New Media is the communications equivalent of “free love” and sex without a condom. It’s fun and feels great! — Amanda Chapel

Lets talk about conversations.

The mantras of Web 2.0 are tied to the dream of a conversation economy. The thought is that information consumers and information creators are dying for the opportunity to chat with one another, and that the highest form of web culture is in enabling these conversations.

Strictly speaking, this is a lie.

Conversation Economy

Unless, of course, you are a blogger or a marketer. Lets take a look and Marketers first, shall we?

The real problem with those of us who extol the virtues of conversation online is that we don’t define the term strongly enough. Conversation in our world is rarely the sort of open communication that human beings have honed over a millennia. The shared understanding, the back and forth between friends that has driven our society forward since man walked upright is useless to us.

For Marketers,

Conversation means branding.

Conversation is a means of delivering a message.

And those who we have these types of conversations with are mere carriers, the vector through which messages are sent, absorbed and redirected back into the world.

When done honestly, this isn’t a problem. This is, by definition, one of the tasks of any good Marketer. We package and deliver messages, we communicate, we have conversations.

The problem rears its head when we try to imbue our chatter with nobility and call it a cultural phenomenon.

Consumers don’t really care about conversation with strangers. Most people are perfectly content speaking with a close-knit group of confidants. As a whole, human beings prefer to consume information rather than produce it publicly.

That’s why Social Media, Blogging and Web 2.0 by extension work on the 1% rule. 99% of people consume the content generated by the remaining 1%. They consume it without a care in the world about expressing their opinion to the great unwashed web.

Where do bloggers fit in, and why do we continue to buy into this idea of conversation?

Elementary dear Watson . . . We belong to that 1%.

For us, the idea of having conversations is wonderful. We want our opinions to be heard. We participate in Social Networks and Social Media. We’re interested in hearing others opine and stranger still we want to talk back at them.

Unfortunately, since we exist in a microcosm, we tend to see this abnormality of genetics as the proper place for humanity.

Ask yourself, how many people do you know who keep a public blog?

How many submit heavily to Social Media sites?

How many create large number of YouTube videos?

When you look out into the real world, you’ll see that this number is much smaller than you would expect if conversation was truly the great experiment we make it out to be.

Web 2.0 Roundup

There is nothing at all wrong with this.

It is the way things have worked since the first Bulletin boards in the early days of the web. It’s just something that we are increasingly forgetting as we try to push the virtues of conversation on an entire generation of web users.

So, the next time you are about to launch into a polemic about how important conversation is to Web 2.0, remember, that in every good conversation you need listeners just as much as you need speakers.

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