Henry is the Director of the Comparative Media Studies graduate program at MIT. I read one of his books several months ago, “Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide” and it was very much one of those right-book-at-the-right-time kind of things. The book is about the ways in which new communication technologies are empowering and encouraging participation in media by people who would not have otherwise had the opportunity to do so. It also discusses the gamut of response to these new possibilities; some welcoming, some smug, some fearful.
But I thought of Henry, because I knew he’d be thinking about how the whole YouTube/CNN debate format is appears to be an almost watershed moment for these technologies. And he’s blogged an edifying post about it.
To wit:

In the 1990s, an alternative — the town hall meeting debate — emerged and Bill Clinton rose to the presidency in part on the basis of his understanding of the ways that this format changed the nature of political rhetoric. In the town hall meeting format, who asks the question — and why they ask it — is often as important as the question being asked. The questioner embodies a particular political perspective — the concerned mother of a Iraqi serviceman, the parent of a sick child who can’t get decent health care, the African-American concerned about race relations, and so forth. We can trace the roots of this strategy of embodiment back to, say, the ways presidents like to have human reference points in the audience during their State of the Union addresses — Reagan was perhaps the first to deploy this strategy of using citizens as emblematic of the issues he was addressing or the policies he was supporting and in his hands, it became associated with the push towards individualism and volunteerism rather than governmental solutions. These were “individuals” who “made a difference.”
What Clinton got was that in this newly embodied context, the ways the candidate addressed specific voters modeled the imagined interface between the candidate and the voters more generally. Think about that moment, for example, when George Bush looked at his watch during a Town Hall Meeting debate and this got read as emblematic of his disconnect from the voters. Contrast this with the ways that Clinton would walk to the edge of the stage, ask follow up questions to personalize or refine the question and link it more emphatically to the human dimensions of the issue, and then respond to it in a way which emphasized his empathy for the people involved. People might make fun of Clinton for saying “I feel your pain” a few times too many but this new empathic link between the candidate and the questioner shaped how voters felt about this particular candidate.

It seems that increasingly, the prize will go to those who know how to navigate this new media landscape. And by that I don’t mean those who learn to game the system, I mean those who recognize that the transparency it creates demands that they be genuine humans.

He’s joined Deloitte & Touche USA LLP “with a mandate to establish a major new research center in Silicon Valley…[to]…explore key business issues created by the intersection of business strategy and information technology.” The content of the post is dominated by an explanation of the questions that will inform the mission of this center. Concerning the question, “What if there is no equilibrium?” he suggests:

Here’s the paradox: at the same time, we cling to traditional equilibrium concepts and institutions that emerged and prevailed in more stable times. Nathan Mhyrvold highlighted in his talk yesterday the contrast between the exponential advance of technology performance and the linear thinking of most executives. Clayton Christensen got the attention of the business world with his perspective on disruptive innovation – but even that is a punctuated equilibrium view – it holds on to the assumption that equilibrium will eventually return.
A more specific question might be: what are the institutional architectures required to operate in a world where there is no equilibrium? Early conventional wisdom suggest that these architectures should focus on agility and flexibility, but that misses the real opportunity – balancing agility with the persistence and stability required to build and deepen long-term trust based relationships. Being able to discern what needs to change and what needs to remain stable may be the greatest challenge of all…

From where I sit, his questions seem to be pointing at a still somewhat inchoate body of interpretation about what is going on with business and technology and marketing communications. I don’t think he’s without some vision of where he thinks the future lies. For my part, I think it has to do with something more subtle than the “democratization of the market” trope that is being advanced by some.
I just think it’s an incredible set of questions and worth reading.

