电子生态系统的十大真相

今天看到一篇好的文章，先贴这里了，等有空了再翻译出来吧。在大的潮流和总体框架思维上，它是具有纲领意义的，当然在一些细节执行层面上，可能作者的实际经验和思考深度还有所欠缺。不过这无损这篇文章的宏观思维价值。

电子生态系统的十大真相

下面这篇东西是应《世界经济论坛》之邀所作，作为Davos的2007年年会日程准备工作的一部分，谈一下电子生态系统来。非常感谢对于本篇的任何能扩展，改善和修正这里观点的评论。

10. 图片为王。数量惊人的口语化的内容，越来越多地被认为是一种噪音。我们正在进入一个拼贴画的新时代，而浏览者们的大脑是拼贴的艺术家。事实上除了大字标题和第一印象的总结以外，满眼的冗长。

优化过的图片所具有的美感逐步变成突破这种杂乱的强有力的工具。不管是私营企业还是上市公司，操纵图片来传递语义或信号都变得越来越复杂。高分辩率和便携性将变成主流。非常有趣的是，与此同时图片的标记和搜索会具有侧面的影响力。

9. 歌曲是年轻人的精神资产。他们在歌曲上树立起他们的个人形象，并感觉他们对歌曲拥有某种合同无法解释的权利。分享歌曲和歌曲列表成为一种自由交流的方式。与之相反的是，影片根本无法拥有这种内在的吸引力和影响力。

对那些不会自己创造太多内容的消费者来说，编辑和发送音乐变成了一种可行的模式。各种如MySpace, UTube那样的工具和平台压缩、重构和重新展示变成可能。

8. 无所遁形。对于把人们的不人道行为公之于众是好事。但是对于鼓吹隐私权的人来说则并不太妙。期望毫无指挥控制能力的安全部门能应对潮起潮落一般的巨量的自发的混沌系统是不现实的。

下一代的安全会建立在人和个人身份，而不是数据或公共机构的基础上。移动能力将加剧这项挑战。

7. 维基规则和“源自大众”是有效的！把任务外包给例如开源软件那样自我组织的志愿者社区，被证明是获取集体智慧和全球经验的有力手段。令人惊异的是，这种方法并不像普通媒体那样对于谣言缺乏免疫力。

维基模式正在变成一种事实上的全球性的私营企业内的集合模式。它对于上市企业似乎也产生了同样的效果：维基化，维基健康医疗系统，维基灾难恢复工作。我们将会从拟子的力量或缺乏头绪中得到经验和教训。

6. 游戏说明一切。未来几个世纪的人类学家可以不用再挖掘水成岩层了。他们只需要找到能让他们玩“魔兽世界”的游戏机，或者回放一个虚拟人物在游戏“第二次人生”中的历史就可以了。所有现代文化中的语汇都会在这个或那个虚拟世界中被使用到。而货币兑换开始将这个世界和现实的那个联系起来。

更多的电子生活中的虚拟交互将会对自我感觉和社区规范产生不可估量的影响。从以往来看，现实生活决定了规范，而虚拟世界会反映出这些，但未来反向作用也会越来越可能。游戏将变成探索生活方式的实验室，而这以往都是由文学戏剧所扮演的角色。

5. 服务取代产品。在电子世界里，比特替代了原子，产品被重新认为是服务。这其实就是谷歌对微软产生的威胁。

服务型的公司还没有完全认识到这点。为了便于把他们和传统的组织思维联系起来，他们倾向于把他们的努力称为产品，极大地曲解了他们的本质，并导致公司不能正确理解消费者体验，需求和价值的全部。

4. 万物皆媒体。广告不会为任何东西付钱，但是任何东西都有可能被用来做广告。这意味着至少可以通过免费的摧毁性的创新来越过某种技术接受的生命周期。

如果电子服务都是由广告来提供资金的话，那么消费最终会变成一种模式。随着时间的推移，人们和文化会对此厌烦，而由大众提供的内容将因为把人们从频繁地被广告骚扰中解脱而成为新的流行。

3. 外包和离岸是不可避免的。工作的数字化把世界变得更加扁平。在互联网的世界里，随着工作本身被数字化，你将很难对某个市场进行保护。这在短期内会极大地重构发达经济体们。长远来看，这将会是解决全球贫穷及其孪生兄弟恐怖主义的唯一有效的工具。

为跨越地域合企业边界的流程提供透明度和控制的工具和组织将会越来越重要。所有的东西最终可以通过某个服务标准协议和一系列确保执行的机制来解决。

2. 符号化的竞争创造了竞争优势。像某个漫画家的著名诠释那样，在网上没人知道你是一条狗。所有他们对你的印象是你对语言和符号操纵的结果。

这给与文学艺术教育很大的宽慰。数字世界将从作为工程技术现象的开始阶段走向文化现象的新阶段。拟子，品牌，声誉，理想－最终都会寻找其最有力的符号代言人。

1. 无处不在的纷扰让内心平静变得更重要。数字系统在不受限制和约束地侵入我们生活的每个角落，使我们得个人和社会价值观念产生困惑。由此产生的异化令我们开始寻求真实的个人精神体验。

随着符号操纵变得越来越透明，它引起了人们对他所关联的任何组织的不信任，而依赖于信仰的传统宗教会因此被数字沟通所破坏。于是，冥思，瑜伽和其他不借助外力的精神体验变得越来越有吸引力。

Top Ten Truths About the Digital Ecosystem

This piece follows up a request from the World Economic Forum for thoughts about the Digital Ecosystem, in preparation for framing the 2007 agenda at Davos.  I would really appreciate any comments that would expand, improve, or correct these lines of thought.

