From: Doug Skoglund - skoglund@pdmsb.com

Date: Thursday, June 30, 2005 03:00 am CDT

Subject: Constructive Conversation - Part II

My thanks for your response to my first post to your discussion web page. It was a bit disappointing, so I have been spending some additional time perusing your site along with reading Chapter One of Cluetrain Manifesto. First, you and I seem to have a different interpretation for the word, conversation. You refer to the Bush conversation and the Kerry conversation, which means absolutely nothing to me. A conversation is a two-way interchange of information between two individuals. I would see the phrase, Bush broadcast and Kerry broadcast as more apropos.

And, unfortunately, even Howard Dean failed to learn from the best of what worked in his campaign. I made an attempt to contact him right after the "big rage" in Iowa, to point out that his Internet effort, while highly successful, had choked when the chips were down and that the powers in the Democratic Party along with the media had collaborated to kill his campaign. I recommended that he go independent; however, his campaign chose not to pursue any kind of conversation.

BTW, Joe Trippi, wrote a pretty good book about the campaign and his feeling that the Democratic Party needed an overhaul and that the Internet was the wave of the future. He, too, chose not to pursue any kind of conversation on any subject.

But, let me get to Christopher Locke's "Internet Apocalypso" -- I quote:

>>Inside, outside, there's a conversation going on today that wasn't happening at all five years ago and hasn't been very much in evidence since the Industrial Revolution began.

IMHO, Mr. Locke is making two fundamental mistakes. First, is the tendency to redefine the English language and second, is the belief that his generation created the thing that he calls a conversation. The fact of the matter is that there are billions of conversations going on today, just as there were billions of similar conversations going on before Mr. Locke was born. I quote again:

>>"Life is too short", we say, and it is. Too short for office politics, for busywork and pointless paper chases, for jumping through hoops and covering our asses, for trying to please, to not offend, for constantly struggling to achieve some ever-receding definition of success.

No, Mr. Locke, no matter what you say, no matter how you say it, somebody has said it all before.

Doc, I'm not trying to denigrate Chris Locke's effort. He has done an excellent job of bringing the whole matter to the forefront, and I promise that I will get a copy of the whole book for reading and reference; however, let me add a quote from Thomas Petzinger, Jr., who said it much better than I:

>>And most importantly, that however ancient, timeless, and true, these principles are just now resurging across the business world. The triggering event, of course, is the advent of a global communication system that restores the banter of the bazaar, that tears down the power structures and senseless bureaucracies, that puts everyone in touch with everyone.

And finally, let me emphasize the point that you missed in my previous post.

Actually, it is my desire to foster more conversation about blogs, forums and other methods of enabling conversations, with the goal of moving toward some kind of political action. When Joe Trippi says that the Democratic Party needs an overhaul, he needs to open up to some conversation on the subject, conversation leading to political action. And when Jane Harman, Democratic Representative from California says that we need to overhaul the way that Congress operates, she needs to open up to some conversation on the subject, conversation leading to political action.

Doug Skoglund - http://ifihadmyway - http://pdmsb.com

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I was also a bit disappointed at first to see no response over there to my post. But there are four comments now, each thoughtful their own way; and the last (by Don Marti, Linux Journali's Editor-in-Chief) is quite constructive.

As for conversation, I have many understandings of the word, as do we all. When we said "markets are conversations" in Cluetrain, we were trying to get past a pile of other synonyms and metaphors for markets: battlefields, arenas, bulls & bears, invisible hands, demand, demographics, regions, categories and so on. We wanted folks to remember what the Industrial Age caused us to forget, which is that markets originally were places where people gathered to do business and make culture. We believed (and still do) that the Net is by nature a place where those kinds of markets can flourish again.

In early-mid 1999, when we wrote the the website and then the book, the dot-com madness was at high ebb. Much of that madness involved leveraging the worst of what we learned in the Industrial Age (e.g."targeting" and "capturing" "eyeballs" with sites we called "sticky" even though they rarely were). It seemed nearly everybody getting venture funding in those days was attempting to extend some industrial supply-side practice (advertising, malls, retailing) into a new environment where — nobody seemed to notice — customers had far more power than ever before. There was a revolution on the demand side, and not just the supply side. Calling what was happening on the demand side (and between the supply and deand sides) "conversation" might not have been accurate in the narrow literal meaning of conversation, but none of the traditional economic descriptions framed it adequately, either. In respect to what was happening with the Bush and Kerry constituencies, what would be a better term than "conversation?" I'm not sure. Yes, I was being vague, but I also didn't want to define either side too narrowly. They were not campaigns in the usual military sense of that word. The electoral environment was the same in many ways, but also different. The marketplace for electorial politics was far more networked than ever before. Political action could take many more forms, travel more avenues, blaze more trails... (Choose your movement metaphor. Any will work.)

At that last link, the second definition of conversation — An informal discussion of a matter by representatives of governments, institutions, or organizations — is close to what I meant by when I said "the Bush conversation beat the Kerry conversation." I believe one reason Bush won was because his side's conversations were a little more formal than Kerry's. Karl Rove's people did a brilliant job of using email, for example, to turn churches into political action organizations. There was no equivalent combination of campaign and conversation on Kerry's side. (Dare I say Bush's grass roots were greener? Hard to resist.)

I'm sorry I overlooked the political action point of your first post. I won't this time. I agree with your last paragraph completely. So let me ask, before we press forward with whatever conversation we'll have, what kind of political action are you looking for?

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Yet, the measure isn't our description, but the impact. Define the impact of conversation. What changes? Who is affected? Define the impact of online community? What changes? Who is affected? We live in such a "lex-haunted" world that we often fail to ask the most simple question of the effect or consequences of our words. I'd like to know how you two guys would apply your conceptions of conversations to politics today. What would change? What would be different? How would we know?

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I posted a response to your message yesterday, but it got lost somewhere, so I'll try again. You, of course, posted in reply to one of Doc's responses to me, but I assume that I can respond also.

Your questions about converstations and communities make my point even better than I. Conversation is complicated by poetic license, thus requiring clarification of meaning for real conversation to take place.

For me, conversation is the interchange of information bewteen two individuals, thus this is a seperate conversation between you and I. You responded to a conversation between Doc and I, and I am responding to your statements and questions.

Which brings me to your second paragraph where you ask far too many questions for a simple conversation. Could you simplify that paragraph a bit, as I don't intend to publish a book here.

Thanks for responding.

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