The Power of Why

I’m buzzing from a) Doug McLennan’s FANTASTIC talk at our final Dynamic Adaptability session in Seattle  b) free in flight wireless Internet c)  Seattle coffee.

We’ll be posting Doug’s slides and the video of the session up here as soon as possible, but I wanted to share a few takeaways.  Doug spoke about the way that the Internet is changing how we communicate and consume culture, and what that means for cultural institutions. One of his key points was that technology enables us to more easily do things that we do anyway–communicate, connect, talk to one another, share things, make things. His main point was deceptively simple:  you need to know why you do what you do in order to know how best to do it, and what technology can help you.  Some other points:

• We’ve shifted from a mass culture model to a niche culture model. The mass culture model wants to find what is least offensive to the most people. In a niche culture model, the audience doesn’t have tolerance for the “mushy middle”, they want what they want…or they’ll get it somewhere else.
• Assessments of your audience by demographic characteristics are nice, but they still leave a lot of questions unanswered. Its not just who the audience is, but what they do, why and how. Ask them.
• Whereas content is becoming niche, infrastructure is moving toward open source.
• We are moving from the “attention economy,” where sellers have to compete for the attention of the potential buyer to the “intention economy,” where buyers claim their intent to buy and sellers create a relationship with them to get their business. Behaving like we’re in a mass market economy is a recipe for failure.
• There is plenty of content, don’t add to the noise unless you add something your consumers specifically value.
• Its all about creating a strong community around why you exist. Many in the arts are experiencing a “crisis of constituency” because they haven’t clearly defined the “why” in terms that matter to people.
• There is not one online strategy that will work for all generations.
• Rather than a producer of content, arts institutions should rethink themselves as a provider of infrastructure for the cultural experience to occur
• How to motivate people to do something once they visit you online? Motivate the desire for social capital (e.g. Guardian MP investigation).
• To get people engaged you need their attention, a reputation, and a community (eg. TED conference is now an online community of ideas as well as a network of advocates in the “real” world)

These are just notes, more later when I post up the video and slides.

Continuing on the “21st century is the new 16th Century” theme…

Clay Shirky compares the havoc wreaked by the invention of the printing press to what is happening now as a result of new technology and the Internet. He points out that the intermediate time between old and new (what anthropologists call “liminal”) was chaotic, as old institutions didn’t make sense anymore but new things were not quite trustworthy enough. His example is journalism, but it could just as easily be the arts. He says:

When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place… Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism…. When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’