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.

The esthetics of digitally enhanced images will become increasingly powerful as a vehicle for cutting through the clutter.  Manipulating semantics or semiotics via images will become increasingly sophisticated, both in the private and public sectors.  High-definition displays and portable form factors will be popular mass markets. Indexing and searching images, on the other hand, while technologically interesting, will be of peripheral impact.

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.  By contrast, films have nowhere near this visceral appeal and matter much less.

Operating on songs is the paradigm for the new creative consumer who will not create content so much as modify it and send it along.  Tools and sites that let people extract, reframe, and re-present will be core enablers, a la MySpace, UTube, and the like.

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.

The wiki model is becoming a de facto collaboration paradigm within private enterprises with global reach.  It seems likely to spawn comparable efforts in the public sector: a wiki-versity, a wike-health-care-system, a wiki-disaster-recovery-effort.  We will get object lessons in the power of memes (or the lack thereof).

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.  All the metaphors of contemporary culture are being acted out in one or another corner of this virtual universe.  And currency exchanges are beginning to link this universe to the physical one.

The emphasis on symbolic interactions in a digital lifestyle will have unpredictable effects on self-perception and social norms. Historically the real world has set the norms and the digital world reflected them, but the obverse can be expected to be true going forward.  Games can become living laboratories to explore strategies for living, a role played by literature and drama in ages past.

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.

Services companies still have not completely caught up with this. They tend to describe their offers as products, which, although convenient as a means for integrating them into traditional organizational thinking, profoundly misrepresents their dynamics and causes companies to miss whole dimensions of consumer experience, need and value.

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.

If advertising is the default funder of digital offers, then consumption is the ultimate paradigm.  Over time people and cultures will weary of this, and socially constructed content will become more pervasive as an escape from constantly being pitched.

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.

Instrumentation and institutions that create visibility and control over processes that span geographical and enterprise boundaries will become increasingly powerful.  Everything will ultimately resolve to a Service Level Agreement and a series of compliance-assuring mechanisms.

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.

Traditional religion, with its reliance on belief, will be undermined by digital communications, for as symbolic manipulations becomes increasingly transparent, it creates distrust in any institution that engages in it.  In this context, meditation, yoga, and other forms on non-mediated spiritual experience will become increasingly attractive.

This piece follows up a request from the World Economic Forum for thoughts about the Digital Ecosystem, in preparation for framing the 2007 agenda at Davos.  I would really appreciate any comments that would expand, improve, or correct these lines of thought.

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.

The esthetics of digitally enhanced images will become increasingly powerful as a vehicle for cutting through the clutter.  Manipulating semantics or semiotics via images will become increasingly sophisticated, both in the private and public sectors.  High-definition displays and portable form factors will be popular mass markets. Indexing and searching images, on the other hand, while technologically interesting, will be of peripheral impact.

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.  By contrast, films have nowhere near this visceral appeal and matter much less.

Operating on songs is the paradigm for the new creative consumer who will not create content so much as modify it and send it along.  Tools and sites that let people extract, reframe, and re-present will be core enablers, a la MySpace, UTube, and the like.

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.

The wiki model is becoming a de facto collaboration paradigm within private enterprises with global reach.  It seems likely to spawn comparable efforts in the public sector: a wiki-versity, a wike-health-care-system, a wiki-disaster-recovery-effort.  We will get object lessons in the power of memes (or the lack thereof).

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.  All the metaphors of contemporary culture are being acted out in one or another corner of this virtual universe.  And currency exchanges are beginning to link this universe to the physical one.

The emphasis on symbolic interactions in a digital lifestyle will have unpredictable effects on self-perception and social norms. Historically the real world has set the norms and the digital world reflected them, but the obverse can be expected to be true going forward.  Games can become living laboratories to explore strategies for living, a role played by literature and drama in ages past.

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.

Services companies still have not completely caught up with this. They tend to describe their offers as products, which, although convenient as a means for integrating them into traditional organizational thinking, profoundly misrepresents their dynamics and causes companies to miss whole dimensions of consumer experience, need and value.

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.

If advertising is the default funder of digital offers, then consumption is the ultimate paradigm.  Over time people and cultures will weary of this, and socially constructed content will become more pervasive as an escape from constantly being pitched.

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.

Instrumentation and institutions that create visibility and control over processes that span geographical and enterprise boundaries will become increasingly powerful.  Everything will ultimately resolve to a Service Level Agreement and a series of compliance-assuring mechanisms.

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.

Traditional religion, with its reliance on belief, will be undermined by digital communications, for as symbolic manipulations becomes increasingly transparent, it creates distrust in any institution that engages in it.  In this context, meditation, yoga, and other forms on non-mediated spiritual experience will become increasingly attractive.