Geoffrey Moore ha publicado sus Top ten truths about the digital ecosystem, que ha preparado como documento de discusión para establecer la agenda de la reunión de 2007 del World Economic Forum en Davos. Este “manifiesto de la sociedad digital” define una serie de cambios culturales que considera totalmente disruptivos respecto al ecosistema analógico en el que hemos vivido hasta hace poco (y en el que sigue viviendo una mayoría de la población). Según Moore, la digitalización de nuestras sociedades va mucho más allá de un simple cambio de canal o de formato, supone una transición radical en los valores y las identidades.
Se podrían criticar las ideas de Moore por que, aparentemente, parecen proponer que es la tecnología la que define el comportamiento de los seres humanos. Por el contrario, en mi opinión, este decálogo muestra que la tecnología digital ha logrado derribar barreras que impedían desarrollar modos organizativos y formas de identidad personal y colectiva pre-existentes, al menos potencialmente. La tecnología actúa como facilitadora no como creadora de comportamientos. En algunos casos, el nacimiento de lo digital permite recuperar modelos que existieron ya a lo largo de la historia pero desaparecieron o se vieron dificultados por avances sociales y tecnológicos previos (por ejemplo la acción colectiva ante el nacimiento de “las masas” por el crecimiento demográfico y la aparición de las ciudades).
Estas son las ideas principales (en el post original, que merece ser leído con calma, podéis encontrar explicaciones más detalladas). Muchas de las afirmaciones de Moore pueden ser discutibles (y serán, sin duda, discutidas), pero todas ellas proporcionan material para la reflexión:
10. Images are king. Verbal content, by virtue of its sheer volume, is increasingly perceived as noise. We are entering a new era of collage, where the mind of the viewer is the assembling artist. Verbalization happens post facto, the residue of headline skimming and subconscious synthesis.
9. Songs are the spiritual property of the young. They construct their identities around them and feel they own the rights to them in a way that no economic contract could interpret. Sharing songs and sets of songs is a type of free speech.
8. There is no place to hide. This is good for exposing the horrors of man’s inhumanity to man. It is bad for the privacy advocates. It is meaningless for the security forces as no command-and-control big brother can keep up with the sheer volume of self-organizing chaotic systems in flux. Next-generation security will organize around the person and the personal identity instead of the data and the institution. Mobility will only complicate this challenge.
7. Wikis rule and “crowd-sourcing” works! Outsourcing tasks to a self-organizing community of volunteers, a la open source software, is proving to be a powerful tactic for tapping into the collective wisdom and experience of the planet. Surprisingly, this mechanism is nowhere near as susceptible to demagoguery as edited media.
6. Games tell all. Anthropologists of future centuries can be spared digging through layers of sedimentary rock. Instead they will just need to find game machines that let them play World of Warcraft or play back the history of an avatar in Second Life.
5. Services displace products. In the digital world, as bits substitute for atoms, products are reconceived as services. This is the threat that Google poses against Microsoft.
4. Everything is media. While advertising will not pay for everything, everything will become a potential opportunity to advertise. This means that at least some technology adoption life cycles can be short-circuited by providing the disruptive innovation for free.
3. Outsourcing and offshoring are inevitable. Digitization of work is profoundly world-flattening. In an Internet-enabled world, as work itself becomes digitized, markets cannot be protected. This will be hugely dislocating to the developed economies in the short term. Longer term, it will be the single most effective tool to combat global poverty and its cousin terrorism.
2. Symbolic competence creates competitive advantage. On the web, as one cartoonist famously noted, no one knows you are a dog. All they experience about you is a function of your ability to manipulate vocabulary and symbols. This puts liberal arts education in high relief. The digital world will move from being an engineering phenomenon to a cultural one. Memes, brands, reputations, causes—all will seek to recruit the most powerful symbolists to their ends.
1. Omnipresent distractions increase the need for inner peace. Digital systems intrude into every aspect of life and, unrestricted and unbalanced, can overwhelm our perception of personal and social values. The resulting alienation will lead to a search for direct personal spiritual experience.
