First Person, Plural!!
David Reed
August 1st, 2008
There is no I, there is only we…
When introducing our work in the Viral Communications Research Group, Andy Lippman and I usually begin by saying our mantra is: “There is no I, there is only we” — not because Andy and I are joined at the hip, but because we want to emphasize that treating communications as a solo, personal activity destroys the very core essence of what it means to communicate. Let me share with you why we think this is a crucially important viewpoint for the future of the communications value chain.
Much of the communications industry, at all layers of the stack, defines itself around an activity that might better be called message delivery. Message delivery is a function that takes an object called a “message” from a sender, transports that message, and delivers it sometime later to a receiver (a TV picture from studio camera to viewer on a couch, or a spoken word from my cellphone to Andy who gets it on his satphone via voicemail). While message delivery is an important mechanism supporting many communications applications and services, communications among humans is a different sort of thing: achieving common awareness, enabling joint action, building a brand image between a company and its customers, etc. In other words, there is no first person, singular form of communications.
As I write this blog post, and you all read it, we are communicating. We share an awareness of a common purpose that creates a context in which this communication is happening. This context consists of the group of us, our interests, the CFP website, the fact that I am sitting in my MIT office, and the fact that you came to be reading this on your computer when you thought it worth engaging with me. This particular “Internet Blog Context” is far more important to this act of communication than the particular message formats, transport technologies, etc. that are used to implement the message delivery that lies underneath it all. (In fact, that is why interoperability in the INTERnet has not commoditized communications – it has only commoditized trivial details).
From a business point of view, almost all of the value (economic utility) of our communications arises out of the shared context that we have created, so as part of understanding what the communications business is about, we should be studying the value that is created through the elements of context, rather than the speeds and technologies of the particular pipe.
Mobile and dynamic contexts are becoming central to every communications activity as well. Every communications context becomes a moveable feast, transcending time and place to include participants that need not all be experiencing the communications activity simultaneously. Such natural flexibility amplifies the value of every form of human communications.
And finally, when we humans communicate, we define and express aspects of our social identity. Identity is embedded in the term “we” – in any particular communication, our relationship and role is one part of our identity.
At about this point in the post you may wonder why an engineer and systems architect has spent so much time on an abstract plane. Let me close by completing the implication.
Prior to the Internet, communications technologies haven’t embodied the first person, plural, nor have they focused on the construction of context or identity. Yet beginning with the Internet and the WWW, and continuing into the future we are constructing in the Viral Communications group, we are constructing technical systems where groups and communities, context construction, identity maintenance, and communications activities that transcend time and location are not the exception.
All future communications applications and services will establish such first person, plural contexts.
In our view, the entire communications value chain is beginning to refashion itself around these more natural, more human forms of communications, enabled by ubiquitous computing and communications resources, both carried on our persons, embedded in our private spaces, and open for use in the public square.
As we move into that future, communications business at any level in the stack must abandon the idea that their primary function is message delivery, or that their primary value is rapid bridging of distance. At the same time, communications policy must engage the much more scary idea that communications technology constructs many independent contexts with many different identities for all of us, depending on those contexts. We each become many identities, and our places become many contexts.
The way to predict the future is to build it — but it’s important to understand that “they” are not building it for “me” — “we” are building it for “us.”
