These two modes of existence are not as detached as it may seem. Changes in  a westerner’s lifestyle may not directly affect the quality of life of struggling people in the third world, still we live in an interconnected global economy where the butterfly effect slowly and gradually carves its impact.

Things are rotten in our affluent global kingdom of Denmark. In many countries, a growing demand for dethroning corrupted systems is heard. In oppressed regimes, rioters demand freedom and a better life. In more democratic countries, frustrated from the failure of the prevailing economic systems, the calls are for an affordable and a more solidarity based future. The outrageous numbers of discrepancies in the distribution of wealth,  the economic inequality, greed and even financial corruption marked an era that is shaking the world’s well being all across.

What can we, the 99% , do in our daily life to make a difference?

Build new engines; develop disruptive life paradigms that will influence our social networks, environment and the axioms on which current crumbling paradigms are built.

Corporate responsibility according to the new zeitgeist should be measured by awareness not only to boardroom results but to the real value its products/services carry and its authentic engagement as trust building mechanisms that influence the corporate identity. These days solidarity accountability and social and environmental awareness gradually become a new measuring scale for a more aware,  just and politically correct existence for many organizations that up till now were led by profit goal seeking as the ultimate purpose.

At the same time we, users, have a responsibility as well.

We can, and should, harness our life style and usability patterns to stop the vicious circle that feeds and increasingly empowers the ruling 1%.

How?

Do we really need to consume all that we are consuming? Is more, newer, bigger the answer? Isn’t that the pipeline that feeds the suppliers of the closed club of the few monster companies that control everything.

The answer to the capitalist networks that financially own the world top down is a user centered state of mind that defeats it bottom up through non tangible weapons – deriving meaning from values and actions that do not require actual purchases, but give satisfaction by their very value – an internal sense of purpose and fulfillment that is not determined by others’ defined status symbols or social ladders.

User centered economy of the soul and social connectedness will replace hedonistic stimuli with soul fulfilling activities that carry with them a lasting meaning. It will be based on real social values of engagement, involvement, caring, solidarity has a much stronger communal and networked value than any financial or brand related bonds.

The social net will get a qualitative meaning as well, as we harness our social circles for challenging the practices that created the affluent society that translated happiness to external assets and very individualistic life style. It  will shift control back to us, users, and will force marketers to share a humbler less greedy spirit. Continuing in the same paths is bound to prove self destructive. On its simplest level, our palates will not suffer a loss if on supermarket shelves there will a choice of 4 yogurt flavors instead of 15 and our personalities will not be deprived if not wrapped in the latest brands. Modesty of settling for less can be as fulfilling as constantly looking for the next stimulus, which very quickly proves to be nothing more than quicksand demanding to be fed again and again to keep the thrill.

Only then a different solidarity based world culture may develop, that will hopefully find more compassion between all its 7 billion inhabitants.

While at its face value it may seem that those two revolutions are contrasting in nature, in fact they are the two sides of the same coin – the user/citizen at the center. Connecting the dots leads to the common denominator –two expressions of the same phenomenon – the voice of individuals shaping society bottom up, in a collective collaborative way.  In both new social is the order of the day. Social activism, social media, grassroots actions and collaborative crowdsourcing are the means. Both are expressions of the traits that characterize user centricity and citizen centricity–a free spirit, independent state of mind and a natural sense of entitlement.

In one revolution, citizens faced with economic concerns, unrest and distrust of the system, react in a bottom up participatory wave of voices. They refuse to continue and passively accept old orders. In the Wall Street Riots the movers and shakers are no longer distinct mavericks, but a collective of citizens that has become a mover aspiring to shake the paradigm that brought them to the abyss.People who fear fragile economies, feel exploited, abused and betrayed want to bring back the human factor into the equation. They call for a more moral, value based and socially aware governance. These riots ignite a communal call for a civic ecology that that places its people at the center of the system.

The Silicon valley transformation works itself up through a ubiquitous open ended individual empowerment, a user centered paradigm, and a social collaborative grid of bottom-up shared conversations and collaborative efforts to work on the best solutions.

  Both are poking the box , replacing top down hierarchal dictation, both reflect a paradigm shift, a new state of mind.

 In fact it’s about preserving corporate paradigms based on rigid rules of engagement, privacy policies of the old world, where top down hierarchies and policies dictate the business models and our captivity.

 It is  opposed  to open  systems that acknowledge and thrive on the cultural, consumer, social shifts and the free spirit of the web that encourages the  harnessing of  new business models to accommodate users.

The internet is etheric, ubiquitous, heterogeneous, distributed and intangible. It includes all the markets of the traditional world. And as digital takes an increasing part of our life, power struggles become more sophisticated and the fight to keep an open web takes further significance. It’s no longer about what devices we use, not even what operating system, but what culture, approach and relations we’ll have with companies that cater for our digital life.

This battle incorporates, from an icentered lens, the most threatening aspects for abuse of the free spirit, culture and mindset we want for our web life. It is a battle over our rightful place in ecosystems created around us, over our freedom of choice,  and our right to proactively manage our privacy and sharing.

We cannot be owned by providers. The battle to become our personal portal and the hegemony wars over web dominance between Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft are cannibalizing the basic web future and mindset it should spell for us, its users.

From a corporate perspective it’s about  transparency, data management, privacy policies and customer relations. The battle over who will have control over anything we interact with on the web.

