It is quite interesting to read every few days articles repeating yesterday’s news, trying to foster a change to generate the news of tomorrow.
What I am referring to? Well, considering the title… Finland’s choice to have universal broadband access by 2015.
Why not? The home of Nokia, just around the corner from the home of Skype (more or less the same language, incidentally)- probably, its inhabitants are all Internet-literate.
If you read this blog, you know that I consider some form of universal access as part of a “citizenship package”- outsourced to private suppliers, but eventually a basic right.
In the XXI century having access to the online shared knowledge repository (a.k.a. Internet) is a basic need to be able to “connect the dots” in new, surprising ways.
And create innovative economic successes.
But… push or pull? Should simply broadband become available, or an educational campaign is needed?
Pushing broadband Internet to potential users requires having a receptive audience, able to use it.
It is not just broadband- it is also all the technological paraphernalia.
Maybe you already know everything needed.
But- do you know how to search on the Internet, or do you use just Google for one-stop searching?
Do you know how to find free experts online able to help you in making a choice, selecting a product, identify your legal rights as a consumer or citizen?
Also frequent users fall prey online to scams that they would never fail to spot in real life.
It is like the supermarket: if you buy something in a shop, and the shopkeeper keys in the cash register just the total, you are suspicious; but if you scan products in a supermarket- do you check the details?
If broadband is just pushed to the audience, without any initiative to create an intelligent (i.e. able to discern in the offer) demand, it could end up the 3G way, that lingered for years, despite all the investment in infrastructure and advertisement.
Whenever technology is involved, it is common to hear the concept “killer application”.
But it is, again, an obsolete mindset: creating a product that consumers buy.
The real potential of the broadband is to allow not just “vertical” uses of its potential, such as a faster and improved Internet, but completely new ways of connecting people, appliances, knowledge.
The risk? If only few will have the knowledge required to benefit from this innovation, some of those few will use it to their own advantage- it is the market economy, isn’t it?
With a side-effect: the first people damaged by “adventurers of the broadband” now have simple, fast, impressive tools to spread news about their negative experience.
As any communication officer knows, “spin” has a completely different cycle, post-Twitter and post-SMS.
And rumours online have a longer life than in traditional newspapers- as an American airline discovered, you just need that somebody links to an old post, and somebody else relaunches it as if it were news, and, pronto, you can get hit by the perfect storm.
In Internet, the perfect storm is the convergence of fast channels, an advanced word-of-mouth, and lack of a jurisdiction.
Also the largest company would be unable to fight thousands or tens of thousands of people worldwide continuously spinning and relaunching a rumor.
But the old fashioned way to think is to see the consumer as an enemy territory to conquer.
Wrong.
As consumers “own” the credibility of their favorite products, part of the “crowdsourcing” is that the audience, the consumers, are all involved in managing your brand.
And this will become even more visible in the future, if the broadband promise is kept.
Credibility and information: beyond “push” and “pull”.
My suggestion is quite simple: also the “push” and “pull” model is obsolete.
Broadband potentially delivers enough capacity to each consumer to convert her/him into a virtual provider or hub.
It is not just the “Napster” or “Bit torrent”, connecting a crowd of users, each one of them acting both as a provider and consumer.
Also when I was working on decision support systems/EIS, in late 1980s, the first tools allowing to deliver access to information stored outside databases allowed a sensible change in the sources of information influencing decisions.
At the time, it was just for companies (of course, due to the cost and complexity).
If you join broadband with other innovations (e.g. semantic web- an Internet of concepts instead of just words), any user could aggregate and process information without being an expert in technology or data processing.
Moreover- the speed of update, and number of potential sources, implies that already today few, if any, bother to check the sources.
Borges playing some jokes with his bibliography- unfortunately, more than once I was able to see articles “digged” and referred by people as an authoritative source, that simply had misinterpreted (by choice or by chance) the original source.
And built a theory on top of that.
In Internet, the first one “taking” a certain spot often builds a credibility with the audience that has no relationship with the actual expertise.
If you add the possibility of creating parallel networks (broadband and already existing web-based tools would allow that), you can create closed communities online around an initial nucleus of disinformation.
Communities that, once set up, would, as any organization, be skeptical to any suggestion from outside the community that what they consider true is at best a reinterpretation, and potentially a distortion, of few, carefully selected facts.
I would not name names- but the interesting that already some websites are quoted as “expert sources” or “virtual think tanks” also by experts in the field, experts who lack the knowledge about the technology or willingness to set up their own expert community.
With the funny result that, to avoid being considered “obsolete”, the very experts that should act as a critical referee join the party, lending credibility to the self-defined “expert sources”.
Solution? Don’t forget the “human infrastructure”: build an educational package alongside
Tags: broadband, credibility, education, finland, innovation, news, nokia, pull, push, skype
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 21:29 and is filed under commentary, everything, publications.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Broadband- universal access: push or pull?
