of marketing ‘viruses’, could command a multiple value in marketing terms that is much greater than the sum of their eyeballs. Part of that concept is already established via the measurement of advertising value based on a blog’s traffic, where bloggers are selling their reader’s eyeballs, although that is yet just simple arithmetic.
So from the marketer’s perspective, where all the traffic and activity of the billion people online is really nothing but raw data to be fed into their marketing analysis systems, the contribution of increasing numbers of users to both expand the depth and quality of demographic info they provide, and to group themselves into allegiances and groups that no consumer survey would ever be able to identify accurately, is just more ripe fruit begging to be picked.
Under this view, content plus conversation equals richer monetization opportunity. That opportunity belongs to whoever identifies and seizes it. Is the jury still out on whether the citizens themselves will always ‘eat cake’ and say thank you?
As always, though, my viewpoint is that personal and social benefit can (and should) be compatible with free enterprise. Steven always says that everything is political. Well, then, making a living is capitalism and giving it away for free is socialism. What is de-volving, however, is connection (and sometimes comprehension) of individuals to the economy that their presence and activity enables.
In a free society (North America particularly) blessed with a standard of living so high as to remove many of us from consuming attention to lower level needs, we should seek the opportunity to knowingly and consciously apportion our daily ration between the personal and the communal with a full appreciation of where and how commerce begins, ends, and actually operates.
If this were the case, then content plus conversation would be but one step on the path to all the destinations (or states) any of us might desire, including meaning. Data in itself has no meaning. Web marketers and entrepreneurs extract meaning based on it, and so do a few savvy individuals, for whom networking is a useful tool. Can we be satisfied on a personal level with a ‘world’ where the fruit of our activity is measured to such a great extent only in dollars?
