TPPR was published on the business utility of blogs in the Letters Column of the Financial Times on 16 November. This letter was then picked up by Freelance News. Other commentary on the new media that may be of interest can be found at:

http://asithappens.tppr.info/journal/2007/10/21/working-the-facebook-system.html
http://asithappens.tppr.info/journal/2007/9/10/second-lifes-consequences.html
http://asithappens.tppr.info/journal/2007/11/2/on-sexual-honesty-web-20.html

It strikes us that there are two separate sets of project for analysts who want to go beyond exploring the technically possible and assess what is going to be commercially, socially and politically effective. It is their effectiveness and not their technical possibilities that will dictate where business opportunities within the new technologies will lie.

The first set of projects is the identification of micro-uses of web 2.0 that will enable current needs to be met and which will segment markets into niches with sufficient critical mass to hold real capital value.

The second analytical process (a very different set) is to predict how the availability of new tools will change how society is structured - and so the nature of individual and social needs and wants. 

This is the long term question about what new markets will arise - and how traditional businesses will need to adapt in the longer term. Above all, what sort of 'creative destruction' will we witness in the next cycle? 

Commentators often confuse the two sets of analysis but quick fix problem solutions within this cycle may not be enough for longevity of enterprise in the decades to come.

Our instinct is that we are about to shift radically away from 'market services' to the provision of 'public services' (much as we shifted from 'manufacturing' to 'market services' and from primary production to manufacturing production in previous long cycles). 

Raw materials are still required and they need to be made into things but the proportion of the economy devoted to these tasks has declined relatively in favour of services. Just as types of manufacturing displaced each other and then were displaced by services, so types of service will displace each other in the next cycle.

As for social change, our assumption is that the new technologies permit mass and individual wants (mostly, in fact, emotional needs and not invariably benign) to be satisfied far more easily and with diminishing customary and community constraints. 

The new technologies will accentuate emotion and cheapen reason just as, in a previous cultural cycle, reason was accentuated over faith by the technology of print. This is going to be a world where wants will over-master needs or will become confused or identified with needs. But a world where business no longer creates needs and wants as in the consumer era proper but has to meet demands that may be cultural, social and political as much as economic.

The political logic is for the public, as it becomes more demanding, to prefer 'guided democracy' that delivers results in preference to any form of politics that presents itself as democratic and yet rules incompetently or makes claims to some abstract legitimacy that no longer stands scrutiny except on a high emotional level.

It is not political authoritarianism but traditional liberal democracy that will be most challenged by a technology base that favours populism, quietism and anarchy in equal measure. Political skills are likely to be defined as effective to the degree to which they balance emotional appeal with actual service delivery. 

But all this is speculation ... and only the beginning of the journey.

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