Will Technology Creation enter its own Age of Abundance?
The proliferation of computer software and the internet has brought many powerful tools to the masses.
From desktop publishing to cheap and powerful design tools, from affordable HD cameras to global publishing platforms such as blogs and YouTube, and self-publishing and self-marketing platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, technology has given power to the amateur and the semi-professional — the power to create media and content that can been seen by millions of people, quickly, cheaply, whenever and wherever.
This is the Age of Abundance. People love it. Now, anyone can create fan sites, parodies, anti-adverts and dissenting PR for their favorite/most-hated brands that are seen by millions. It creates challenges and opportunities for the worlds of marketing and advertising.
John Winsor, for example, created Victor & Spoils to build on crowd-sourcing principles. Victor & Spoils aims to tap into a broader client talent base than can be maintained within a single company and, notably, to co-create with consumers as well as with other creators. It is using this abundance to create a more diverse base of creativity.
At the same time, this technology shift has created a new opportunity to add value in a networked age. Call this ‘Ideas that do‘ or ‘marketing with meaning‘, advertising as a service, brand utility or one of any number of other terms, it involves leveraging networks in order to target specific users or customers. A large part will be technology creation, not just web platforms and iPad applications but networked FMCG products and internet-enabled real world devices.
In the past the advertising industry was able to create long-lasting cultural impact through Big Ideas and broadcast media but now the major effects on our culture, especially the ever-increasing network culture, are caused by innovations in technology and software platforms. To offer these same effects in the future we must look to Technology Creation.
Previously the marketing services industry has, in the majority, treated technology and especially the internet by using technology and not creating it. This is primarily through digital advertising on other technology platforms, videos on YouTube, search marketing, even microsites and brochureware sites — all of these are applications of technology but none involved the creation of technology.
As Mike Arauz says in Designing for Networks, agencies have used the internet primarily in traditional ways for awareness and persuasion and missed the greater opportunities of sharing, cooperation and collective action. In short they have treated the internet as just another media channel, competing in an attention war where abundance has created an infinite media landscape. I call this “pulling the levers on the electronic box”. Pulling the levers will always become commoditised because anyone can do it, especially as the levers inevitably become more and more user-friendly. Through Google AdWords, Google Places even somewhat through Google TV ads, Google has brought powerful advertising capability to everyone.
The problem is that the industry on the whole is so far away from the technology creation landscape, because mostly it is still stuck in the lever-pulling business. You can see this by checking a few basic facts: How many technology innovators are in the industry? How many of them could really build the next FourSquare? How many agencies have a CTO on the board at the highest level?
Technology Creation is a scarcity
Technology Creation is difficult. It requires difficult-to-learn skills and — often — a multi-disciplinary team. System and service design necessitates close collaboration between behaviour experts, designers and engineers. It is a collaborative and iterative process that can rarely be done by one person alone. Programming skills especially are not owned by the masses.
The fact that Technology Creation is scarce means that a premium still applies to it. Look at some of the companies with the largest market caps — Apple, Google and even Exxon. The market believes their future ability to create new technology is what will drive them to greater profits in the future (Microsoft may no longer be in this category). The great technology creator — talent — is rare and these companies are masters at finding and fostering the best talent, from awesome designers like Jonathan Ive to the ranks of great engineers at Google.
Some may say that open-source software is a crowd-sourced example of Technology Creation but that is not how open-source projects work. All successful open-source software (for example Apache, Linux, Ruby On Rails) is initially created by either one person of a small group of people. In a lot of cases the origin is within a large company (Google has released over 500 open source projects).
After this initial creation, open-source projects are run by a small group, the core-commiters, often under a benevolent dictator. Other people use that technology by remixing it into other acts of Technology Creation and remixing patches or features which are then curated by the core-commiters back into the project.
Before there is Technology Creation there will be Technology Remixing
I believe the industry is transitioning through the era of Technology Remixers. These are the people who understand broadly how technologies work, can understand trends and behaviours and know how to remix existing open source software and APIs of services and platforms (ie. Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare etc) to create new experiences. They will be able to bring together technology with new ideas and capitalize on what is out there with basic amounts of engineering talent. A lot of the technology outputs from agencies in the digital space is technology remixing.
