iCasting, Advocating against Advocacy
Arthur
Einstein, Jr.
and I have been discussing a better way for New Yorkers to take control
of their future – something better than waiting passively for
the
politicians and rich guys to become responsive. It will provide yet
another community-building web framework, but without the usual agendas
of politics or a for-profit "sticky" social network.
Arthur understands
something about broadcasting – he was a partner at Lord
Geller Federico Einstein, the
agency that broadcast the Little Tramp character to put a friendly face
on the IBM PC. |
 |
Just now Arthur emailed this:
Britt old bean,
Having thought about this for a
few seconds it occurs to me that we may be working on a whole new idea
- let me try this out on you.
Broadcasting is a one-to-many scheme. (I believe it
originates in agriculture as a method for sowing seed - casting it
broadly by hand in the hope that some of it will land in friendly
territory and germinate.)
The territory covered may be
broad but there's a lot of waste inherent in the method.
What we are talking about goes beyond broad-casting. It
begins by casting as wide a net as broadcasting does. But its
real goal is to attract a cadre of interested people who will respond -
and coalesce into a core audience who are interested and potentially
active - in that sense its a distillate of the broadcast
audience. And you might think of the whole process as
i-broadcasting (that is, inverse broadcasting).
Does this make sense? And do you think it might be a helpful
way to
differentiate what we're up to here?
Arthur's on to something here. As you can see from his essay,
he has witnessed how tech and the Internet has changed everything: not
just the tools we use but how we the tool users may be
changing the most. Under his "iCasting" model, the wide net is just the
beginning of a profoundly intimate event: connecting people in the real
world.
Broadcasting has an agenda - selling stuff, politics, religion, etc.
Arthur's notion of iCasting casts an even wider net than the airwaves -
literally, the 'Net - to encourage everyone to proactively engage
others on the merits of choices. So Arthur and I and the rest of our
merry band are advocates of making choices, unmediated by the experts
who are invariably shills for a specialized point of view.
Just as the ClueTrain guys were marketers who defected
from marketing, we're advocates who are defecting from
Advocacy.
2:51:29 PM 
|
|