It is quite interesting to read every few days articles repeating yesterday’s news, trying to foster a change to generate the news of tomorrow.
What I am referring to? Well, considering the title… Finland’s choice to have universal broadband access by 2015.
Why not? The home of Nokia, just around the corner from the home of Skype (more or less the same language, incidentally)- probably, its inhabitants are all Internet-literate.
If you read this blog, you know that I consider some form of universal access as part of a “citizenship package”- outsourced to private suppliers, but eventually a basic right.
In the XXI century having access to the online shared knowledge repository (a.k.a. Internet) is a basic need to be able to “connect the dots” in new, surprising ways.
And create innovative economic successes.
But… push or pull? Should simply broadband become available, or an educational campaign is needed?
Pushing broadband Internet to potential users requires having a receptive audience, able to use it.
It is not just broadband- it is also all the technological paraphernalia.
Maybe you already know everything needed.
But- do you know how to search on the Internet, or do you use just Google for one-stop searching?
Do you know how to find free experts online able to help you in making a choice, selecting a product, identify your legal rights as a consumer or citizen?
Also frequent users fall prey online to scams that they would never fail to spot in real life.
It is like the supermarket: if you buy something in a shop, and the shopkeeper keys in the cash register just the total, you are suspicious; but if you scan products in a supermarket- do you check the details?
If broadband is just pushed to the audience, without any initiative to create an intelligent (i.e. able to discern in the offer) demand, it could end up the 3G way, that lingered for years, despite all the investment in infrastructure and advertisement.
Whenever technology is involved, it is common to hear the concept “killer application”.
But it is, again, an obsolete mindset: creating a product that consumers buy.
The real potential of the broadband is to allow not just “vertical” uses of its potential, such as a faster and improved Internet, but completely new ways of connecting people, appliances, knowledge.
The risk? If only few will have the knowledge required to benefit from this innovation, some of those few will use it to their own advantage- it is the market economy, isn’t it?
With a side-effect: the first people damaged by “adventurers of the broadband” now have simple, fast, impressive tools to spread news about their negative experience.
As any communication officer knows, “spin” has a completely different cycle, post-Twitter and post-SMS.
And rumours online have a longer life than in traditional newspapers- as an American airline discovered, you just need that somebody links to an old post, and somebody else relaunches it as if it were news, and, pronto, you can get hit by the perfect storm.
In Internet, the perfect storm is the convergence of fast channels, an advanced word-of-mouth, and lack of a jurisdiction.
Also the largest company would be unable to fight thousands or tens of thousands of people worldwide continuously spinning and relaunching a rumor.
But the old fashioned way to think is to see the consumer as an enemy territory to conquer.
Wrong.
As consumers “own” the credibility of their favorite products, part of the “crowdsourcing” is that the audience, the consumers, are all involved in managing your brand.
And this will become even more visible in the future, if the broadband promise is kept.
Credibility and information: beyond “push” and “pull”.
My suggestion is quite simple: also the “push” and “pull” model is obsolete.
Broadband potentially delivers enough capacity to each consumer to convert her/him into a virtual provider or hub.
It is not just the “Napster” or “Bit torrent”, connecting a crowd of users, each one of them acting both as a provider and consumer.
Also when I was working on decision support systems/EIS, in late 1980s, the first tools allowing to deliver access to information stored outside databases allowed a sensible change in the sources of information influencing decisions.
At the time, it was just for companies (of course, due to the cost and complexity).
If you join broadband with other innovations (e.g. semantic web- an Internet of concepts instead of just words), any user could aggregate and process information without being an expert in technology or data processing.
Moreover- the speed of update, and number of potential sources, implies that already today few, if any, bother to check the sources.
Borges playing some jokes with his bibliography- unfortunately, more than once I was able to see articles “digged” and referred by people as an authoritative source, that simply had misinterpreted (by choice or by chance) the original source.
And built a theory on top of that.
In Internet, the first one “taking” a certain spot often builds a credibility with the audience that has no relationship with the actual expertise.
If you add the possibility of creating parallel networks (broadband and already existing web-based tools would allow that), you can create closed communities online around an initial nucleus of disinformation.
Communities that, once set up, would, as any organization, be skeptical to any suggestion from outside the community that what they consider true is at best a reinterpretation, and potentially a distortion, of few, carefully selected facts.
I would not name names- but the interesting that already some websites are quoted as “expert sources” or “virtual think tanks” also by experts in the field, experts who lack the knowledge about the technology or willingness to set up their own expert community.
With the funny result that, to avoid being considered “obsolete”, the very experts that should act as a critical referee join the party, lending credibility to the self-defined “expert sources”.
Solution? Don’t forget the “human infrastructure”: build an educational package alongside
Tags: broadband, credibility, education, finland, innovation, news, nokia, pull, push, skype
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 21:29 and is filed under commentary, everything, publications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.