The cost of interactions between individuals has fallen to zero

This will be a short and to the point post. I have sought to explain how this blog is (kind of) orga­nized (see here). In the process, I have changed a bit the orga­ni­za­tion, and have now to com­ply with it :) So let me do a few posts that need to be there while not really bring­ing new con­tent, for the major­ity that is.

One of the fun­da­men­tal shifts brought by the emer­gence of the Inter­net as a com­mon tool used by indi­vid­u­als is that the costs of inter­ac­tion has fallen to zero. Umair Haque is one of the best ref­er­ences in this domain, and char­ac­ter­izes this new con­text as a world of “cheap, ubiq­ui­tous inter­ac­tions”, or said oth­er­wise a “hyper­con­nected” world.

At first through vir­tual rudi­men­tary Bulletin-Boards, the Inter­net has enabled increas­ingly effi­cient, cheap and deep inter­ac­tions. What started through mailing-lists or on ICQ, con­tin­ued on forums, and evolved into tools like Face­book, Dopplr, and an infi­nite vari­ety of means for indi­vid­u­als to find, con­nect, and inter­act with other indi­vid­u­als on nearly every pos­si­ble top­ics or col­lec­tive endeavors.

Of course, such a rad­i­cal shift had many con­se­quences. They range from rad­i­cal trans­parency to the decay of brands. You may think that this shift has occurred a long-time ago and has now being incor­po­rated in every domain: strat­egy, mar­ket­ing, etc. You would be right for the first point, but unfor­tu­nately quite wrong on the sec­ond. We’ll delve into this in sub­se­quent posts.

An obvi­ous illus­tra­tion would be how industrial-era orga­ni­za­tions are seiz­ing on these exist­ing tech­no­log­i­cal capa­bil­i­ties to improve their inter­nal effi­ciency. Most aren’t, and the unre­al­ized poten­tial is sim­ply mind-blowing. What is needed is a com­plete rethink­ing of orga­ni­za­tions as insti­tu­tions, with all dimen­sions rede­fined to take into account these shifts.

Umair has been bang­ing on all of this bril­liantly for sev­eral years now, if you are inter­ested in this topic (and I would argue that you should), he’s now blog­ging at Har­vard Busi­ness Pub­lish­ing.