We should be thankful for those super giants of the digital economy for empowering us with a new digital dimension that has revolutionized our lives and has made digital a commodity. At the same breath, we should fear the lack of sensitivity and respect, of those companies, who, through their offerings, define the rules of what our digital life will look like.

What awaits us in that power struggle?

Apple has revolutionized our communications consumptions, yet their closed system of Macs, Iphone,  iPads are closed gardens relying on itunes for entertainment content. Will the future spell a web built on micro apps?

Google’s search results, as our primary source of reference, dictate to a large extent how we perceive things. Will the future depend on an organized web according to Googles’ keys for inclusion?

Facebook has redefined our social connectivity, dialogs and the way we interact with each other over the web. Will it our personal operating system be dressed in Facebook’s outfit?

As the world goes mobile, smart phones will indicate the next evolutionary stages of web usage, the battle between the mobile Android based Google mobile OS and the closed Iphone systems is a micro cosmos of the battle over closed or open web. And on it goes…. 

 We are at the verge of web 3.0 that will bring with it awareness and contextification, that will make us, users, more vulnerable as computer systems will automatically analyze  our interactions with advanced semantic tools, spot our whereabouts and activities through location awareness. Add that to the downpour of information, data and media, personalization will be the name of the game – and control and privacy issues will augment with that.

The symbol of the battle between open and closed is the cultural difference between the basic approach of two of the giants fighting for hegemony – Google and Facebook.

We used to fear Google’ Big brother master plan for web dominance,  We can be mildly reassured of  Googles’ Don’t be evil motto that they have made a central pillar in their corporate identity, that their culture tends to be more open, today, and by the level of transparency that goes together with being a public company.  

Facebook opts for closure, secret and obscure policies, remaining private so not to have to embrace the transparency and accountability of a public company.  The Goldman_Sacks Facebook deal, a quasi private investment , asserts this. If  Facebook really wanted to, it could embrace an open culture, Zuckerberg preferred  not to assume that accountability.

 We must encourage privacy activists, consumer watchdogs and netizens  to foster constant awareness to the importance of open systems, transparency and user control in a free, neutral open social web.

A neutral web will ensure our security, safety, independence – as contrary to a closed web dominated by digital superpowers who constantly track us without any ability on our part to block or share at will, controls our data and dictates the economic food chains around our data.

For all these reasons, protecting us from the closing movement of the giants who want to dominate it all – calls for a paradigm shift. One that reverses relations between providers and users, is based on technologies and  an open mindset that will allow for pull based permission and data exchange context based food chains, proactively managed by users who become equal partners in the food chains created about them.

Some basic new ground rules for rearranging relations between consumers and providers must be respected. No commercial corporate, acting for its own capital gain, should own our data or have the ability to manipulate or expose it unsolicited, or arbitrarily and unilaterally dictate what additional offerings become integrated to the services and what their consequences are to us, users. They should respect our rightful place as the only owners of personal data, visibility and sole control over sharing handles.

Only then will Zuckerbergs relinquish their power, acknowledge and act with the humility and accountability that come with assuming the culture of reciprocity and respect of truly catering for individuals.

Icentered takes a personalized prism in trying to point the influence of 2011 web’s evolution trends on us, individuals.

The social web
The social web will continue to drastically evolve in the coming year. From the industry’s point of view, 2011 will be a year of social business integration,  a sign of the mainstream maturity of social marketing.  From an icentered prism, the social web expanded from its original mission to facilitate and empower sharing of our experiences with a trusted circle of friends, to become a central component in digital life, with implications to many web life aspects. In the coming year, the social web will continue to evolve, creating more complex issues, problems to solve, challenges and new paradigms to consider.
         From fragmentation to harmonization – Currently our social web experiences are still fragmented through a multitude of platforms. We communicate through Facebook, Twitter, Skype, chat, Gmail, IM… Yet, as users, we strive for more intuitive, simple and unified social platforms. A trend towards consolidation will continue, with efforts like @Facebook.com ’s social inbox. In parallel Google integrated social into its search, facilitating social findability. The trend of moving away from fragmented experiences in a diversity of social networks and the need for integration takes a higher stand as the coming year will see increased efforts for harmonization and diversification of offerings, and the fight over hegemony over becoming our consolidated social portals, will motivate Facebook, Microsoft, Google… to increase offerings and tie us even more to them.
Social life may become more harmonized, but it will bring about the problems associated with data retention, manipulation and all privacy apprehensions that are associated with corporates’ siloed platforms and users’ stickiness. As privacy concerns will not fade away, and people will become increasingly aware of privacy breaches and, we will have to become more alert  to the hidden interests of  harmonization of social platforms  and will strengthen the emerging awareness to the conflicts and need for  user controlled paradigm shifts that will protect us.
·         Ubiquity – Our physical 24/7 connectedness will be even further empowered by real time ubiquity and sharing through new personal gadgets with more advanced apps. With the launch of the Ipad at the beginning of the year, a whole new market segment of tablets, Google’s Android platform for the smart phone market, are empowering our always-on perpetual  accessibility wherever we go, whatever we do, catering for our fun needs ( music, videos, reading, games, entertainment…)to yet higher levels, with intuitive sharing built in. It will   facilitate our connectedness anytime, anywhere with everybody, through all devices, with a plethora of apps adapted to all platforms.  
·         Affordability of new gadgets, smart phones, reducing communication and surfing rates will expand  mass usage of 24/7 social connectedness with our friends anywhere anytime and will enhance a  new breed of location aware apps.
·         Integration of social features in websites, apps and tools – will allow for  intuitive sharing of our surfing.  Many traditional sites will continue to make their sites more social by introducing Like buttons, sharing plug-ins, opening pages in social platforms and getting involved in social discourse to allow for more interaction.
·         Social connectedness – The coming year will continue to empower  our social connectedness, on the virtual, social and philosophical level, through web enabled platforms that facilitate it. This connectedness will become part of our web identity, by getting more involved in social, political and environmental activities of web life and in our localities. We will be more active through social platforms, empowering social do good, entrepreneurship and micro contributions and we’ll try to make a difference and influence, as a reaction to our growing frustration and disappointment from existing institutions. More of us will get involved in bottom-up initiatives to better our life and lives of others and revive trust.
·         Social CRM – From corporates’ prism, the coming year will see an increase in social marketing and evolvement in engaged social brand identities. Brands need to have a presence on the social sphere, because we converse through social platforms like Facebook and Twitter, embrace recommendations from our social sphere as trustworthy, and become more averse to aggressive marketing. Therefore more companies will develop a social web presence, in order  to interact and engage with us through social discourse. They will try to generate trust by a change of tone, in almost a non commercial way, attentive to our feedback , with careful  phrasing of brand claims and marketing messages. The result will be an overpour of product and brand pages in our social networks, a fact that in itself raises a debate on whom will existing social platforms eventually serve. It yet remains to be seen if it weakens the internet as a trustworthy platform or harms its neutrality.
There’s light at the end of the social CRM tunnel, because brands will adopt an engaged profile. We will continue to witness an increasing humanification of brand identities that cultivate social causes, engagement and involvement and present values that exceed the functional or life style values of their offerings. Many will include an environmental,  social and communal identity, as a means to create a new dialog.

