Good teachers know that lectures can’t be facts alone.
Human beings aren’t machines, we learn through experiences and intuitions. It’s why we like stories so gosh darn much. Narratives are the shortest cognitive shortcut we have to actually being somewhere.
The term “barriers to entry” as it relates to the Internet is all mucked up. We are convinced that the primary barrier to entering a market is money. Yes, that’s true, in the world that existed before we started handing out bandwidth and teaching everyone HTML, money was a pretty big thing even for Internet folks.
Now we have publishing, hosting and distribution costs that are negligible. Does that mean that barriers to entry don’t exist? Not by a long shot. Now, the currency isn’t cash it’s Attention.
We need to look really closely at Attention if we are going to understand where this train is taking business an entrepreneurship in the near term. The amount of Attention we have available to us is fixed. There is only 24 hours in a day, and those precious few hours that we aren’t sleeping, working or spending time with our loved ones are being increasingly taxed by every new post, video and startup to enter the market.
That end result is that the barriers to enter the web have been steadily increasing for years, and will continue to increase until we either find a way to create more time or to use the time we have more efficiently.
Ask anyone how excited they get about updates to Google’s search algorithm.
The information systems that will survive in the longest run are those that have human beings at their core. Human beings who get a jolt out of things that touch on “human stuff,” like their biases and their overwhelming sense of existential deprivation.
Size doesn’t matter. At least when you are discussing the volume of content you generate.
Falling into this lie is one of the principle reasons there is so much junk in the world.
Human beings, consumers, users want tiny moments of extraordinary beauty not great piles of commoditized crap.
The Internet has given us access to more information than we’ll ever know what to do with. While this is great news for anyone who has ever stayed up late wondering how many seconds have really passed since the beginning of the Universe. Unfortunately despite all the gifts the web has doled out, and the high-minded talk about Social Media Revolution, we have a greater and greater tendency to see each other as statistics rather than people.
Trust me, it’s really easy to do, especially when the only access you have to the people visiting whatever slapdash piece of content you’ve put together is from the comments, which are often poorly concealed spam and from analytics packages which can barely differentiate between people and bots let along tell you anything useful about them.
Despite the ease of viewing the Internet as a nameless, faceless playground, this is dangerous. Not because abstracting things doesn’t have a practical benefit, but because it makes it far to easy to think you can succeed by following trends lines rather than thinking about what actually makes sense to do.
Reducing people to data points makes us far too comfortable ignoring common sense, which is a bad thing – always.
