image credit: Feliciano Guimarães

In my most recent post, I asked if enterprise should think small. But as a close friend said to me, it’s one thing to suggest that enterprise should change; it’s another to lay out a clear path for it.

I won’t pretend I have all the answers (or any really), but I do think that with a little critical thinking, together we can talk about practical, actionable steps that translate some of the advantages of small business/startup culture into enterprise business processes.

Applying Startup Speed and Flexibility

Given that key to rapid innovation is the ability to fail fast and fail cheap (a concept that applies to your career too), perhaps two of the most beneficial elements of startup culture are speed and flexibility.

Because of sheer size, some elements of that speed and flexibility just won’t fit into the enterprise.

And probably for good reason. Imagine an enterprise CEO calling everyone at 3 AM to tell them that s/he’s had a breakthrough and that you’re going to completely change your business model.

Doesn’t work. Especially not after that silly IPO.

But at the same time, in a recent interview for the Ask Summit, Emily Jasper suggested that, when it comes to organizational culture, there’s a a spectrum between what we would typically deem “startup culture” and “enterprise culture.” She went on to articulate that it may be possible for enterprise organizations to emulate pieces of startup culture.

I think a responsible and appropriate way to mirror startup speed and flexibility when it comes to innovation is through targeted and fractal development teams.

Fractal Development

Last fall, Terry Weaver wrote about failing fast and cheaply within the context of a quote from Ravi Sastry: “You’ve got to play to win—not play to decide.” Wever writes,

…If you’re considering something new and non-traditional, go flat out. No reservations, no limitations, take no prisoners. And, at the same time, bound your risk. Determine in advance how much time, how much effort and how much money you’re going to risk before making a “go/no-go” decision. Bet an amount that should be sufficient for success, but not enough to swamp the company if it doesn’t work.

The road to responsible risk management, in my opinion, is to remove the layers of approval that often choke off the life of innovation teams.

Once a team is taksed with developing a product, leadership should give them the tools they need to make decisions, to bend rules–in essence to worry about how their plans will fit within the organizational process later. Forcing innovation teams into approval channels often causes the reservation and limitation Wever warns against.

In terms of structure, it’s my opinion that this team should be a fractal of your organization, made up of as few people as possible.

Successful SaaS provider 37Signals recommends orgs use only three people for version 1.0 of any software development project. The point?

Talented people… thrive on the challenge of working within restraints and using their creativity to solve problems. Your lack of manpower means you’ll be forced to deal with tradeoffs earlier in the process — and that’s alright. It will make you figure out your priorities earlier rather than later. And you’ll be able to communicate without constantly having to worry about leaving people out of the loop.

The same logic, I think, applies to projects in other areas—depending on your organization, it could be the development of a new FMCG, a brand new social network-based customer service program, or even a breakout marketing tactic.

Empower fractal development teams

In the end, no matter what the task is, leaders should let the small, fractal team to sort out all of the details. Let them lock themselves in your conference room over the weekend if they want to. Let them work in the park if the want to. Give them the flexibility to be. To create. In short…

Trust the team.

Sure, leadership should make it clear they expect the team to provide something that will address the task at hand; however, the ultimate success or failure of the project should be secondary. After all, this is about trying new things. Some will fail.

But if version 1.0 fails, the organization is out significantly less time and energy than if they would have subjected the initial development to layers of approval and everyone’s scrutiny.

But if it succeeds, that’s when the project can move into a more formal development stage. More hands will be needed to develop version 2.0 as the organization plugs innovation into their current organizational processes.

Your thoughts?

So does this have legs? Could you see this implemented into enterprise culture? Why/why not?

I’d love to continue the conversation.

-Andrew

Image credit: Jsome1 on Ficker; see original for copyright info

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image credit: DeaPeaJay

As social business concepts emerge, there is a clear and growing divide between those companies that have embraced social modes of work and those that are still operating under the rigid rules of twentieth century enterprise.

This of course has lead to all sorts of misguided and mostly useless debate about whether or not the shift to Enterprise 2.0 is important.

But I’d argue that point is not whether or not social business models are “better” than traditional industrial models, nor is it about what’s profitable right now. The importance of this conversation is about how human connectedness through technology is changing the way we interact and do work.

My take on this is also most likely not completely new, but as I begin to piece all of this together, it’s my hope to continue the conversation about the changing nature of work (not just the changing nature of social interaction) and invite you to join in.

