Is Context The New Currency?

In 2013 I wrote this for Fast Company:

"Between the endless Euro drama and the Bitcoin brouhaha, currency has been much in the news of late. Most people would probably name the US Dollar as the dominant currency in this day and age. While that may be true in one sense, is today’s preeminent currency even still money?"

If you read that today without me telling you I published it four years ago, you would think it was possibly a fresh story. And herein lies our problem in our world of sharebait communications in an attention economy groveling for likes and newsfeed popularity. The biggest issue with the "web of meaning" we have created the last twenty plus years of how behavior shifts and evolves is we treat trends and behavior like an on/off switch.

Because of the on/off switch theory we believe there's only two modes to the world. There's only a world with black and white simple stories. There's only a true/false answer. There is only good/bad but no in between.

There are those who hustle and those who don't. There are those who growth hack and those who don't.

You can learn all the easy hacks if you share your email with me or you can have a life of FOMO if you don't.

Somewhere in the last ten years we lost all meaning of why we do what we do and when we do it. We have lost all context of the world around us.

I blame direct marketers, simpleton journalists who don't ask critical questions, education that pushes right and wrong answers and know-it-all managers for all of this.

In the direct marketing world, you buy search ads, social ads and use inbound methods to attract your buying audience. The issue of course is no one really sees something, clicks on it and then buys. That's a very simplified way of how the brain works and how people behave. This assumption is an unconscious bias that people see ad, click ad, buy from company online and their life is better. It doesn't assume what that person is doing when they see these ads or if they even are paying attention when they see or click on the ads. But because this false narrative is seen as true by millions of people when it comes to marketing success, we now buy this BS narrative and apply it to millions of other areas in our lives.

One area in particular is that when the calendar turns from one year to the next people leave behind the baggage from last year and pick up with the things that are fresh and new for the new year as pointed out to them by various blogs and media outlets. However, if we look at behavior from some of the books like The Tipping Point, Contagious or Non-Obvious that studied how trends form and become accepted all of them note that nothing ever just becomes big overnight.

In fact, most trends are not spotted, predicted by industry experts or even based on hard data. Instead, they're curated from people like you and I who are simply more curious, observant, fickle, thoughtful and elegant of the world and how different things are forming or decaying.

So let's bury this belief that a new year means new things. Calendars are poor barometers anyhow because many things that will tip in 2018 probably began forming as early as three to five years ago or in some cases, are remixes of behavior from 15 to 20 years ago. In some extreme cases, some behavior is reminiscent of 100 years ago when entire economies transformed.

So for example, when we hear about how people are yearning for more intimate groups both online and offline as they tire of "big social networks," this behavior in 2018 may seem fresh and new but is similar to how people behaved in 1998 as they stumbled out of the cesspools known as AOL chat-rooms at the time. When we hear about the fascination with Bitcoin and people trying to invest in it with no understanding of how it works, how is this any different from the Dot Com fallout in the late 1990s or the run on the banks in the late 1920s?

In fact, most trend observations are all studies in history. The fact eCommerce is as big as it is in 2018 shouldn't be a surprise for an industry that burgeoned around 1994/1995.

It's just that it appears new because the people writing about it haven't been exposed to or understand origins. Let me share a personal story about this. In the early 1990s when I was working in the music industry I witnessed how sample technology was taking off and being used by producers in hip hop and house music to drive a fusion hybrid known as "hip house" (yes, I know, how original sounding of a name). To me this seemed unique and new. But to those who had been in the industry since the 1970s, the behavior wasn't new. In fact, what sped up the fusion was the technology. The "sampler" now allowed two pieces of music to melt together to form an entirely new soundscape. I thought it was amazing, innovative and fresh but my mentors simply saw it as what humans had done using the art form of DJing with two turntables being automated.

When we don't dive deep into why things are the way they are, we lack a growth mindset. When we assume following the tactics of someone who says they make millions of dollars a year on a video to get you to buy their workbook for $10,000 so you can do the same, we lack a contextual framework. When we assume that people who are popular are influential, we lack what it means for people to be persuasive or for people to have a good bot engagement strategy.

This brings up the point of context around who publishes information and opinions on the world around us. Many will question the age or educational discipline of those who act as influencers on various networks or in media but that's not what we should question when observing. Just because a person didn't study International Relations doesn't mean they can't understand these subjects. The better question is how differently-abled and curious are people when projecting their point of view? What influences them today and what influenced them a year ago or a decade ago? This gives people a context of what they have witnessed around them and why they may state a specific opinion on a particular topic.

It's easy to note how the social "guru" noted that social selling is going to be big in 2018 to later find out the person was 17 in 2010 when the term was first coined and thrown around (many of us called it social business) and didn't have a LinkedIn account. It's easy to want to partake in manipulated outrage by a Top Voice on LinkedIn around the subject of Snapchat when the person never heard of or used Socialcam in 2011. It's also easy to realize most influencers who I now see daily in my video newsfeed are no different than YouTubers seeking validation in a sociopathic manner with the hope they get 1,000 likes or 100,000 views(of course, no one ever questions what a view even means in this day and age or if because someone saw it, if they truly were paying ATTENTION). And yes, it's easy to think people are influential by how many followers they have.

As a result of these questions around context I've already begun my great purge on various social platforms of who I follow. I'm not looking for experts. I'm not looking for young gurus or know-it-alls. I'm seeking those of all ages and different ablements who can state with contextuality why they believe in what they do and tie it back to something that influenced them in their past as good curators would do. Just stating trends for the sake of doing that isn't enough anymore. Just publishing content with no backbone into how you came up with your belief system is not enough anymore. Just saying you're "Being Authentic" is definitely not enough anymore.

Everything is a remix or a mashup of things, situations and scenarios that came before it. This is what context means in our simpleton day and age of status updates stating opinions or hacks as if they were absolute truths. Or personal stories of inspiration being absorbed as if they can scale. The deeply curious minds will try to find the evolution and patterns. They'll always be asking and searching with this statement in mind, "What more deep research and mind hunting can I do on this topic to learn more?"

The uninterested and incurious minds will accept what others post at face value as the absolute truth, click like and scroll on.

Geoffrey Colon is a Senior Communications Designer at Microsoft and author of the book Disruptive Marketing. Check out the latest mixtape Disruptive Marketing Vol. 2 now.