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Re: Constructive Conversation - Part II
Thanks. 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? There are responses to this message:
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