The Challenge of Being Big

It’s tempting to place the importance of social media solely on the outward-facing communication functions of an organization.

This, I think is a mistake.

Sure, as Stuart Foster recently pointed out, big brands have big challenges to overcome in order to reach the level of social marketing effectiveness some of their smaller counterparts enjoy. But Foster himself outlined relatively easy solutions to each of the social media marketing challenges.

What’s more difficult is the socializing of business itself, and more specifically, the socialization of work in the enterprise. It requires that we leave entire business paradigms behind. It means culture shift.

Slow, Complex, and Complicated

Letting your employees tweet at work does not equal socialization of work.

Because the socialization of work has to do with an adapting structure of an organization, smaller orgs seem to fit more easily within social models of business. Martinj Linssen suggested that if your organization is at the level of enterprise (or larger), there’s possibly no place for social in your organization.

Linssen explains that traditional enterprises are slower, more complex and entirely more complicated than their more socially inclined counterparts because of their size, their inability to let go of historically ingrained practices, their overly political systems of power, and the challenge of legacy apps.

All of these things are symptoms of the enterprise obsession with groups. It’s what Stowe Boyd has been saying for years: “the rights and responsibilities of individuals are derived from group membership, and these rights are granted by the enterprise.”

Compare this to the social web networks that provide individuals with rights and responsibilities without a transfer of power from a group.

The issue is human

As Tim Jahn recently articulated in my interview with him for the Ask Summit, larger organizations often lack humanity.

Once you attain a certain size, you become more or less defined by the sum of your processes. In order to maintain rule for the sake of the process, you must strip any humanity from the equation. Process trumps creativity and automation trumps innovation.

And that’s how we become the cogs Seth Godin keeps telling us not to be.

Economy and Scale

So why try to change the enterprise if it’s so riddled with challenges? Why not kick the whole model and shrink organizations?

Despite the growing commitment to creativity, collaboration and innovation I see in conversations online, me must nod to the economy of scale. Stuff simply costs less when it’s purchased or produced in bulk.

But what’s the cost of the supporting infrastructure for producing cheap goods? If we look carefully, we see that return on assets (ROA) has dropped over the last 40 years, even as labor productivity improved (source: Harvard Business Review). It’s as #smchat founder Chris Jones articulated:

How can we hope to make money, when the answer to every problem is to buy and/or build more infrastructure?  Large scale operations require maintenance and up-keep, care and feeding.  It’s a problem that doesn’t go away.  A viscious [sic] circle.

So should enterprise organizations “think small” and attempt to act more like their social counterparts to boost profitability as technology and human connection advance? Jones continues:

It’s no longer enough (if it ever really was) to try to ‘think entrepreneurial”.  Small and nimble companies are developing a clear advantage in the new global marketplace. They lack the bureaucracy that blocks collaboration, that shields executives from shifting market paradigms, that strands innovators in organizational silos.

A fractal sort of scaling

At the risk of oversimplifying the issue, I think some of the problems of traditional organizational scaling might be solved by rethinking scale altogether.

After sorting through all of this, it seems I finally understand what Stowe Boyd meant when he said that the future of business would face a fractal kind of scaling where “the same sorts of organizational principles are at work in the large and in the small.”

This type of scaling, as Bas Reus shows us, might appear as heterarchy, a wirearchy, or some other networked structure that resembles nothing like the traditional organizational pyramid.

In any case, the future of business in the social realm is more than a marketing program or a mindset.

It’s a complete restructuring.

What do you think?

Are you caught an an immobile enterprise that’s seeing your market share being eroded by start-ups or smaller, more nimble organizations?

Do you sense a coming change in organizational scale?

Do you think I’m completely wrong here?

Leave a comment if you’re so inclined.

-Andrew

Image credit: DeaPeaJay on Ficker; see original for copyright info

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It’s one thing to talk about how to leverage new social platforms to do business better. It’s another to talk about shifting business models to adapt to the current state of the web.

I think we’re doing well to address the former. My RSS reader is brimming with shining examples of how to engage, execute and measure social media tactics. But the critical conversation that I don’t hear as much about (and maybe it’s because I’m looking in the wrong places) is about how to shift our business modles themselves to better fit into a world where networks are no longer the exception but the norm.