Finally money spent for good.
·         Bluring boundaries between business and private life on the social web – The increased real time visibility creates a new hybrid of reference bases that will only grow in nature and blur traditional segregations. Both we, users, and companies, will increasingly use the social space for business needs – such as customer service, personnel recruitment through social references, cooperation, we’ll harness the social web to get more trustworthy, real time results.

Trust  

Distrust continues – our faith in financial institutions, commercial providers,  sustainability of economics, in politics… disintegrates.  We do not put our trust in corporates’ lip service of having our best interests, integrity and data preservation at heart. We are frustrated, angry and disappointed. Marian Salzman talks about rage  as a decisive power to shape attitudes in the year to come. Frustration, loss of faith, aversion distrust and annoyance with traditional norms of opaqueness, interests that do not put us citizens/consumers/individuals first.
We will strive for a relation with brands, providers and organizations that seem to have a real meaning, whose discourse inspires credibility, integrity, we will bond and put our faith in those who truly reach to bond with us and not monitor or impose on us from their detached corporate ivory towers.
This brings about several phenomena that will only accelerate in the time ahead.

Transparency

We came to take social sharing for granted. It enhances openness and transparency of what is happening with my friends. Same expectation will become a culture that will grow. What is happening with our providers? Or more so – what is happening with the information our providers have about us. Intolerance to lack of transparency will continue to ferment.

 Distrust brings about an urge to disclose. As much as the example of Wikileaks will remain controversial, because of the yellow peep-hole nature into the dark corridor of global politics, of the information leaked, and the life endangering and world level damages, the phenomenon will not die. It is inevitable and unstoppable. As every bottom-up phenomenon, it feeds on subversive distribution that challenges existing orders.  As these lines are written, a new platform ,  OpenLeaks, is launching. People who will consider themselves gatekeepers for the rights of citizens, consumers, that are unhappy with cultures and ethics – will use this platform and others that would presumably mushroom, to enhance transparency and ethical conduct and warn of wrong doing. That would undoubtedly force organizations – political, governmental and corporate board rooms to exercise more transparency and sharing, so they do not find themselves hostages of frustrated employees.  Although it’s abuilsing curve, its very existence will contribute to a new culture and mindshare.

Context awareness

Context awareness is still in its infancy and still has a dual impasse at its very nature. From our prism – context signifies the greatest return on attention in the information overflow. When the web will evolve to become web 3.0 or the semantic web, we will expect applications and gadgets to know enough about us to cater for our needs in a relevant and optimizing way. But to date, this vision still poses a threat of a big brother constantly monitoring us and manipulating our data for corporate profit making.  That only enhances privacy concerns.
The other side of context awareness is that it is not ripe today, definitely not in a user centered way.  It does not serve us, it serves corporates that will kill to put their hands on such data for data manipulation purposes. Personalization and context are still not perceived as personal data services that should be catered for user side.
In the coming year attempts to partially enhance context awareness will still be localized through sensor based context aware computing units within gadgets such as mobile phones, TV remotes etc, but not as a universal context service, that monitors and analyses all our web activity on our behalf.
A better society

One of the most prominent trends that will dramatically increase in 2011 is based on we want a better world and we do it ourselves.  Soft values of empathy, caring, replacing greed with compassion, will continue to have a growing impact in brand identity, corporate social involvement in the community, environmental awareness, do good initiatives as part of identity building. The good values will enhance constructive capitalism, as Umair Haque, calls it. The result will gradually bring about a participatory web ecology, that will pave the way to new paradigms, that truly put users at their center.
This will not happen in the year to come, but more building blocks will lay the foundation to the realizations that the upper limits of existing paradigms  create glass ceilings that do not empower adapting to the new world and cultures fermenting under our feet. Quality, soft values, trust, transparency, coopetition instead of siloed competition,   relinquishing traditional powers to gain new coalitions will take some more steps towards a web of life.

