Another good post from Alan Moore highlighting several interesting articles.
The Guardian’s Aleks Krotoski says With the public in charge, reality rules.
A few months ago, I was dumbstruck when a deity in the UK games business suggested that the future of computer gaming was community, not content. This man’s plot structures, characters and dialogue have won accolades and legions of fans. His games are the epitome of designer-generated content through which players trip, dazed at its digital perfection. So what’s this about community superiority?
Well, he’s also very insightful. The static content that arrives in a packaged game is becoming passé. Instead, community and community-created content are the keys to courting and keeping players, as games technology becomes a testbed for self-expression.
Kevin Kelly in Wired writes a good post about how the internet has trumped expectations and empowered millions of end users in creating, not just consuming entertainment. (I loved his discovery that the Amish, who eschew electricity, television and cars still have websites, created using the terminal in the public library, to sell their wares.)
Alan also digs up this quote from German media magnate Hubert Burda in the IHT:
We now concentrate on using social software to build closer relations with the communities of readers around our magazines. News has now become a commodity, thanks to the Internet, so we must differentiate ourselves in other ways. Content alone can no longer win. You must build and interact with audiences.
All of which (and more) inspires Alan to say
Everything you thought you knew about business, marketing and communications you can forget. What we are witnessing is nothing short of the beginnings a cultural revolution that within 10 years will have replaced the fixed orthodoxies of government, business and marketing forever.
Communities will have become the primary medium by which government, businesses and their brands will successfully engage with their customers/stakeholders/voters
That may be a bit extreme… but then again, maybe not…
