3
In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked workers, people are speaking to each other in powerful new ways.
Cluetrain Thesis #8
The real difference between the Internet and all preceding media forms lies in its relationship to the public. Online, people aren’t just the audience – they are also the content. The Internet is made of people.
Most forms of media from the last the last five hundred years (and there have been many of them; just check out the stack of corpses over at the Dead Media Project <www.well.com/user/jonl/deadmedia/>) weren’t really made of people. They were made of producers and audiences, publishers and readers, talkers and listeners: binary opposites that establish rigid roles, with ideas flowing downstream, from the one with the knowledge to the many who thirsted for it. Before the Internet, the culmination of the top-down media model was big newspaper chains, broadcast TV, and Hollywood . Solid, predictable spectacle.
But the number of car chases, explosions, celebrity divorces, Backstreet Boys and episodes of Survivor any culture can absorb is finite. Spectacle has become boring, mind-numbing and repressive, and, thanks to the Internet, we actually have an opportunity at hand to institute a different way of doing things.
The Internet is the nail in the coffin of the disenfranchised spectator. Everyone can potentially see everyone else, whether in name or in action. More importantly, we all become a part of the show. People don’t go online for the passive spectacle of a Disneyland parade, but for the collective carnival that we produce by being online together.
Think about how the Internet has changed the process of storytelling:
Then …
For our grandparents, the central narrative arrived in town every Saturday at the Bijou. After weeks or months trundling through the typewriters of paid hacks and the corners of big studio back lots, the Lone Ranger would jump off the screen in all of his predictability. He’d pick up where he had left off last week and end up where he was headed next week. And then all the kids would head home, don their masks and reenact the thin gruel of culture that flowed from the founts of Hollywood.
Now …
In contrast, the central narrative for our children begins and ends within the game itself. In places like Battle.net or Ultima Online, hundreds of thousands of people weave tales of knights and sorcerers, noble alien races and bloodthirsty humans. The narrative unfolds in real time and is constantly changing. What’s more, it no longer comes from the pens of paid hacks. It comes from the collective dreams of the players. As a product of ‘the collective mind’ it is engaging, compelling, magical.
‘Now’ is the time of commonspace, the many-to-many online world where audiences are simultaneously the performers in the main attraction.
The Electric Carnival
When describing the novels of Dostoyevsky, the philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin used the metaphor of carnival, ‘a pageant without footlights an