The EU adopted a new strategy called EU2015 that emphasizes the need to implement a charter of citizens’ and consumers’ rights of respecting their privacy, giving them control over their data. This charter:

Emphasises that all EU citizens should be made aware of their basic digital rights and obligations through a European Charter of citizens’ and consumers’ rights in the digital environment; believes that this Charter should consolidate the Community acquis including, in particular, users’ rights relating to the protection of privacy, vulnerable users and digital content as well as guaranteeing adequate interoperability performance; reaffirms that rights in the digital environment should be considered within the overall framework of fundamental rights;

 Believes firmly that the protection of privacy constitutes a core value and that all users should have control of their personal data, including the ‘right to be forgotten’; urges the Commission to take account not only of data protection and privacy questions as such, but especially of the specific needs of minors and young adults with respect to these questions; calls on the Commission to submit a proposal for the adaptation of the Data Protection Directive to the current digital environment;

Citizens should be made aware of the privacy impact of their behaviour in an online context, and should be afforded the right to require the removal of personal data even when the data was initially collected with the consent of the data subject. The fight against cybercrime is another significant challenge. The effective enforcement of EU legislation in this field is often obstructed by cross-border legal issues, such as competent jurisdiction or applicable law.

Is this a milestone in the realization that the giants’ wars over our data control, where Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft…. are doing all they can to control our data, as the basis for their business models is abusing us, users, robbing us of our most basic rights?

Is this a wake up call to exert authority to empower the basic rights of our web, in the spirit of Barlow’s declaration of independence and the realization that still today, it is far from being so?

In 2007 there was a wave of voices reclaiming our rights. I want control over my data, web privacy manifesto, Time to write our own rules, but none of them took it to the place of exploring the real meaning of users’ control.   

With the advent of the social web, it only seems worse. The debate over the death of privacy and the era of publicy  grows as the users’ data are increasingly being manipulated – and the call for an open alternative to social networks like Facebook, as a result of the growing to aversion Facebook’s latest manipulations, is a good example.

The Icentered paradigm takes the Eu’s 2015 initiative to its rightful place – starting out by placing the individual at the center, and claiming natural control.  It calls for a new mindset, a fundamental paradigm shift for an active control at the users’ hands.  

Icentricity is very much a product of the evolving web’s zeitgeist of the era of the user. I in the center means that I am no longer the “user” as defined by web site owners and digital merchants – I in the center means a truly user centered web.

The time is ripe for new definitions that will better reflect the increasingly central place of users’ controlled web culture.

The  Icentered vantage point defies providers’ site centered interests where we find ourselves depending on one-sided privacy and trust management policies of providers. We can choose to agree to these policies, and enter the site – or decline and go away.

These providers use our data as the basis for their business models, as advertising platforms, to target us, invade our social spheres and unwillingly turn us into points of reference and of sales. They use our profiles as glue to ensure user stickiness. 

Icentered calls for a new paradigm that puts the user at the center and places me, the individual, as the anchor point, so that  whereas to corporate, process and service the world is flat, opportunities are global and digital users are everywhere, to be manipulated for their commercial ends, to me – the digital me, this flat world has a center point – a gravity anchor – it’s a personal I in the middle – for each and every one of us individually.

• It is My web of life
• I am the center of my web, its gravity anchor
• I am a unique individual, a micro universe of one.
• Each of us is an Itom – an individual painted in unique colors, and yet a member in the web’s people grid.
• I have a personal context – My web is personal
• My personal context is the only prism through which I converse with the world
• There is one harmonious me interacting and roaming all across
• I am dynamic  - what I deem relevant is transient
• The only one who knows all about me is me
• It is my data – nobody owns me
• I and only I proactively manage my privacy and trust
• I am in the driver’s seat with the reins in my hands
• My web of life is my fortress and the keys are in my hands alone
• On my terms – The web according to me
• It reflects me and is there  to serve my needs
• I am at the head of food chains that are all about me

The Icentered paradigm calls for a cleaner, more transparent, trust based digital ecology. Once individuals are recognized  as the centers of food chains created around them – corporates will also realize that they are there to serve them, and not they dictate the terms.

Social networks are consolidating and it will reshape our communication ways. For us our social networks are the town squares, the camp fires around which we share, converse, expose…. All the major players are adding features so that their offerings in order to  capture a larger users’ activity share on their communications platforms. They all want to be the platform of choice over which we manage our relationships, turn it into an ad delivery multi headed monster, and draw the golden eggs of the ad and targeting based revenue streams associated with it. 

The results – borders are blurring, distinction features between the web technology moguls are fading, web based interaction is going one level higher on all fronts – and we users, are faced with situations that demand a new level of awareness – we need a new set of active choices to optimize our interactions in the over exposure to all our social networks’ activities and a stronger privacy lens in our watching eye – we need to protect ourselves, as we are being exposed and targeted on all fronts, since marketers will strive to find us wherever we are.

