Nano-Marketing

A recent post on the Economist 's Intelligent Life website made me wonder about the idea that to imagine collectively and innovate imaginatively we still need experts to help us along. Brice Auchenthaler's book suggests that there is definitely still a certain amount of fine-piloting needed: "in order that the procedure doesn't become submerged by an overflow of creativity from inside and outside the box" (for more on what happens inside and outside the box and how you can use it, watch out for the English edition of Brice 's book, The Imagination Economy - Web 2.0 to be published later on this year).

In a debate on the issues of organisation that took place at Picnic in Amsterdam David Weinberger, a fellow at the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and author of “Everything is Miscellaneous”, defended this model of the internet . His debating partner was Andrew Keen, author of "The Cult of the Amateur", who sees the inclusiveness of the internet as a levelling-down, vulgarising force.

" we are moving away from the time when we thought that the best way to organise information was to get some experts together and have them decide for us what was relevant and what was not.

No need to abolish that approach—we still have experts who are amazingly good and professional about what they do and how they do it. "We can keep the good old ways, but we are also saying, let’s take those leaves off the tree and make a miscellaneous pile of stuff hoping that it would reveal connections between pieces”, says Weinberger. “Instead of excluding stuff, let’s include anything. When you as an editor make an assumption that a Paris Hilton article is trivia, you can include it anyway and let people decide. Who knows, in ten years there will surely be somebody writing a thesis about it, so include it!”.

Not only do you preserve the information, you let it go wherever it might be of use or interest: to aggregators, which can create new value for users by showing, for example, which airline is offering the best air-fare; to mash-ups which can discover and display correlations between seemingly unrelated data-sets.

Freedom of information leaves us free to reject, or to demand, complexity. And often we demand it. If George Bush gives a speech meant to get a point across simply, within hours thousands of bloggers will be picking it apart and re-introducing complexities that Bush sought to exclude, or never imagined. Bloggers have the human instinct, to find a topic of common interest and explore its complexities in conversation. But it's the opposite of the instinct of the broadcast media , which is to simplify. “That’s why we are so happy to be on the web, that’s why we like blogging —we get to be complex again”, says Weinberger...."

So what do you think ? A total mess or an aladdin's cave full of treasures for all ? Is Web 2.0 dragging us down to the lowest common denominator or is it creating experts in every corner of the planet on every subject available...? The more information there is, the more experts we need to sift through it ? Or are we all turning into complex blogger's who turn simple statements or ideas into neverending debates ? Vice or virtue...

Mots-clés : Internet , experts , 3D , Economist , Intelligent Life , imagine collectively , The Imagination Economy , Web 2.0 , Everything is Miscellaneous , The Cult of the Amateur , 3D