Hyperpersonal Spaces: What they are and what do they mean to the Future of business (I)

AUTHOR's NOTE: I have been as of late finding myself answering several questions on issues regarding Hyperpersonal Spaces and what do they mean, so basically this post originally serves the lazy, lazy purpose of people being redirected here in order to avoid repeating myself to death. So if you are one of the redirected ones, feel free to call me names. All of them are well deserved.

First, please have a look at this image:  

This slide belongs to the deck we share with Microsoft regarding our joint Digital Transformation proposal. Depicts the current simultaneous collision of four of what Rumelt called "attractors"  which implies, basically speaking, technological or social disruptions that appear from time to time in society of such magnitude that generate an associated "gravity field" that affects a certain number of companies and business models, either to be chewed by it, or altered in its current trajectory.** For example, the attractor "Internet everywhere" is something than note only propelled Cisco over IBM in the 90's but its ripple effects are still being perceived on megatrends like IoT nowadays.

Yes, I know. If our statement is right, an obvious result of four big attractors collisioning into some sort of mega attractor would imply what you could be thinking at this very moment, that a huge meteor is on its way to Earth. But this is not today’s subject of interest, maybe another day we’ll delve into that.  

Today, we are going to focus in one of the smaller, apparently most harmless of the four attractors: The rise of hyperpersonal spaces.

They look like the least probable culprit and something that could not hold a candle to beasts like Digital Transformation, with all its hoopla. Maybe it’s the fact that probably could be the farthest in time of all four to materialize fully the fact that makes it so non menacing to us.

In fact, it's the worst offender of all, by far.

Let's try to remember how Hollywood perceived Hyperpersonal Space Management would be managed in the future. Specializing in one of their multiple applications, Personal Digital Signage.

Which is, non surprisingly, received with a lot of salutations from the public:

"Come on Javier, that's just an over the board example"

I hace got more to share, do not worry:

I already had a clear opinion on the matter on my 2004 book, Personalización ("Personalization") - which was about personetics before personetics even existed as a concept. We already talked about the future of personalization, and how Minority Report was a skewed and deformed version of it. 

Scary, right? Many of the critics who had seen the movie would agree. Many of them speak of "complete erosion of personal privacy" (Entertainment Weekly), of how "intrusive" personalized ads are (The New York Times). Jack Aaronson mentioned in one of his articles the opinion of a safety expert, Scott Beechuk, co-founder of PrivacyRight, which states that "'Minority Report' makes real our most intense fears regarding our privacy." However, We can find on his opinions a little bit more common sense. Since Mr. Beechuk follows more closely issues relating to privacy than the average film critic (that is what he does), he acknowledged that "it is unlikely that this prediction of Hollywood on personal Advertising become a reality" *

Obviously, we find much more intrusive the visions of "spiders" that police release into a building in order to scan the retinas of all its inhabitants. But that's not what worries us, but ads: Why? Because we perceive the spiders issue as something far, far away, and belonging to a dystopian future, while deep in our hearts, we think that any given day,  American Express will launch a similar initiative. It is something much closer and therefore more threatening. Pivots on something we already know, and that gives you some sense of verisimilitude, like the lies that contain some amount of truth sometimes seem to make them true. * 

Well, I am afraid than the upsurge of Google, Facebook and the rest of the anal probe army has made the crawling spiders menace a little bit closer than it was in 2004, bit I think the basic premises are still laid out there.

In 2004 personetics was not yet such a mature discipline as to allow myself to lay my current thesis regarding the matter: These kind of scenarios won't happen because people won't allow such an invasion of its hyperpersonal space.

Which tales us to the crux of the matter: What is a hyperpersonal space? Let's try to put a definition in place.