We can’t control this blurring, or at least it demands a proficiency level that is not intuitive to all mainstream users, and eventually it may cause many of us to lose all the trust we might have had in parts of the offerings they had all together, so that a supposed added app blessing, will turn into a core service curse.

Until today the distinction was quite clear:

• When I want to answer a dedicated mail message I use outlook, Gmail….
• When I just want a short comment – I tweet (140 characters)
• When I want a short personal message -  I use IM, SMS
• When I want  a one to many  communication channel I use my social network – e.g. Facebook
• When I want it for a vertical communication channel like profession related – I use LinkedIn.
• When I want to share my thoughts or muse on an issue – I blog.

With such “communication empire” under my command, each provider wants to become a full scale communication platform, and they all start to look alike. When they all offer me the same, duplication is redundancy, and privacy, segregation and verticalization considerations may leave me more confused and eventually cause me to drop some – so that in fact channels that wanted to do it all for me, risk losing me all together.

Attempts to sort it out primarily focus on comparing their benefits for the industry’s sake, so they will know how to best target their customer in the tectonic shifts that are dynamically changing the balances, not from my users’ point of view of how we may optimally benefit and still feel secure.

First thing first – how is the scene changing? Facebook, Twitter, Google and even Microsoft are radically harnessing the missing components

It started out in a war between FaceBook and Twitter and the battle field was data portability. From FaceBook’s Connect to third party sites, Twitter’s answer, and MySpace following.

Then it scaled up. From basic blurring, like the Twitterization of Facebook to a full communication platform. Facebook ‘s Titan  project – a full fledged web mail system that will make full mailing from the Facebook platform simple and intuitive. This is more strategic, because it makes the lines between Twitter, Facebook, MySpace…. really blur.

Along comes Google’s Buzz and changes the scene. By harnessing a whole social network from millions of dispersed Gmail web mail users into a global social network, integrating blogs,  Twitter, Google Reader shared items, photos and other feeds, Buzz aims for the slot of placing it all under Gmail  - our one to one, one to many, segregated sharing, full exposure – and hence the hegemony over all our web communication.  

Where does it all go? According to Google, to a universal map of monitoring users wherever ( mobile and location awareness), whatever (desktop Buzz integration) with whoever ( social integration) in real time as the fertile ground for an ad based world that will follow us in all our activities and whereabouts, and will pop up offerings in our faces every mile of the way, every minute of the day, every click we make.  

Privacy fears

 Privacy and social networks are not two contradicting hiding and sharing  terms.  The balance and the granularity of exposure and sharing  is a very personal decision. Buzz’s initial fully automated set up option of full exposure of correspondences and contact lists, addresses, activities, scanning mails…..violated its very essence.   No one has the right to assume such a totally ubiquitously naked world. They failed to give us the keys for choosing what, when, with whom, how. They lost the trust of is users’, breaching such basic privacy issues to such an extent is outrageous. No matter how its leaders will apologize for the privacy breach and bullying forcing of the service and allude it to their being novices in the social sphere (is that so?  Do they really not fully understand the market they came to serve or seeing us as means to an end was above all?) It does not matter – they have won their sit in the pantheon of corporate predators we should look out from.

Gmail is an email service. Capitalizing on my mailing list to allow Google to create an active social network on my back without my consent or active optioning is a digital rip off; entangling us, users, in impossible cross options, so that no matter what you do, somehow leaves your private information open and searchable, is a faux pas much more than any other communication platform, because many of us use other Google applications to manage digital life as a commodity. Google Inside has turned into an omnivore that coarsely invades every ounce of privacy and selection criteria we may have. It not only holds us captive, but strips us naked in the town square.

It is inconceivable that we will have to look for ways to protect ourselves from companies who are supposed to provide us service for our own good. Can a “no shame” scale based titan culture abolish all the basic axioms of relations between providers and users and settle for lip service?

This may be the last straw to show how acutely a paradigm shift is needed:

• No commercial corporate, acting for its own capital gain, should own my data or have the ability to manipulate or expose it unsolicited.
• No commercial entity should arbitrarily and unilaterally dictate what additional offerings become integrated to the services and what their consequences are to me – and force me to struggle to undo what they decided for me should be automatically activated.
• The only person that is allowed to have the keys to my personal data and the segregations I want to make about my interactions is me.
• Ownership of my data, my visibility and my sharing handles should be at my sole control.

Too much demands a context filter as a protection means

From our point of view – this entire saturated social environment is becoming exhausting. Too much diversification, parallel platforms to manage, social duplications.   I can get lost  in the multi management and so can my privacy, jeapordising also sensitivity to  the privacy of the people in my social sphere.

 Less networks with more meaning seems the natural next step. Less is more. Absolutely. Less with meaning is even more.  To me meaning spells context or relevance. When everything is searchable, context becomes a compass that leads the relationship overflow.

The context of what I communicate about and with whom, or the personal relevance of what is being communicated to me – that is the decisive noise selector in the avalanche of web sociality. Contextivity is humanizing. I am in the center and my dynamic personal context is a guiding principle for a new level of conversations. It turns 6 degrees of separation into 6 degrees of connectedness. Once context based interactions’ keys are established, the delivery platform is less important.