Capitalism hasn’t changed

There is a common denominator in a capitalist economy:

No matter of how we structure our business models, our end goal is often the same. As Mark Schaefer recently pointed out, both in a post and in my interview with him: although the way we’re doing business is changing, we’re still “trying to more to more people for more money more often.”

I don’t think social business changes that.

I’ve argued that in the future, connection may be more important the products as we embrace social business models. According to Stowe Boyd, these soical business models will not simply fix what’s broken, but will be a complete departure and replacement of the old way of doing business:

In the final analysis, this seems like yet another example of paradigm change. Kuhn [link mine], in The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions, detailed the research that demonstrates that schools of thought fail and are replaced by revolutionary viewpoints exactly when the old theories cannot explain what is happening in new research.

The ad barrier

I think this paradigm change should start with how we think about the ad-based business model. It’s no secret that newspaper and magazine revenues are down. Just as a snapshot, business magazine ad revenue in 2009 was down as much as 46% for some tiles (Inc. to be exact).

Although online advertising has made a bit of a comeback, it’s time to see the writing on the wall: in an online environment driven by networks, only a few (Google, Facebook, YouTube) stand to make significant gains with ads.

This of course is not a novel suggestion. Earlier this month, venture capitalist and potty-mouth Dave McClure called all who are reliant on ad-based online business models “lazy, ad-happy, Web-Tards with crappy ROI.”

The ad business model assumes that you will create a frequent-use product (Google, Facebook, YouTube) that will drive some insane amount of traffic.

But as wetoku co-founder David Lee points out, even if you create a product that can be used frequently and scale quickly, “Chacnces are, your product and your company sucks (if we use Twitter, Facebook or YouTube as the standard of non-web-tardism).”

Not everyone wants your product

Which means we have to settle for a smaller number of people using our products.

Which means ads simply aren’t going to cut it.

Which means we have to get people to pay for our products in the first place.

In his rant on web-tardism, McClure points to an excellent article on the penny gap: the reality that it’s much harder to get consumers to pay one penny for what you’re offering than it is to convince them that your product is worth $5 instead of $1.

Place your focus on closing the penny gap

Given that an ad-based model for online revenue probably won’t work for your business, and given that there are relatively few people who actually want to use your product, I think we should start talking about how to aquire new customers at the minimum possible cost (instead of spending all our time talking about effective social communication and measurement).

I’m not just talking about building trust via social networks.

What I mean is, we need to think about how people share information via networks in order to structure out business models around them.

Sure there’s the freemium model, but that has its limitations. What if you can’t convert free customers to paid customers?

What about structuring our business models like Cory Doctorow who makes a boat load of money, even though he gives away his the exact same content of his books online? (Doctorow’s model isn’t really freemium, it’s more like just plain free.)

Or what about cutting out free altogether?

What’s your take?

How do you see the future structure of business models?

Will we see an increase in subscriptions and transactions (and less ads) as McClure claims?

Will freemium replace ads as the defacto business online business model?

Will something else take it’s place?

If you have an opinion. please share it. Let’s continue this critically essential conversation.

-Andrew

Image credit: A. Drauglis Furnituremaker on Ficker; see original for copyright info

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In a recent email, someone accused me of not being snarky enough lately. HA! You asked for it:

Here they are, 10 steps to writing a popular blog post in no time flat:

1. Spend 2 minutes on Twitter and find a popular blog post on a hot-button issue.
2. Open your blogging platform and start ranting in response. Logic here: rant = passion and passion = popular.
3. If possible, make some audacious claim about Gen Y, or Gen X, or whatever generation you happen to be from. The more it inspires warm fuzzies or outright anger, the better.
4. Think about creating an easily digestible list. [Ah, irony]
5. Don’t acknowledge the article that started your rant. Links slow you down, and you can’t afford this one.
6. Don’t ever stop to think through the issue critically or do any research beyond the blogs you read anyway. The clock is ticking!
7. Channel your inner motivational speaker. It doesn’t matter if what you’re claiming is true, per se. What matters is that you inspire people to start nodding along.
8. Leave a half-hearted plea for people to comment. Aim for quantity of comments over quality. This will make you appear to be popular and help to ease that nagging feeling that no one is reading your blog.
9. Now that you’re done writing, go back through your post and link EVERY word that’s semi-related to another post you’ve written. This will keep people on your site longer, increase your page views, and of course, stroke your ego when you open Google Analytics.
10. Hit publish. Make sure to retweet yourself several times over the next few days.

