I have just returned from my morning walk with the dogs. Jay and I are are hobbling along, both with shot knees. But the sun is shining and there are signs that this long winter is drawing to a close. Nearly home, I am filled with the knowledge that every walk with Jay is precious. Snow, wind, rain or sun - soon would come the day when we will never do this ever again.
As we shuffled to the steps of the house, I asked myself "What do I really want?" Knowing for sure that all this will end - maybe sooner that I had ever hoped - "What do I really want?"
The answer came to me immediately. "I want to love and I want to be loved". "I want to be connected to people whom I love and who will love me for whom I am - not for who I should be but for whom I am. I want to be loved for my whole self."
So what have these fears and hopes of a middle-aged man got to do with Public Radio and TV?
I think everything.
Yes a lot of the value of the social web is that it can connect us to ideas, to music and to shows that we like. Yes, a lot of its value is that the web can ensure that we experience these things on our own terms and on our own time. But underneath all the content and the flexibility, is another connection.
As Luis and I talked, he reminded me that the web has the power to connect us to those special few in the entire world who are our match.
It was therefore a moment of great synchronicity that as I talked soon after with my friend Susan Meyer at WOSU about how she saw the future at WOSU, that we found ourselves talking about this.
Talking about the very nature of the human connections that I think only public radio and TV has the trust to facilitate. Talking about the nature of the human connections that we think are the centerpiece of the future for the system. Talking about really fulfilling "What we really want" rather than its proxies such as stuff and money.
Susan's mandate at WOSU is to build a community of relevance. Sounds good, even noble. You too may have such a mandate. But.....
How do you really "Facilitate Community?" How do you make it "Relevant?" Can you build community anyway? Is this a conceit? What would providing the tools to do this really mean? What would helping Ohio that has all sorts of complex economic social and structural problems mean? How could any of this help the future of the Station?
None of the questions offered any answers that helped. Susan was stumped. Most of us are asking these same questions and most of us are also stumped.
So as she wrestled in the blackness, like Beowulf with Grendel's mother, she started to feel the pull of an idea. We also all have been playing with this idea, but Susan has gone further than any of us that I know of. The idea is that the most important attribute that public TV and Radio have is Trust.
We all give lip-service to this. But how can this Trust become the key to the kingdom?
Susan sees it like this. The web is not only establishing the Long Tail of content - content will be infinite and there will be that special item item that captures my full attention. So in this world of infinite content, filtering and finding the special content for me is true value.
But it also sets up the Long Tail of human relationships as well. Her focus is becoming the human relationship part of the puzzle. For not only are we now exposed to infinite amounts of content that has to be filtered and found but also to infinite numbers of people. The same process of filtering and finding for content will have to apply for people as well. The content and the people are also entwined.
Making sense of this vast universe of content and people is where a lot of value can be found. But Susan goes further. The key is the people. Here is how she sees this.
Until now, we chose those we became close to by geography. Our blood families. The Kids in our class. The kids on our street. Our co-workers. The parents of our kids friends and so on. With such small pools, we get the best match that we can. For most of us, it's not that powerful a match. It's just the best we can have. Most are situational. When, we move we end it.
The one great social flash in our lives is when some of us go to university. Here we can meet people who are from a much larger pool. Here we get a closer match to the soul mates that we seek. Here we have the time to invest in each other. Here is where many make the long term friends that last for life. The whole environment of university is set up as a social space that makes this possible. Then sadly, it is all down hill. Our lives get busy. We move, we have kids, work overwhelms. Keeping attached to our university friends gets harder and harder. We also change. Small differences in values when we are 20 can become chasms when we are 50.
As we get older, we get more exposed to being deeply lonely. Even in many marriages, the "shoulds" and habits prevail. Who loves us for us? What does "us" mean? Susan told me that she sees us as complex beings who have many parts.
- We have our intellectual needs
- We have our emotional needs
- We have our physical needs
- We have our spiritual needs
- We have our values
"Us" is all of these. It is unlikely that we will find any ONE person who has a perfect match for us in all of these. It is unlikely that we will find any person who lives near us who has any of these matches. The local pool is just too small.
For those of us who are fortunate to go to university, the immense bump in the size of the pool - opens up the chances of getting much better matches than we had coped with at home. When we leave university, we also leave the Space that makes this work and we default into a life that progressively shuts us off from making these matches.
Until now.
When I started blogging in 2002 something special happened to me. I found myself back at Oxford as a freshman. Suddenly I was exposed to thousands of people. I began to make friends again as I had done nearly 40 years ago. Also like university, blogging and now Twitter allowed me to hang out with them as I had in college. Social software's mundane side is its main social power. It enables us to be students again and just hang out. So we have the time with each other to make the bonds real.
In 6 years, I have never been disappointed. When I finally meet in the flesh the person that I have grown to like and often to love online, the reality holds true.
The social web has the power to answer my opening question about what do I really want. It is filling my life with a group of people who give me what I need in all parts of my life.
As each special person cuts a facet in my being, more light enters and more light shines back out. As I look forward to the last part of my life, I no longer fear that I will be progressively more isolated. I feel the opposite. I see the last years of my life as being complete. I look forward with joy in my heart to deepening these special bonds that I am making with a special group of people.
But there is a problem with my story. I joined the social web when it was a village. There were maybe 60,000 of us back in 2002. As on PEI, we all "Knew" each other. There might have been no more than 2 degrees of separation between us all. How many are involved now? 150 million? How many in 10 years time - a billion?
The good news is that as the pool expands, the chances of each of us finding a perfect match in every segment that makes up our "Whole self"gets better. The bad news is that just as with content, there will be so much social noise out there that it may be difficult to find the match.
Susan's aha is this. If finding this match is what we really want.
If the web offers us the potential to makes these matches. Then Public
Radio and TV can use their greatest asset, Trust, to find a way of
helping us find each other. Finding our soul mates is the true work of
our lives. Our soul mates are also our filter for the rest of the world
as we experience it. In a world of infinite content, it will be my
friend's opinion that draws me to content not a digg rating. Content
will be special, a social object, when I share it with a real friend.
eBay's business model was built on Trust. It created an ecology where I can trust a stranger to do business with me. In so doing it opened up my world of Trust and hence economic opportunity from my small geographic circle to the world.
This is Susan's big idea. Public Radio and TV can be the "University" kind of place where we can safely find people that are a match and then deepen the match into friendship and then love.
So with this as context, where is she heading on a day to day basis? What is she doing? What can we all learn from this so far?
In part 2 we will find out