This is why context is the next Holy Grail that technology titans will hunt for. I, the user, want a single place (doesn’t have to be a server – can very well reside in the Cloud) where all my info, connections, personal stuff (photos, books, social networks, profiles) are stored and I can manage that.

However, mastering contextual personalization must be in the hands of the only one who should know all about me in order to draw my context – and that is me! Assuming that not all people are techno savvy to mange that, companies that will be establish to handle my profile derivatives on my behalf should be strictly liable  like banks and credit card companies that manage my financial assets and as such are bound to me  and my privacy under strict regulations.

A higher level of manageability will come to be when communities of interest, devoid from financial imperialistic considerations, will become “users’ data bankers” of users’ profiles’ data repositories on their behalf, to assure cleanliness  transparency and inclusion of users’ in all the food chains created on top of their data.

 A catch.

It is not in any provider’s interest to allow me that. Would you voluntarily hand over the chicken coop with the golden eggs? It is all the more reason why context keys must remain in our hands. Our personal context is our asset to expose or share at our will, with the keys in our hands.

We must cry out and ban anti web culture activity that disregards us as the purpose core of the services we consume.

It is up to us – if we all harness bottom up our demands and the way we want it, our voice can serve to help corporates’ leaders and policy to make the right decisions that will not alienate us and will harness a win-win trust and loyalty based modus vivendi between all participants in the food chains. To empower it, an icentered paradigm shift is needed that will establish cleaner meaning based interactions.

The increasing trust in business can be connected to the rising transparency and social responsibility that organizations embraced as part of their corporate identity.

In media, on the other hand, rise of social media as a targeting platform for marketers is shaking the inherent trust we have in our social sphere.  We trust our friends and peers because they are supposed to be devoid of personal gain in their recommendations – clean, transparent p2p natural flow, reciprocal in value.

I tend to share the doubts about the accuracy of the numbers in this trust barometer, and also believe that the level of trust from friends and peers depends on more complex  factors  than reflected in the ways the questions were built. At the same time there is no doubt that the rise of the value of the social web for marketers, the growing share of social marketing in the marketing mix of companies and the open revenue based  facilitation of the social platforms to allow marketing, targeting and advertising activity, shake our automatic trust.  

Once marketers tap into our social spheres, aiming to build profits and reputation for their brands, and take on a cloak of authenticity to capture our attention, we feel manipulated and recoil. When the major social networks compete on becoming targetable communication platforms, we users, lose our town square and become more suspicious.  

So, basically, although in the attention economy recommendations from friends are much more than just attention grabbers, surfing above the noise, even people from our social sphere can’t be automatically classified as trust agents in today’s reality where:

A. My social sphere (to me a trusted more intimate personal circle) is being targeted by marketers as social media to manipulate for their profits, sometimes even with explicit incentives, and other times through technological means that are not transparent to me.

B. In an era where you may have hundreds of acquaintances, formerly known as friends, in your social network (or several of them), without any distinction of the level of proximity, intimate acquaintance, or at least the framework or context of acquaintance – being on someone’s social graph doesn’t automatically turn this person into a trust agent.

Therefore I believe that the keys are context and relevance. Trust is amorphic, subjective, non tangible. It stems from a whole subjective set of attributes, values, connotations and beliefs regarding a person, a situation, a recommendation. It establishes a level of credibility to the recommending personal friends that external sources cannot assess.

The 2 folded context/relevance around an interaction is a very strong determinant for a level of trust. The context of the recommending person to me within my social graph, levels of proximity, common interaction grounds. With it comes an attitude to the relevance of the person in my social sphere to the recommendation, the product/service and how that offering might be good for me. The personal context in which these elements are related to me and the offering, enhance my trust.

Context empowers  trust, enhances it by creating a relevance based degree of connectedness that exterior marketers cannot be aware of. 

The economics of the social web enable marketers to exploit our social sphere for their marketing purposes. Transparency is doubtful, the social platforms we use empower it and these food chains woven around us leave us outside the reward circle.

Contextonomics, the economics of context, on the other hand, cannot be easily manipulated in that way. This currency of the attention economy has a very strong subjective element inherently woven into it. It calls for explicit cooperation.

The value of the personal context around an informative transaction is something that only the parties involved can assess, as a measure of value and trust. Marketers depend on us and our explicit participation. It demands a higher level of transparency, of willing participation – and therefore entitled to a reward – a transparent food chain, between willing participants, for the benefit and reward of all parties involved.

Is privacy dead? That’s a long  and old debate. Has anything fundamental changed?

Stowe Boyd challenges traditional definitions of publicy and privacy and claims that because of the fundamental difference between the physical and virtual worlds, we cannot translate physical world notions of privacy into the virtual world, where interactions are only time and not place related. Because of new definitions of publicy  in the new decade, privacy will disappear.

I beg to differ.

The web has added a new dimension to our interactions. Technologies and platforms empower its etheric nature  to become an extension of the physical world with communication ubiquity almost a natural reality.  Today, you don’t need to be physically somewhere in order to be there. Phone calls, video conferencing, camera enhanced chats, emails, blogs, tweets….  Empower your presence in other than its physical manifestations.

As the web increasingly becomes our natural habitat, as individuals we have the same rights to disclose at our will information about ourselves.  It has nothing to do with our physical presence. As an increasing part of our interactions is web borne, rules, practices, codes of conduct and dos and don’t , apply to our feeling of well being, safety, privacy security.