And there you have it.

What do you think?

-Andrew

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image credit: Helga Birna Jónasdóttir

I’m talking to you, young, hip, fancy social media blogger/guru/maven. You get engagement, community management, and customer interaction.

At least that’s what the young pro blogs I’m reading suggest.

But what about the unsexy stuff?

Do you know your cost of new customer acquisition?

Could you spout off five easy ways to increase average order size?

Can you read a P&L statement?

Can you quickly and easily demonstrate social media’s value to the bottom line?

How are you at using market research data to predict consumer behavior?

Consider this my formal and open call.

It’s my opinion that if we really want to advance how social media is used in business, we must first demonstrate how it contributes to revenue.

We also have to acknowledge that traditional models of marketing and customer interaction still work in many cases, and talk about how the new works with the old.

Maybe I’m being unreasonable.

But it seems to me that for as much time as we spend talking about all things social (“we” meaning likely readers of this post, myself included), we spend next to no time talking about new approaches to nuts and bolts stuff. Not just measurement, but integrated approaches with traditional business functions.

Perhaps that’s why Oliver Blanchard told us to “Beware the Social Media one-trick-pony“:

An individual with “extensive” Social Media experience…cannot function at the Director level without prior experience at that level outside of “Social Media.” Your knowledge of the function of a department…takes precedence over your knowledge of Social Media.

And maybe it’s why A few weeks ago, David Spinks argued that too much networking makes bad marketers:

We’re just starting out, and the first thing we now learn isn’t to start studying people and marketing, it’s to use social media to network and build a personal brand.

We should do instead

In treating social media like the the center of the universe, it’s my belief that we’ve narrowed our focus too much.

Instead of spending all of our time thinking and writing about building community or getting more blog readers, perhaps our careers and our conversations would be better served if we focused more on calculated business principles.

Mark Schaefer suggested that if you want to get a job in social media marketing,

Become a beefy marketer. [...] to really build a career you should become proficient at the fundamentals of marketing. Star performers will be able to apply their love of the social web to marketing research, consumer behavior, product development, personal selling, and brand-building.

The point I’m getting from these conversations?

Stop doing the same social media trick all the time and widen your skill base.

I think one of the best ways to wrestle with the new application of business basics is together, through conversation across blogs and platforms like Twitter.

So here’s to learning new tricks

And talking about them, too.

What do you think? Do young pro bloggers have a responsibilty (for the sake of our own careers) to push beyond social and life talk? Please share your thoughts.

-Andrew

Image credit: Helgabj on Ficker; see original for copyright info

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Although I’m hesitant to proclaim that any traditional form of marketing or customer service is completely dead, the shifting social landscape has hallenged us to rethink even our most basic and deeply ingrained practices – like face to face customer service. Neal Rohrbach gives us a taste of what might be the future of customer service:

Recently I’ve found myself on the road quite a bit between conferences and trade shows. It’s really amazing how social media has blended into these trips, started relationships, continued conversations an on and on. For example, the Social Fresh marketing/social media conference I’m attending in Tampa next week, I found via Facebook, connected with the host via Twitter and got an invite. When I headed to Las Vegas for the SHOT Show, I found a number of vendors on Twitter, connected with them before we headed to the show and met there to discuss our eCatalog and Advertising opportunities. The most eye opening experience was what unfolded after I found myself taking a cold shower at the Luxor Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, pun intended.

Jet lagged and running behind I hurried to the shower to start my full day of pounding pavement at the trade show, only to find the ice cold water pouring from the shower head. I gave it a minute, played with the knob, tried the bathtub and the sink as well, no luck. After a world record fast shower, I brushed the icicles out of my hair, got dressed and headed down to the customer service desk. I had assumed that a formal face to face complaint would yield better results than picking up the phone. Approaching the desk, I was greeted with a half-hearted “Can I help you?” and here was that dialog:

Me: Yes, I wanted to let you know that I didn’t have hot water in my room this morning.
Agent: Did you let it run for a minute?
Me: Yes, I let it run for a few minutes and had to take a cold shower.
Agent: Are you staying in the Pyramid?
Me: No, the limestone beds wreck havoc on my back.
(long pause, blank stare)
Me: I’m in the west tower.
Agent: We don’t have any reports of water outages in the West Tower, are you sure?
Me: Yes I’m sure.
Agent: Well all I can offer you is an apology, these things happen.