There are some who say this is as far as agencies need to go, that you can achieve great things by remixing existing technology and that agencies should not be in the game of Technology Creation. The problem is that the industry will only become truly relevant again to an age of networks and technology when it can conceive and create whole new technology experiences. That is not to say that all traditional marketing/advertising activity will disappear. There will always be money to be made in advertising, just not as much money. The effect of content and media experiences on long-lasting, global technology culture is far less than the effect of technology innovation.
Hierarchy of Technology Creation
What happens as Technology Remixing and Technology Creation move towards abundance?
We can predict this because Technology Remixing is rapidly moving towards the same abundance as digital content. This is still a way into the future because at the moment the consumer is not a programmer, but as subsequent generations become more digitally literate, their capacity to remix and create technology increases. The primary reason for this is that these consumers have no fear: they expect technology to work for them. I’m reminded of the Douglas Rushkoff speech at SXSW “Program or be Programmed” (at the end of this post) where he raises a call to arms for people to learn how to code and design their own systems, or be programmed to live with the limits of existing legacy code and institutionally-defined behaviors.
“If you are not a programmer, you are being programmed…. We got the computer which meant that anyone could be program reality, but that’s not what happened… We got the computer, did we get a nation of programmers, no we got a nation of bloggers… If we don’t create a society that at least knows there is a thing called programming then we will end up being the users, and worst, the used.” – Douglas Ruskoff taken from Program or be Programmed
As the digital generation grows up, Technology Remixing and Technology Creation will enter their own Ages of Abundance and the chance to have cultural impact reduced. There are indicators to this behaviour. Arduino is opening up simpler ways to create interactive object and environments and is being taken up by hobbyists — for example, you can build your own EcoDrive with Arduino and MPGuino. Low-cost desktop 3D printing will allow people to create their own physical objects, reducing the copying cost of physical production in the same way the internet has reduced the distribution and copying of digital objects to near zero. These are signposts on a road to abundance of Technology Creation.
Abundance breaks more things than scarcity does. Society knows how to react to scarcity. – Clay Shirky
If Technology Creation becomes abundant then all bets are off. People will solve their own problems through technology and distribute those solutions to others at lower and lower costs. More collaborative software will allow small disparate teams with different skill sets to work together to solve a common problem. The growth of Technology Creation has a direct knock-on effect on the diversity and power of Technology Remixing and the impact of technology adoption to produce new forms of digital content. As a new generation emerges the technology landscape will tend to infinity.
So is Technology Creation going to be in your future?
10 comments
Great post. As we remix and remix, truly innovative work is going to come from inventing new kinds of experiences and utilities, not from a new kind of script or press ad. I was particularly struck by the idea that technology is impacting on popular culture much more profoundly than popular culture is impacting on technology.
Very true that agencies are currently using technology to put advertising in more places rather than to create wholly new experiences-I’d argue though that a majority of digital agencies are very much in remix rather than creation mode as well-in part I guess because the opening up of things like the Twitter and Foursquare APIs, the Google Latitude API etc make it much easier to mash up existing technologies than before.
A challenge then for me is how we bring the right kind of technical expertise into the heart of agencies. That is, highly skilled engineers with instincts for innovative and relevant new uses of technology. There is currently something of a gap between exciting but slightly peripheral ideas-ideas that impress in a pitch but have few practical applications-and hard working mash ups. But perhaps great ideas start at the periphery…
Cracking post Stuart. It’s not so much that the developers will inherit the earth, more that they’ll programme the very way the entire universe functions. I am not a programmer, and I’m already starting to feel as illiterate as a peasant watching a performance of Shakespeare in the early 1600s.
Awesome post. I think you’ve nailed something really important, a crucial distinction between remixing and creating – and you nailed to the Age of Abundance. ‘Technology Creation’ is a great way to look at it.