It is individual.

The notion of a private home can be equaled on the web to a private self, the right to individually decide if and to what extent open or close the  personal information tap. Just as in the physical world I can and should  feel anxious about the way in which I can be monitored and traced by surveillance cameras and tracking of my whereabouts through my cellular device, so I can and should be worried about the ways in which I am monitored and targeted online unknowingly and without my consent.

My information IS my property. Look at the billions$ industries that evolve around online informations. There is hardly today any aspect that does not have an online arm as a commercial entity and with means of communications.

Geo-spatial of the physical and temporal aspects of the virtual are not criteria by which my personal data can and should be compromised. There is a lot about gender, age-group, ethnicity… that is obvious in the physical world once someone looks at you and can be easily concealed or distorted online – but as a human being it does not make me less entitled to have the keys in my hands as to  how much I open the door, to whom and under what circumstances.

Privacy infringement is mostly about profitability, brand power struggles and business hegemony. Old battles fought now  in new waters.  Corporates’ interests in our private information travel freely between the physical and virtual worlds. When consentual supply is not enough for the growing demand for our data, private information piracy, in the name of quality of service, supposedly for our own good, is not legitimate and should not be  encouraged or taken as a lesser evil, online or offline.

The new frontier  for this battle is now our virtual social spheres – virtual social habitats to which they want to tap into, wherever we are, eager  for our info and use us, many times without us even being aware , for their marketing purposes.

The augmented sociality, as Stowe Boyd calls it, enables us to remain faceless in the social sphere, and so our interactions remain faceless. He claims that

Those raised in this brave new world are already living in a cultural context based on publicy, and therefore they are running afoul of social conventions based on privacy. Publicy says that each self exists in a particular social context, and all such contracts are independent.

I see the expression of the self in the virtual world differently. As it is about people, the individually personal context in which we interact within our social spheres, is what humanizes the virtual publicy. I believe that each of us is the sum total of all our interactions, not in a particular social context, but as part of a totally harmonized webbing presence. We are Itoms in a people’s grid. As such it gives us the right to completely cloak, openly share all or partially expose as per relevance to a certain interaction or social thread.

No doubt the digital natives, born into a web based reality have different attitudes and views than boomers who are a product of physical world concepts, but the borders of private sharing and public displaying remain a very personal decision. An interesting survey conducted among 2500 youngsters about their privacy concerns in their interactions in social networks indicated that private may be extended, in their eyes, from a private self, to the boundaries of that social sphere, but within that perimeter, they have privacy concerns that put clear boundaries between virtual privacy and publicy.

To top that, the web is not just about generations x, y,z. Today, for the first time in history, there are more older people than younger, and with life longevity, for many years to come, digital natives and digital immigrants, importing to the web different world views and exposure norms, will live side by side, equal citizens in the virtual space, and all should have accessibility to publicy and privacy practices that suit each of them individually.

Once you refute the assumption that specific social norms applicable online or offline must gain the consent of a significant majority to become a legitimate life practice, and embrace an attitude that regards each individual’s equal prerogatives to decide for herself the spectrum of her privacy boundaries, there is no blurring or confusion.

The technological capabilities of cross referencing private information about me  and what I share with my friends from various social spheres I am present at, data mining from commercial sites, public sector databases, can have privacy implications in the real world, as  civilians and as people in a free society.

The fluxing of the notions of publicy and privacy and legitimization  of breaches of privacy norms in the name of a new virtual publicy, are dangerous, because they can lead to anarchy with blurred boundaries between virtual and physical, and the implications can be far reaching.

It is a reversal of a 23 years old advertising  policy that has become a tradition and almost a part of the Super Bowl fabric, where millions used to wait to see  what  will Pepsi  come up with for the broadcast.   The corporate has decided to switch its advertising strategy and replace $20 million worth of 30 seconds ads with a social media web based campaign.

In 2010 Pepsi is going to be starting a new campaign called “The Pepsi Refresh Project”, where money  will be given to communities to help refresh them. This time it’s not about giving them Pepsi to drink, but helping  build up communities, or help communities built around good causes, and need extra money to pull them off from tough times.

The Pepsi Refresh Project website will become a community gathering place where people  can submit projects they want Pepsi to sponsor , and visitors to the site will vote on the projects they feel deserve to receive the money.  $20million is allocated for this project.

From  a traditional advertising point of view, this move  can be conceived  risky  for Pepsi, breaking a years’ long life style brand image building,  especially at the time when carbonated soft drinks  have been in decline during the last several years, and the biggest drop in consumption is among teens.

 But instead of pondering what potential damage is Pepsico causing   its brand,  dropping all its Super Bowl budget and not participating in its traditional TV based marketing platform, this move is  a brave decision to tap into the hottest web lifestyle trends and associate its brand identity with good causes.

Pepsico is building a multilayered cause -based marketing campaign, harnessing in this move several key factors to create a new brand identity for Pepsi and contributing to its corporate image as a responsible company, with high social awareness and a sense of purpose that exceeds its brands’ performance.

