The revolution will not be televised

Or the importance of being both good and original.

While I’m not a big fan of musicians reworking past hits, I’m beginning to wonder if we should ask Gil Scott-Heron to run up a new version of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. He made a good point then: that real change comes from the people dealing with the day-to-day challenges, not the people talking about them. His point still holds today. Web 2.0 might be where the buzz is, but the real revolution will emerge from the child care workers, farmers, folk working in Starbucks, and all the other people who live outside the limelight.

There appears to be a disconnect between the technology community—the world of a-list bloggers, venture capital, analysts, (non-)conferences, etc.—and the people who doing real things. The world we technologists live in is not the real world. The real world is people going out and solving problems and trying to keep their head above water, rather than worrying about their blog, twitter, venture funding, or the new-new thing. This is the world that invented micro-credit, where fishermen off the african coast use a mobile phones to find the market price of their cash, and where farmers in Australia are using Web 2.0 (not that they care what it is) to improve their farm management. These people don’t spend their time blogging since they’re too busy trying to improve the world around them. Technology will not change the world on its own; however real people solving real problems will.

We’re all too caught up in the new-new thing. A wise friend of mine often makes the point that we have more technology than we can productively use; perhaps it’s time to take a breather from trying to create the new-new-new thing, look around the world, and see what problems we can solve with the current clutch of technologies we have. The most impressive folk I’ve met in recent years don’t blog, vlog, twitter or spend their time changing their Facebook profile. They’re focused on solving their problems using whatever tools are available.

Which I suppose brings me to my point. In a world where we’re all communicating with each other all of the time—the world of mesh collaboration—it’s all to easy to mistake the medium for the message. We get caught up in the sea of snippets floating around us, looking for that idea that will solve our problem and give us a leg up on the competition. What we forget is that our peers and competitors are all swimming in the same sea of information, so the ideas we’re seeing represent best practice at best. The mesh is a great leveler, spreading information evenly like peanut butter over the globe, but don’t expect it to provide you with that insight that will help you stand out from the
crowd.

Another wise friend makes the equally good point that in the mesh it’s not enough to be good: you need to both good and original. The mesh doesn’t help you with original. Original is something that bubbles up when our people in the field struggle with real problems and we give them the time, space, and tools to explore new ways of working.

A great example is the rise in sharity blogs. The technical solution to sharing music files is to create peer-to-peer (P2P) applications—applications, which a minority of internet users use to consume the majority of the available bandwidth. However, P2P is too complicated for many people (involving downloading and installing software, finding a torrent seeds, and learning a new language including terms like torrent seed) and disconnected from the music communities. Most of the music sharing action has moved onto sharity blogs. Using free blogging and file sharing services (such as Blogger and RapidShare, respectively) communities are building archives of music that you can easily download, archives which you can find via a search engines and which are integrated (via links) into the communities and discussions around them. The ease of plugging together a few links lets collectors focus on being original; putting their own spin on the collection they are building, be it out of print albums, obscure artists or genres, or simply whatever they can get their hands on.

What can we learn from this? When we develop our new technology and/or Web 2.0 strategy, we need to remember that what we’re trying to do is provide our team with a new tool to help them do a better job. Deploying Web 2.0 as a new suite of information silos, disconnected from the current work environment, will create yet another touch point for our team members to navigate as they work toward their goals. This detracts from their work, which is what they’re really interested in, resulting in them ignoring the new application as it seems more trouble than it is worth. The mesh is a tool to be used and not an end in itself, and needs to be integrated into and support the existing work environment in a way that makes work easer. This creates the time and space for our employees to explore new ideas and new ways of working, helping them to become both good and original.

Update: Swapped the image of Gil Scott-Heron’s Pieces of Man for an embedded video of The revolution will not be televised, at the excellent suggestion of Judith Ellis.