Marketing, of necessity, treats the market as an abstraction. Thus, the customer is an abstraction. I’m willing to wager that people don’t mind being abstracted, they just don’t want to feel like an abstraction. If you’re going to try to convince a friend to try a particular restaurant, you will undoubtedly recourse to an abstraction of that friend to find the right bit of persuasive suggestion. However, when you actually talk to your friend about it, the exchange will be anything but abstract. It will take account of the shared social context, your friend’s non-verbal communications, your desire to share a new flavor, and so on. Most importantly, presuming you are anything like a decent human and you call this person a friend because you mean what is generally meant by friend, you will be speaking from your center. You will be honest. You will be human. You will be you.
This is the crack in the edifice of marketing as a paradigm. It has been there since the beginning, and no efforts to ameliorate it from within the marketing paradigm have been successful. Because marketing was a successful innovation to begin, and because its culturally totalitarian nature took time to manifest, the pressure to solve the problem of its anti-social behavior has only recently become increasingly apparent. Marketing is becoming less effective as it becomes more ubiquitous and people become more cynical. Everybody probably already knows that part.
The internet has changed everything; even though the marketers are still in the dark about it. I like to say that marketers have treated the internet like a television with a keyboard and mouse. That some marketers have been experimenting with allowing customers to create content does little to sway my opinion in this regard. I think the citizen/customer generated content (CGC) thing is a whole lot of fun and illuminating, but it does not constitute the next paradigm.
The next paradigm comes when marketers stop marketing and use these new tools to help their organizations to act like humans. The paradigm within which they’ve been operating hasn’t allowed them to do this. Now they can. Make customer service, research and development, and marketing into an organic whole so that it can assimilate these new tools. Have conversations with customers at every point of contact. It’s not democratizing the market as some have suggested, anymore than you are a democracy when you are trying to persuade your friend to join you at your favorite restaurant. It is about being human. Be accountable. Say no when you have to, but explain yourself. Apologize when you have to. Know when to apologize because you’re actually engaged in a dialogue with those you may have hurt. Give praise to those who do novel and compelling things with your products. Tell incredible human stories.
This is what creative, strategic marketers have wanted to do all along, but the marketing gestalt hasn’t made the path visible. Marketers are relegated to being the veneer of the organization—out at the edge of the process—whereas every encounter with the customer should be directly informed by the center; from the human part of the organization; from its core. The new role for marketing is in facilitating the transformation of companies from distant abstractions to human institutions. It is an opportunity for big ideas; big ideas that the big ad agencies are constitutionally incapable of conceiving.
Whatever you call that role, it ain’t marketing. Maybe it’s anthropology, as the other innovation firms call it. I just call it being human.

As I interpret this footage, Mr. Jones appears to be pissing on the whole customer generated marketing/social networking/web 2.0 clique. It’s not exactly what I would call withering, but as I interpret it, there are some substantive arguments offered. For those too lazy to read John’s post, here are the relevant bits from David’s speech to which John calls attention and my brief thoughts.

“Our industry cannot delegate the creation of brilliant ideas to consumers. That has to be our job.”

In general, I concur. However, there is always Ben’s 1%.

“What’s been quite a prevalent trend in the lazy agencies over the last two years is to go, ‘I know. Consumers can now create ideas so what we’ll do is get them to come up with the idea.’”

This is undoubtedly true, but I suggest that it derives from the fact that marketing firms are constituted for a kind of communication that is defined by the mass communication technologies of the last hundred and fifty years. Ubiquitous packet-switched networks with decent bandwidth to our homes can only encourage demand for conversation. Marketers are tooled to talk at a mass audience. This conversation stuff is new to marketers and because it seems to require something of an operational and cultural retooling, I imagine it will have to be forced on them by the market. They may try to include these initiatives in their campaigns, but until they make this constitutional shift, they will be hard pressed to create authentic conversations.

“If you look at and go play around on the ‘YouTubes’ and ‘MySpaces’ … well, there are a few entertaining things there but there is so much utter crap there. There are only so many times you can watch someone dance in a crazy way or mime badly to a song. And so firstly, consumers aren’t that brilliant at it and secondly, what they will do is not all that relevant.”

This would seem to be the other horn of Ben’s 1% rule. To wit: if 1% of your audience will contribute something profound and relevant, it follows that the other 99% will not. It does not follow, I submit, that the conversation is thus rendered useless, for reasons I’ve mentioned previously, but it does seem to suggest that so-called CGM is likely not any kind of panacea. It is a prediction of what I have the pretention of calling my model of what is going on with marketing that the “traditional marketers” and their tools really won’t go away, but they will have to learn what the new technology really means and that discovery will necessitate a fundamental change in the constitution and creative culture of the marketing firm.
Incidentally, the depths of my loathing for the name, “Integral Marketing” grows daily. How about: Humanization? Anthropic Communication? Yuck. Tribal Marketing? Nope. Really, help me out here.