There were a number of things I took away from this conversation. For one, I felt slightly insulted that the customer service agent had to verify that I let the water run more than a few seconds before drawing my conclusion. Secondly, I was perturbed at their argumentative attitude when I wasn’t provided what I had paid for, hot water. Many times before I’ve accepted and moved on from my expectations not being met if I’m at least offered a sincere apology and promise that it will be taken care of for the next day. Finally, they obviously didn’t have a sense of humor and completely missed my ancient pyramid joke.

Still a bit perturbed, I pulled out my iPhone to tweet about this experience. I sent out a “thank you” to the hotel for eliminating my need for a sugar free Redbull that morning, as I was wide awake after the cold shower. Within the hour I had an @ reply from the Luxor hotel and casino and they wanted to make things right for me…wow. Later that day, their marketing and social media manager personally delivered goodie bags full of t-shirts, hats, a pile of new release DVDs and they even offered me free show tickets for that night. That was much more than I ever expected, and it was greatly appreciated!

On the way back to my room with my in kind gifts I realized what had just happened and I was saddened. It was clear that face to face customer service had one foot in the grave that day. When I went to talk to a customer service agent in person, I was all but shunned, and not until I blasted out a tweet to my meager 850 some followers did I get results. I guess social media really is as viral as everyone says.

The biggest lesson to learn from all of this, whether you run a small business, or are a part of a large corporation, is to not forget what’s most important in house. Social media is a way to reach out and offer customer service virtually. It’s not supposed to replace customer service on a face to face level, but act as an extension of your brand that reaches out when you can’t offer a smile and a handshake. Props again to @LuxorLV

for reaching out and taking care of me, but pass on some of that charm and charisma to your front desk staff!

Neal Rohrbach is Chief Creative Officer for Outdoor Channel Outfitters. He is also the Co-Founder of Idea Anglers. His portfolio boasts successful projects on both small and global markets, from “Mom & Pop” businesses to professional sports teams and Fortune 500 companies. He is a marketing zealot, graphic designer and entrepreneur. He thinks outside the box, not off the shelf.

Photo Credit: icathing See photo page for Creative Commons licence.

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Last month, a few other young professionals, namely Nicole Crimaldi, Matt Cheuvront, and (to some extent) Shane Mac suggested that the best education is self-education.

As one who loves a good debate, and as someone who’s always been sympathetic to the side of traditional education, I decided to interview Cali Harris (@caligater) who recently quit her job to pursue her Masters full-time. She’s the real deal. The video interview and a recap (with my 2 cents thrown in) are below:

[If you can't see the video, click to visit]

Grad School can lead you down a path you didn’t know existed

Cali started in cultural studies, but stumbled upon a few social entrepreneurship classes, and found that she really wants to be a social entrepreneur.

Sure, this type of thing can happen while you’re working, but extra school gives you a lab of sorts to experiment and stumble all day every day—something that is partially hindered if you’re holding down a 9-5 and trying to figure out what you want to do with life on the side.

Sometimes it’s a matter of personal priorities

Cali quit her job to give 100% to grad school.

I can’t tell you how many people I know who have tried to straddle both grad school and a full-time job. They usually fall into one of three categories: (1) the crazy people who excel at both, (2) the people who are obviously favoring one or the other, or (3) the people who start to suck at both.

At least from my experience, the majority of people I know fall into that third category.

So what’s the value in graduate school?

Why shell out an insane amount of money of a piece of paper?

The value for Cali is the process. Learning to maneuver your way through graduate school is similar to maneuvering your way through a corporation, or a startup.

Earning your graduate degree, says Cali, is not about a line on your resume. She feels that she’s gained insight and skills she didn’t have before to start something perhaps bigger, and perhaps more informed.

There’s something to be said about those who can start and build something without a formal education, but there are some instances in which a formal education helps teach you how to think more than anything. This comes not just from reading and conversing, but from people who are actively challenging you in your pursuit of knolwedge.

Grad school also teaches you how to play the game. In school, in corporations, in your client relationships, there will always be a fair share of politicing. If there’s one group that worships at the altar of inter-organizational politics, it’s higher ed. This is an invaluable experience.

