There have been two incidents recently, “big man” and the “tram rant”, where a member of the public has videoed a disturbance of sorts and it ending up being seen widely and the police getting involved.
Twenty years or so ago, the Rodney King beating video was a sensation. Now, with half the population owning smartphones, and most of them having video recording abilities, its clear there are interesting times ahead.
The police already routinely film the view from traffic cars, and YouTube is full of cyclists’ footage from helmet cams.
Imagine a scenario where people start routinely filming, storing or even live streaming from wearable cameras. It won’t be long before they’re cheap as chips and as discreet as a button. We could all be constantly filming our own CCTV.
What would that mean? People recording all their conversations with officials or colleagues; footballers all mic’d up to capture episodes of abusive language (or prove innocence thereof)?
Given we all routinely say things we haven’t thought through, or didn’t really mean, there’ll be a lot of sticky situations and a lot of messy legal and social ramifications to work through.
Everyone having a kind of personal black box recorder is quite a potent thought, and doesn’t feel good for society. However, the kind of routine sharing that happens on Twitter and Facebook would have been similarly unpalatable just 10 years ago.
Maybe it’s not Big Brother we ought to be wary of, but his distributed younger sibling.
I was brand manager at the Guardian when the “Guardian Unlimited” websites were launched in the 90s. As part of the launch, I was tasked with creating a CD-ROM called Get The Net which had starter ISP software and this video of the editor, Alan Rusbridger, giving his thoughts on the internet revolution. I think his thoughts stand up pretty well.
My money is on this being the decade of disintermediation. The technology, trust and social graph is now in place to allow people to deal directly with each other and cut out the corporates.
Brent Hoberman (my former boss) and Stelios have just announced plans to make EasyCar a person-to-person car club
HouseBites is attempting to revolutionise takeaways by providing a platform for chefs cooking at home
AirBnB is a global network of accommodations offered by locals
Comedian Louis C.K. is getting a lot of love for selling his video simply and directly to his audience
And there’ll be more to come.
Could this give rise to the ‘nano-business’? Millions of people like you and me turning on/off supply of services we provide to suit our convenience. By day: accountant, on Sundays: curry chef
Like everyone else, I’ve been beguiled by the unfolding hacking drama at News International.
It’s been well discussed that it took the confluence of tenacious, brilliant reporting from the Guardian with the amplifying power of social media to really land the killer blows.
One thing that’s really struck me, though, is the impact of social media on crisis management PR.
NI took the understandable step (eventually) of publishing an apology last weekend in all the nationals, followed by “and now let’s put it right” the day after. These are classic steps in the crisis management playbook.
However, are they relevant any more? Within moments of the apology being published, it’d been dissected, remixed, lampooned and re-broadcast by the Twittersphere – undermining its power markedly.
Traditional crisis management has relied on a scarcity of the ability to broadcast. I.e. get your message on tv/in the papers and that’ll drown out dissenters.
Fun and very well-made Greenpeace video attacking VW, but the comments are mixed at best, with many commenters suggesting they picked the wrong target.
[edit] looks like George Lucas didn’t appreciate the copyright infringement!
For anyone interested in keeping up with mobile (that should be everyone, right?), I recommend signing up to the Mobile Fix from Addictive – a smart new mobile agency.
This week, they pointed to to another terrific deck from Mary Meeker. The stats on mobile seem to get more and more amazing. The growth in transactions, sales outstripping desktops and the shift in time spent connected to handheld devices is compelling.