Harnessing a do good community structure for the infrastructure of The Pepsi Refresh Project, taps on the several of web 2.0 and the social web trends of its target market:

• Harnessing a community of people around a good cause in a community structure  capitalizes on
  •  Giving a people a sense of purpose and social capital in giving their voice for a worthy cause
  •  Becoming a valuable source for social do good
  • Tapping to a central web trend of not only talking  to people in their gathering places but taking an active initiating part in building one;
•  Connecting the Pepsi brand with social values, involvement in community life and a do good life style, and not just
•  individual hedonistic life style of  fun and being easy going
• Connecting the Pepsi brand with a vibrant beat of web lifestyle through  communities, social networks and the internet as a central gathering place
• Harnessing the power of we are smarter than we  in building a community power in the decision process of where to allocate money

Harnessing a do good campaign through communities that  will be built around a bigger lifestyle object or cause, a passion that harnesses people, is a reflection of an emerging zeitgeist that marks a dominant trend for the web and the physical world alike.

A variety of recent trend predictions for the social web see an evolution in the making – but no big breakthroughs. To sample just a few:

Axel Scultze presents an interesting prediction for the social web 2010. The outstanding trends he foresees are:

• Twitter will become the leading news system
• Advertising will flood the social space
• LinkedIn will grow significantly
• Social business will thrive as more businesses will enter the social web
• IT departments will open up to social web and adapt the new processes needed for opening up
• Social media marketing will use social media differently
• Social mobility will enhance distributed enterprises and new working models
• Exposure of social graph information will cause some loss members due to privacy concerns
• Corporates will monitor social networks to listen to the customer’s voice in social networks to fine tune offerings
• Social networks will converge with other applications, media and platforms
• Gaming industry will have a stronger presence on the social  web
• Gadgets and add -ons will be developed and used for social applications to enhance communications
• Search will include geo aspects and will include relations
• Groups, communities will not consolidate but will strengthen in impact

He concludes by speaking about the need for earth shattering innovations to manage relations, but assumes that won’t happen in 2010.

David Armano points at 6 social media trends for 2010:

• Filtering will make social media less sociall
• Social business will beef up
• Corporations will look to scale their social business activities and will create incentives for social participation
• Companies will develop social media policies
• Social media will go mobile as users and workers will want to be part of their social sphere
• Sharing no longer means e-mail
  Jennifer Leggio concentrated her 2010 predictions around the question will social media reach ubiquity?  And asked over 30 people from her social media network their opinion on this question.

A variety of views. Fascinating.

 Joel Postman , foresees in 5 social media predictions for 2010 foresses that:

• Augmented reality applications will become mainstream
• Location-Based Applications Will Dissolve Into General Social Networks
• Enterprise Social Software Applications Will Become Commonplace
• More Social Media Regulation Will Follow the FTC’s October Endorsement Guides
• Social Search Will Shake Out, and the Search Metaphor Will Change.

All of them look at the social web from the point of view of the system or from that of corporate who want to use it to reach a goal, as Brad Ward compares it to  a horse race.

To take to a higher scale, beyond next years’ predictions, Jeremaiah Owyang, when he was still at Forrester, wrote a very interesting analysis on where the future of the social web.  He looks at the future of the social web from the point of view of the system.

“…If you can’t see where this is headed, I’ll tell you: all of what we’re doing from our clicks, queries, wall posts and tweets is teaching the ’system’. In the long run we’re creating a massive global computer, an artificial intelligence, and someday, a thinking being.

When the system will reach a stage that it learns about our behaviors, preferences, relations… When such a system’s automation becomes a holy grail, we users should be very afraid – no,  Panic Stricken.

What exactly is that system? Who owns it? How much does it know about me? Is it transparent? Is it all in my consent?  Who owns all this knowledge about me?

When considering an intelligent web, the first thing we need to guarantee is that this web is ours, the people who comprise the people’s grid.  Anything short of a user-owned-web there is no guarantee of who will end up serving whom and what giant wars will evolve over the hegemony of all this.

Adrian Chan ponders on the future of the social web  and examines the system from a user centric prism that looks at my past interactions, forming a social centric prism that learns from my social usage patterns and my interactions with my social sphere.

It still assumes some top down external management that combines several aspects of learning – and as such – raises the same apprehensions.

The future of the web from an Icentered point of view – a people’s grid

The next evolutionary stage of the social web will exceed systems’ learning and will take the human side of the web – us, its users, as the anchor point. From an Icentered point of view, the future of the social web is about the people that comprise it, each one of us, as a member in the people’s grid. It will create a social web that harnesses personal context to add meaning to the communications.

As such my social sphere is all about me.

 I am an Itom in a people’s grid.

With me at its center, my context is the anchor point through which I interact with my social sphere. Taking a holistic approach I am complex, dynamic, holistic, me all across and therefore exceeds the current closed boundaries of social networks.  It means that  I will no longer have to actively sift for relevant friends from a multitude of accumulated social network contacts and actively take care of portability between communities.

Same is true to all others.  All Itom will create  a people’s  grid. Relations and conversations will be contextualized.   It will turn six degrees of separation into a context based social graph of connectedness, both within my social sphere and in its extended perimeters. So that I can communicate with my social spheres through a contextual anchor that ties us ad-hoc to that communication,  regardless of network, place and time.

It will assume:

• Portability and harmonization of my context across disjoint networks,
• Adaptivity to my usage patterns across platforms and devices
• Proactive privacy management of my social relations
• Ad hoc context based sharing around an interaction
• Active participation in business models and food chains around me and my social sphere