Would you add anything?

I’ll admit this post talks more about the benefits of graduate school than it attacks the deficits of self-education.

So in the spirit of thinking about the positive, what other good things do you see about a graduate education?

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Despite the obvious connection between a certain feminine hygienic product and “iPad,” I think the name is brilliant. In fact, I think that Apple may have done it on purpose.

Sure, everyone from CNN to Twitter (iTampon was a trending topic for nearly 8 hours), has been poking fun of Apple. Many, including Shereen Meraji of All Tech Considered, are wondering: “maybe there weren’t any women in the room when that got decided.”

The power is in the buzz

When I was driving home from work today, NPR was running an interview with Bruce McCoy and Tami Sagher, the writers of a 2005 MadTV iPad spoof (think iPod meets Maxi—watch it here). This interview, although poking fun at Apple, brought the new tablet back to the front of my mind.

Suddenly I started fantasizing about having one—what I’d do with it, how I’d use it.

That is precisely why “iPad” is brilliant: Apple gave us another reason to talk about it.

And really, who cares if it has a dopey name?

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To be honest, this post has less to do with failure and more to do with personal innovation from within the corporate structure—the struggle to make change happen, to get your ideas implemented if you aren’t in a senior leadership position.

The Math of Fast and Cheap

In 2007, Doug Hall suggested that businesses should Fail Fast, Fail Cheap when it comes to innovation. Specifically he showed the business sense of failing quickly and cheaply:

If it takes six months and $100,000 to take a product from idea to customer reaction, then at best you’ll get two cycles in a year. However, if you can do a complete cycle of learning in a week for $1,000, you can get 52 cycles in a year at about half the cost.

Actually, if you do the math right, it’s about one-fourth the cost.

In any case, Hall’s point is that you should try new ideas often and on a small scale because you can’t know exactly how an idea will turn out until you try it.

Simply put, this type of rapid iteration that drives innovation. With each iteration you learn, and with each cycle of learning, you get closer to making something work.

What about my career?

Failing fast and cheap is well and good for product development, but what about your career? Consider the following adaptation of three tips to decreasing the cost of failure by Scott Anthony,  Managing Director of Innosight Ventures:

Anthony: “Lower the costs of experiments”

Me: Gaining support for your ideas at work may not cost you much money, but it certainly costs you time and effort. To prevent too much of your time from being lost, your first pitch shouldn’t be super polished. It should be “good enough.”

Never blindside your director or CEO with a written action plan, no matter how well researched.  Despite your good intentions and solid argumentation, this approach is too easily dismissed. Trust me, it’s happened to me twice in my professional career (you think I’d learn).

The point is to find the sweet spot where your research and verbal pitch are “good enough” to get your foot in the door. Once you’re in, then work on that formal brief. This is will save you oodles of time in the long run.

Anthony: “Change the order of experiments.”

Me: When pitching your ideas, don’t start with your enormous, big idea goal. Instead, start with something smaller. I’d recommend asking yourself, “what simple solution would make others’ jobs easier?”

If you find a way to remove an obstacle your coworkers are presently dealing with, they’ll be more likely to support you when pitch a bigger idea down the road.

Anthony: “Increase the pace of decision making”

Me: One of the most effective ways to sell an idea is to build a prototype. If, however, the prototype isn’t producing some kind of results in relatively short order, consider it may be the idea, not the prototype that’s at fault.

Also consider that the big idea you’ve been pitching for 8 months may not be worth all of the effort you’re putting into it. It doesn’t mean you should abandon your big idea if it isn’t adopted right away, it means you should recognize when a pitch has failed, regroup, shift the order of your experiments, and come back to you big idea later.

This way each cycle of learning can bring you closer to selling your big idea.

What would you add?

When it comes to pitching your ideas at work, how do you decrease the cost of failure?

Please share!

-Andrew

*image only:

image credit: Joe Loong (joelogon on Flickr); original here

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Yesterday Rebecca Thorman contested that “bloggers are not writers” and “blogging is not writing.”

I happen to disagree, but this not really about disagreement. This is about rethinking our basic understanding of writing.

This is about boiling down the underlying implications of Thorman’s ideas in an effort to hold them, to examine them, to test them.