Re: Pats’ comment – why is it that agencies find it so difficult to get the right kind of technologists? I suspect that it might be for deeply cultural reasons. Stuart, again I think think you nailed this – the reason might be that they don’t even realise that they are now in the business of Technology Creation. This parag is ‘the one’:
“The problem is that the industry will only become truly relevant again to an age of networks and technology when it can conceive and create whole new technology experiences. That is not to say that all traditional marketing/advertising activity will disappear. There will always be money to be made in advertising, just not as much money. The effect of content and media experiences on long-lasting, global technology culture is far less than the effect of technology innovation.”
Very stimulating. There’s not enough of this tech/development perspective in our discussions about the future of marketing communications.
I wonder, though, that if we are destined for a world of technology abundance – and I think we are – then is it still something that agencies should try to get into? Certainly it’s to their advantage to foster those skills now, while technology talent is still scarce, but once it becomes abundant, those high-profit skills will become commoditized, right? What do agencies do then? (Not that I consider that to be my concern… : )
I got the feeling that Stuart was kinda pretending that we might be moving to a commoditised Tech Creation world, or that he didn’t really expect this to happen for a long time… you know, in order to appear even-handed and reasonable.
Stuart?
Really intelligent piece, Stuart. Your argument is clear and convincing, even if it does leave me in a slight panic: I’m not a programmer, and as our world becomes more tech-networked, I’m going to have to learn or be left behind. (Best prepare myself for profound marginalisation, then — Justin, you wanna go cave-hunting this weekend?)
I think you’re right that we are headed in the direction of technology abundance, but I wonder if, as the digital generation grows up, the bar of just how much skill is required to create (versus remix) will rise along with the average person’s digital intellect. We’ll see.
Hi Mike,
Yes I think Technology Creation will reach abundance but, to quote Edward Boches quoting someone else, a generation has to die first. So it’s still a way off but obviously the way change is speeding up it is approaching us fast.
So should agencies try to get into this? Yes definitely and quickly because the opportunity will only exist for a while and you they can’t wait 30 years to get it right. Can they? Don’t know but it doesn’t look likely from here, not many are committing and changing fast enough. What will they do then? I’m with you, its not really my concern. Also I have no idea, all bets are off.
So maybe the companies to take advantage of this value creation for their clients won’t be the usual suspects, maybe it is a whole new wave of companies with a few re-invented agencies in the mix.
Stuart,
Excellent and thoughtful post. I believe very much in your technology adoption stack and the note about remixing. I wrote a blog post a while ago called 1% of the features for 99% of the people. What i witnessed was new Web 2.0 companies taking very complex creation environments (e.g. Photoshop) and building simple websites focused on 1 of the 1000 features of that product (e.g. red eye reduction or Van Gogh-ing a picture). The challenge of moving the average user from remixing to full invention is the complexity that is involved with building a system. I can open a beer, but running a bar is hard (i have tried twice to open bars/restaurants and failed).
I believe the next generation, as you mention in reference to John and V&S is the logical aggregation of expertise through next generation crowdsourcing businesses (expertsourcing). My company, Trada, is doing this in the paid search arena. We’re seeing phenomenal results when you apply guided expertise to a complex problem like paid search optimization. The same opportunity exists in many adjacent categories (V&S does this for creative production of course). The great debate is whether this approach commoditizes the actual expert. While i could opine on this for a long time I think the simple answer over time is that it doesn’t. If you create markets that allow experts to focus on their expertise (rather than serve and administer clients) you create a positive feedback loop for those to learn and enter the market as experts (e.g. you remove the system effect).
I think in the long term agencies will play an important organizing, guiding, and administrative role in the middle – frankly as they always have.
Niel
CEO, Trada.com, http://www.trada.com, @nielr1
http://www.trada.com
This is a really fascinating position and the model is enormously useful. But I don’t think the explosion of technology remixing is going to translate into a boom of technology creation as such. To me, technology creation will always be super-hard and there is probably a sweet spot at the top of technology remixing that almost resembles new technology creation but in fact isn’t. And that’s where the talent lies.
