#WhatTheInternetWants: Convergence
Winning in marketing today means playing according to the rules and implications of the technology that has transformed the world.
“We are in a period of productive remixing… The rate of possible combinations grows exponentially, expanding the culture and the economy.” – Kevin Kelly
“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.” – Mark Twain
Here’s what we know so far:
The Internet is like us; it wants to live and grow. It wants more nodes. More connections. More experiences. More everything.
To fuel it all, it seeks:
- flow and mutuality to drive action
- increasing intelligence in its ecosystem
- specialization to push the boundaries of what’s possible
- a slice of structure every so often make sense of it all
- attention, which is drawn to and accelerates other dynamics
The final foundational force the Internet harnesses to get what it wants is “convergence.”
Down to its bones, the Internet is a convergence medium. Born from the union of the telephone and the computer, the Internet comingles communication and computation – becoming an uber-platform for platforms that eclipses its kvelling parents.
The Internet enables and drives convergence – the fusion, the remixing, the collision – of everything from media, technologies, sciences, ideas, industries, cultures, bits and atoms, man and machines, and perhaps one day our minds as well.
Naturally, it’s all about scale and network effects. As the Internet gets cooking, lots of connections and actions and flows flow within the system, and things get messy. Better yet, they get positively chaotic.
Mashing things together and seeing what comes of it – more or less, that is the creative process. Always has been. That's how new ideas/opportunities are born.
What the Internet brings to the game is unprecedented scale, speed and capability – which ratchets up optionality – and transparency, providing a clear view into how it all works.
The marketing lesson: Engineer as many collisions as possible.
A hybrid, multi-disciplinary creative/brand strategist with skills developed across the entire marketing ecosystem, Todd Lowe does everything from brand, connections, campaign and content strategy to communications/content ideas and marketing innovation.
As he decodes the marketing lessons from #WhatTheInternetWants, offline he unpacks the underlying strategic implications and applies them to building solutions on behalf of brands, agencies and consultancies.
View all #WhatTheInternetWants posts
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Background/sources:
“Paul Romer, an economist at New York University who specializes in the theory of economic growth, says real sustainable economic growth does not stem from new respires but from existing resources that are rearranged to make them more valuable. Growth comes from remixing. Brian Arthur, an economist at the Santa Fe Institute who specialized in the dynamics of technological growth, says that all new technologies derive from a combination of existing technologies. Modern technologies are combinations of earlier primitive technologies that have been rearranged and remixed, Since one can combine hundreds of simpler technologies, there is an unlimited number of possible new technologies.” – Kevin Kelly
“Thousands of years from now, when historians review the past, our ancient time here at the beginning of the third millennium will be seen as an amazing moment. This is the time when inhabitants of this planet first linked themselves together into one very large thing…It was in these years that humans began animating inert objects with tiny bits of intelligence, weaving them into a cloud of machine intelligences and then linking billions of their own minds into this single supermind.
This convergence will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet up until this time. Braiding nerves out of glass, copper, and airy radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all people, all artifacts, all sensors, all facts and notions into a grand network of hitherto unimagined complexity.” – Kevin Kelly
"Opportunities Before Efficiencies. As fortunes are made by training machines to be ever more efficient, there is yet far greater wealth to be had by unleashing the inefficient discovery and creation of new opportunities." – Kevin Kelly
“The difference between humans and animals lies in the ability to… let ideas, pardon the expression, copulate. Collaboration has an explosive upside, what is mathematically called a superadditive function, i.e., one plus one equals more than two, and one plus one plus one equals much, much more than three. That is pure nonlinearity with explosive benefits... All you can do is create an environment that facilitates these collaborations, and lay the foundation for prosperity. And, no, you cannot centralize innovations; we tried that in Russia.” – Nassim Taleb