I’m deeply indebted to Thorman’s post and presentation as the start of this conversation, so first: Thank you Rebecca. And now to our point of departure…

A Trajectory, not a Definition

Consider for a moment that writing is not limited by a set of fixed definitions, but is instead a trajectory.

Or maybe a possibility.

Or perhaps the possibility of trajectory.

But never fixed and defined.

The problem with the assertion that “bloggers are not writers,” is that the statement assumes we have the authority to say what is and what is not writing.

Sure, in a common sense way, we preform this sort of function all of the time. It’s how we determine the crayon doodle on the back of a Denny’s placemat isn’t writing.

But to be more clear, setting limits on writing by stating that “bloggers are not writers” assumes that we can lift the veil of language (the symbol “writing”) and find behind the curtain the real essence of “writing” devoid of language.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen “writing” sitting on my kitchen counter. I’ve seen books and newspapers there, but never “writing” as such.

To those who argue that definitions are constructed by communities (that we set definitions in a social structure). I don’t completely disagree. But I’ve invited society over for dinner more than once, and it’s never shown up.

What I’m trying to say is, it’s impossible to officially draw the limits of a word based on social usage alone. This means that Webster’s is more a snapshot than a guide.

Writing has never been about originality

One of the arguments leveled at blogging is that it isn’t original, that it’s base appeal panders to the crowd, perpetuating the myth that collective thought is better than individual thought.

But writing, no matter how private, is never individual or original.

Consider the “subject” (the author) of writing. Who writes? How is meaning transferred? We’ve long since moved beyond the intentional fallacy. More specifically Fredrick Jameson (2000) writes,

[the individual subject] is also a myth…this construct [of the subject] is merely a philosophical and cultural mystification which sought to persuade people that they ‘had’ individual subjects and possessed some unique personal identity (p. 285).

The point: we cannot reconstruct an author by reading a text because there is no singular author.

This death of the subject also leads to the death of origin. Derrida (1978):

The “subject” of writing does not exist if we mean by that some sovereign solitude of the author. The subject of writing is a system of relations between strata: the Mystic Pad, the psyche, society…it is not enough to recall that one always writes for someone…. We would search the “public” in vain for the first reader: i.e., the first author of a work. (pp. 226-227 [italics original])

Our search in vain for the first author of a work is a search in vain for the origin of discourse, the origin of writing itself.

Writing’s implications are not wrapped solely in the intention of an author, but reach into the complexities of the transfer of meaning from one person to another—a “system of relations.”

If the subject, the writer, is a system of relations and not a single and sovereign entity, then there can be no distinction between a “true” author and a “false” author, a “writer” and a “blogger.”

It is not enough to say that “most blogs aren’t writing,” or even that “there are some bloggers who are true writers,” because assuming truth and falsity in the question of writing is to misunderstand the enterprise of writing from the ground up (in philosophical terms, to dogmatically privilege either the present or presence).

If writing is something more, blogging is nothing less

The problem with blogging is not that most bloggers are poor writers.

In fact, the problem is not the medium.

The problem is that we have too many things to read, too much content to pour over, that each blog post is skimmed, chewed on for all of 28 seconds, and promptly forgotten for the next piece of content in the stream.

Writers, regardless of their vocation, develop content for their respective audiences.

To be sure, we can never have a fully-developed conversation about writing without talking about audience because they are equally part of the process of writing.

Even though journalists, novelists, reporters, columnist and others may inspire us to boil their ideas down, whether or not the distillation takes place is based on an individual reader’s decision.

Blogging has evolved as another form of writing. And simply because we’ve adapted blogging to fit the real-time internet doesn’t suddenly push it’s content out of the realm of writing.

But isn’t there a certain banality of all blog posts? Sure.

Isn’t the blogosphere over saturated? Getting worse by the day.

Are blogs mostly worthy of our time? For many, probably not.

But blogging writing all the same.

So if we want to give credit

In the end, if we want to give credit to the transfer of meaning the occurs through the process of writing, we give credit to enduring ideas, observations, and philosophies regardless of the medium of their expression.

-Andrew

[A warning: some details of this argument were omitted for the sake of brevity. If you take issue with this, we can discuss at length the metaphysical underpinnings of the following philosophical arguments. I'm on Skype here: wordpost]

Image credit: Andrew* [nez on Flickr]; See original for rights information which may differ from the license of this blog

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