The rest of this post is just some ramblings on why I think the above.
Douglas Rushkoff’s idea is inspirational and true but even if programming was taught in every school in the world, encouraged in the home and lauded in every business worldwide, the ability to tell a computer fluently exactly what to do is almost anti-human and destined to be ignored. And if the human-computer interface has progressed to a level where programming becomes second nature, that doesn’t necessarily mean the general public will take it up as an activity. Unless it involves less effort than TV, it’s never going to catch on. It’s inherently anti-human.
Technology isn’t technology unless it’s adopted. Without adoption it’s just a thing that someone’s created that nobody cares about. So, I think the creation of technology itself is super-abundant and always has been i.e. for every widely-adopted technology there is maybe 10 that go unused. I don’t believe technology creation is scarce, I believe that the public’s capacity to adopt new technology is the scarce commodity (which is possibly exactly the same as what you’re saying). Given this, I think the tip of your heirarchy is a hugely difficult place to be and is only really occupied by either large corporates such as those that you mentioned with huge R&D budgets and/or R&D cultures or shed-dwelling tireless inventors (which is certainly scarce). The kind of things that I imagine here are steam engines, the home computer, the Internet, the ipad, glasses, bone density scanners, C++ or fridge freezers. Whereas the Technology Remixing area is much more massive and includes Ruby on Rails, videos, podcasts, websites of any kind etc.
To me, that space at the top is just too risky and difficult for agencies to exist in, the remixing seems lots more fun, experimental, rewarding yet can still gain the attention brands need to survive.
Technology is really about addressing human needs, be they survival, information, entertainment etc and as more and more basic needs are addressed we’re just going to be creating technology to address the problems that the new technology of yesterday introduced us to. Sure there will be more new big technologies but surely they will become less and less.
So, that’s a long way of saying I don’t think we’re going to see any kind of age of abundance for technology creation. Additionally, I think that technology creation or technology remixing v.s. public adoption is as adverse, tricky and problematic a place to be than The Big Interruption Advertising Idea (let’s call it) v.s Public Attention.
Rushkoff’s argument (and Stuart’s, I think) is that with the ability to make comes the ability to define the world. We’re at a stage of technical evolution in which a new communications infrastructure and means of public discourse and exchange is being defined. The most value is created. the greatest creativity displayed and the strongest power exerted by those involved in its definition and not mere use.
That said, it’s hard not to focus on the ultimate destination when pointing to trends and there are few absolutes: scarcity and abundance are relative terms; there’s no liminal boundary between technology remixing and technology creation; and it isn’t just about technology but how it’s applied in new business or social contexts – I agree Mike. The scarcity is often not just technical/programming ability but the complementary synthesis of skills to make it useful – that’s often a remix. As Stuart says, it’s about “collaboration between…designers and engineers”.
I think Stuart’s completely and totally on the money, there’s just an inevitable semantic difficulty between technology creation and technology remixing – sometimes it’s hard to tell one from the other. But although there aren’t any absolutes there’s a direction to travel in and that’s up towards the pinnacle. I think the best agencies will have ambitions to be innovative and a desire to do difficult things in order to be stimulated and stimulating and to stay ahead of commodity shifters (according to the simple truth that the scarcity of Flash developers is a transitory moment in human history).
To paraphrase William Gibson, the end game is already here in some ways and far off in others. I’m reminded of the huge sense of power I got when I first used Hypercard (Apple’s best ever product?) and I learned how to programme simple database structures and graphic animations. I get the same feeling when I see my 9 year-old daughter thrashing the hell out of Keynote to make stories out of words, photographs and videos with the most bonkers transitions and typographic animations. We use Rails and other new and some established technologies to create completely new kinds of networks and services with no apparent deceleration in the pace of innovation but a constant flow towards making programming easier, in the hands of more people, reducing the scarcity of technical know-how so I guess we have to be like a salmon swimming up river against the tide – we’d be made to be going the other way.