A hyperpersonal space, therefore is a communication space (A delimited time and place context where a communication is happening) which involve most (or all of them) of this characteristics:

• It's hyperpersonal in terms of the classic communication theory approach (goes beyond face to face comunicación because a lot of additional info which is not usually used in a FtF communication is exchanged in order to maximize the overall relevance of the communication)
• That "beyond FtF" capabilities is supported by some kind of profiling sophisticated enough to provide the desired degree of relevance. As well, context is properly modelled and managed.
• The space is usually mapped by the user to issues that are extremely close to the "core" values or identity of a person. Therefore, the default degree of intimacy is high. Without going into too much depth, if we make a simplified model of intimacy, the hyperpersonal space would deal with the inner layers of the model. What we call the Core Identity layer.

• Locus of control is in the hands of the user. He decides what is private, what is public, and has an easy access to proper management of how the communication is made. Facebook and Google are at fault here, because there is a precooked setting of privacy options, non easily modifiable for non-technical people, which is highly advantageous to the datasuctioner company. 

A hyperpersonal space is, therefore, a communication space where you have a basic dual chance: Being tremendously relevant or being really annoying, on the fringe of personal injury. There is no in-between space. Either you have a resonating triumph or you're obliterated. There is no space for the usual answers for advertising for example (the classical indifference). It's like the motto on the US 32th Armored Division, a matter of victory or death.

Of course, we hinted as well some of the characteristics of hyperpersonal spaces without being able to properly define them. Hey, we were young and needed the money. :)

However, and unless there is an outbreak of collective insanity in the future, the people of American Express Marketing can do their job very well, and certainly never addressed such an initiative.

 Nobody in their right mind wants to hear his name loudly on the subway. When people come out of a wagon, the flow of people is much higher than the announced capacity of wall panels How to discriminate? How to be heard above the cacophony of yelling several ads at once?

 In the film, Cruise still acts like a person in 2001 transplanted in 2054, when the ad calls his name in public, he turns his head to it, amazed. How long would it take to make us deaf to subway ads, as we empty our physical mailbox without looking at any of the brochures that have been dropped? How long it would take before someone sells cacophony insulator helmets and lose track of all things around his way?

 Nobody in their right mind wants the whole people in the store know your name and your last purchase, particularly if it was e.g. underwear. For reasons not relevant here, Cruise is identified as a Japanese person, "Mr. Yakamoto", which makes the artifice much more obvious, the triviality of the approach more apparent and the attempt of GAP to show closeness and differential treatment comes down as an amateur magician caught on a grossly crude trick."*

Nice, we discovered what was going to happen with adblockers like 11 years ahead of time. :)

Now we have noticed the real importance of the hyperpersonal spaces. In fact, they basically rule personetics, as they are the base of the second and third laws of personetics, as follows:

• Second Law: The closer you get to a person’s core identity the more personal you need to be in order to be successful
• Third Law Context is Everything, demands real-time data and proper modelling

"Ok, Javier, We get it. Bit why are such abstract constructs so important?"

Because the global overall flow of communications are heavily being displaced to such "abstract constructs"

• Mobile is the strongest provider of growth in terms of advertising and overall communication traffic worldwide. Mobile is a natural hyperpersonal space. It's not a mobile phone, it's a proxy to our digital personal identities. 
• There is a plethora of devices appearing in a mature version in the market which are by nature bound to transform themselves into hyperpersonal spaces: Google Glass, Hololens, Oculus VR... 
• IoT is another huge driver and catalyzer of the whole process, with more and more devices being able to capture information and raising the bar in terms of relevance needed to be heard though the crowd.

We will keep on posting more on the matter at hand, but let this post be the cornerstone and then let the rest of the building blocks fall in its proper places. Accesories and complements will come later. They will be many, in many available colours and shapes. This is the least you could expect from somebody who really cares about personetics.

* Excerpts from the book Personalización (2004) Javier G. Recuenco, Jerónimo Sánchez, Javier Salutregui, Diego Blanco - Pearson Educación

** It's not now the time to get knee deep on the matter, but If you have not read "Good Strategy Bad Strategy" by NOW, you're wasting tour time.