I had the distinct pleasure of spending a few hours with Umair Haque last week while he was in town for the Supernova conference. This was pretty exciting for me as he has been a core inspiration for my intellectual and professional pursuits of the last 3+ years.
I was first turned on to Umair’s work via Fred Wilson. Once I read a few of Umair’s pieces on Bubblegeneration, I was immediately blown away by his combination of writing skill, extreme econogeekery, and keen insight into pop culture and the human condition. He presented a really compelling framework for how to make sense out of the media and technology environments I had been working in (and continue to), so it struck a chord, to say the least.
A good bit of what he was writing about (network economics, game theory, social capital, etc) was just over my head enough to get me obsessed with understanding it. Over the course of a several months, I went through and read every single thing he had ever posted to Bubblegeneration, along the way buying and reading books about the above-mentioned subjects, reading everything he linked to, and scouring Wikipedia for definitions of things I wasn’t familiar with.
I sometimes refer to this as my self-directed MBA. It was the perfect way and perfect timing for me to study some forward-looking business economics after finishing my MFA, which was extremely self-directed as well. I had learned how to apply and discipline my curiosity at CalArts, so my broadband connection + these influences = a total field day for many months.
Around the same time, another major intellectual/professional influence in my life had turned me on to Yochai Benkler’s work and also Bruce Sterling. So this was a period of really intense learning as you can imagine.
Fast forwarding to this week, the actual hang (also featuring Chris Golda, Jonathan Strauss, and Jonathan’s friend Loren) met my [wild] expectations: some drinks, some analysis of various agreed-upon douchebags, some discussion of solutions to some problems, and plenty of jokes. Everyone involved was super hilarious (Umair included) so that was key to the fun.
I’ll get into some more details later, but of the things that I was reminded of was, ironically, tied to the ever-present “social media” phenomenon. Typically I try to stay away from talking about social media in the abstract as those conversations (occurring online especially) in the aggregate have not changed at all in years.
The thing that I was reminded of is that there are many things that these new media technologies can do to make people better off, but they require specific application to specific problems…not just the meta-problem of media itself. That’s why I think social media is “under hyped”, because few have really executed strategies that take advantage of the broader implications and opportunities of hyperconnectivity (also note The Shift Index).
What I mean by that is: things like StockTwits and Hello Health and Lend4Health and eduFire and awe.sm and Topspin are about 80 billion times more valuable and interesting than, say, AdMob (here’s a nice post from Umair explaining why).
A lot of people are spending their time figuring out how new ways to connect buyers and vendors so they can engage in the same old transaction. But what we really need are new kinds of transactions and new roles for economic actors (check out Doc Searls VRM project for an example and Eric von Hippel generally).
Social media tools are just that: tools. Here’s hoping more people start using them to build a better plane/train/couch/IRA/classroom, instead of wringing their hands over advertising*.
(**note that social media conversations are a substitute for advertising. But you knew that, because read this incredibly on-point paper by Umair, right? ;-)
