The social nets feel fatigued to me.
Cacophonous. Unfulfilling. A shouting match.
I’m find myself pining for the dirt under the fingernails of life.
Wanting that nuance and exhausting pensiveness that comes from spending your Saturdays deep into a book that has nothing—and everything—to do with life.
Replacing music in my gym time with podcasts, though less the endless palaver of syndicated startup talk, more the long-form conversations on random topics like just recently, the early intaglio work of William Blake or behaviorism of open spaces in smart cities.
Forsaking time-sucking sitcoms for the story of ideas, novellas of surprise and the deep ambiguity that only comes from focus, from work of the mind, from abandonment to the process of laying out complex ideas.
And realizing—for me at least—that I only truly find the subtlety and assurance of thought in these stories and posts, infrequently in the short fuse of tweets.
It’s a reaction to a need for conversation and discussion. A hiatus from posturing. And exhaustion with speed pitching.
Embracing the truth that engagement is not a measurement, it’s a connection and we are mistaking as a culture—certainly as marketers–the measure for the truth of what we are seeking.
A firm rejection that life or work or friendship or the dynamics of startups can be captured in a phrase.
They can’t.
The collars of character counts in Twitter, the unfriendliness of words in Instagram, the enforced triviality and poses of Facebook, are like glances in the mirror.
Like Zoolander’s Blue Steel.
We are entering the most empowered, the most possible, the smartest data-driven time period that I can remember in my career.
But we need to truly redefine listening as an action with purpose to take advantage of this.
We need fuel for detailed imagining. We need stories that weave through the vagaries of inspiration and the foresight that only come from truly letting go.
We need articulate points of view that are owned by people not afraid to be dramatically wrong.
We need to surround ourselves with studied conjecture. With a thermal blanket of long-form thoughts.
There’s an ebb and flow of excitement and reflections, blogs and microblogs, phrases and expositions in thought.
We bob on top of these cycles, riding the wave in and out of cultural highs and lows.
I think today we are churning in the mire of trivialized socialization.
And it is calling out for for something with more depth. For something that takes digging in, with more touch and purpose.
That’s where the opportunity lies.
Technologists will see this as an evolution of platform types. Behaviorists will see it as the stair step of new platformed behaviors and collective drives for different types of communications.
I think it’s a combination of both, not a rejection of either.
The power of the nets as the origin of community is obvious.
But the more wired we become, the more connectivity is the given, the more data serendipity and UX clarity becomes the norm, the more the need for stories that bind. And thoughts that fight against simplicity and too easy understanding.
I see this as a nudge to step outside the metaphors that are stale and unfulfilling cross our social nets.
And in business, beyond the glorified, misguided tactics of growth hacking. Beyond the mania for simplification.
We need taglines, mission statements and clarity of course, but they are the tips of the iceberg, not the iceberg themselves.
The takeaway for me as I look into the new year, past the exhaustion and malaise of this political season and to the opportunities for work and culture, is in a commitment to understanding and listening.
And to me, this comes from immersive, multi-disciplinary thoughts and meditations. From allowing ourselves to discover the true story and forsaking the easy phrase.
I love a great tweet. They are simply not enough.
Who doesn’t love a pic that touches the imagination. We need more though.
We need thoughts that bind through our individualized understanding of them.
We need a process that understands that ambiguity and nuance are not a miss, but often the the only place where clarity can be found.
