Nollind Whachell

Does the environment of the Web encourage these things?

• to play
• be curious (explore, research)
• to share
• be honest (transparent, truthful)
• to trust
• to listen
• to appreciate (equality)
• to rant

The following sentence is found in the final chapter of The Cluetrain Manifesto.

But if you think of yourself as a company, you’ve got much bigger worries. We strongly suggest you repeat the following mantra as often as possible until you feel better: “I am not a company. I am a human being.”

When I reread this, something “clicked” again inside of me. It is the same feeling I got when I read The Cluetrain Manifesto the first time. And yet, after these past few years nothing has seemed to change. Most companies still don’t seem human. Even more so, I’ve tried multiple times to start my own company and yet everytime I did so, it didn’t feel right. It felt like something was missing. I kept following the formula of what a “business” should do, yet it just didn’t feel right to me as a person. I think the greatest problem I kept having was that everytime I tried to create my own business it didn’t feel like it really represented me as a person. Instead it represented something entirely different that I didn’t like.

I really would love to have my own business. And yet I don’t think I can until I understand how I can best represent myself as a person instead of a business. I’m hoping that discovering these cultural values from the Web will bring me closer to discovering how I can run a business and yet still “feel” human.

Another question is that maybe if we want to evolve we need to start redefining what a business is then? Or maybe we need to find an entirely different word to use instead of company or business?

Just reread the last chapter of The Cluetrain Manifesto, specifically the very last paragraph of the book. This should have been the very first paragraph of the book.

Imagine a world where everyone was constantly learning, a world where what you wondered was more interesting than what you knew, and curiosity counted for more than certain knowledge. Imagine a world where what you gave away was more valuable than what you held back, where joy was not a dirty word, where play was not forbidden after your eleventh birthday. Imagine a world in which the business of business was to imagine worlds people might actually want to live in someday. Imagine a world created by the people, for the people not perishing from the earth forever. Yeah.

Imagine that.

This definitely gives hints as to what this new culture should be.

Another important question. How would a business operate differently if its culture matched that of the Web? If businesses should be leading by example, how should these businesses that are trying to promote blogging consulting services be operating themselves? Are these businesses pushing blogging consulting for other businesses really practicing what they preach?

I’ve been doing some thinking about what I said in my post below about the BBC interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, where I said “The Web is the culture of the world.” I immediately started wondering if the Web truly was our culture, what are its values then? Even more so, I started wondering if one could define these cultural values could people start using them to get more in synch with the changes that are happening in the world. In effect, my greatest question was if a business started following these cultural values, what would happen? Would it fail miserably or would it become incredibly successful? And of course if it became successful then wouldn’t it be the perfect example and role model for other businesses to follow who also want to change with the times. This is extremely important because the only way other businesses will get on board is if they can actually see the beneficial results that other companies are having. In other words, lead by example.

Thinking about Business Logs and other similar ventures trying to show businesses how blogging can help them, I thought I’d find the answer there about these cultural values. I didn’t. More than anything I kept hearing more about how the technology of blogs could help a business without much emphasis on the cultural change needed for blogging to actually work. There were hints about culture but they didn’t come up as much as I wanted them to.

Finally, I remembered about my talks with David Weinberger some years back and that reminded me of The Cluetrain Manifesto. Were these cultural values of the Web defined within it? After rereading some key chapters I discovered that, yes, they were but…not as evidently as I wanted them to be. I think the closest thing I found to a list of cultural values was a list in Chapter Five: The Hyperlinked Organization (pg 125) entitled The Character of the Web.

The Character of the Web

• Hyperlinked
• Decentralized
• Hypertime
• Open, direct access
• Rich data
• Broken
• Borderless

While these are definitely not what I would call the character traits of an individual, I still think they can lead to discovering and defining these cultural values that the Web is helping us to remember. That’s right. I honestly believe, as it was mentioned in The Cluetrain Manifesto, that these cultural values are nothing new. If anything, they have existed with us for thousands of years until only recently and with the proliferation of the Web we are once again rediscovering these values from our past. As I mentioned before, cultures influence people just as much people influence cultures. We are doing this on the Web by sharing stories and having conversations. In doing so we are not only passing on what is important to us individually but also what is important to us as a culture and people. It is cultural information that can influence and guide us into this future of change.

BBC News interviews Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web, about the Web today.

I feel that we need to individually work on putting good things on it, finding ways to protect ourselves from accidentally finding the bad stuff, and that at the end of the day, a lot of the problems of bad information out there, things that you don’t like, are problems with humanity.

This is humanity which is communicating over the web, just as it’s communicating over so many other different media. I think it’s a more complicated question we have to; first of all, make it a universal medium, and secondly we have to work to make sure that that it supports the sort of society that we want to build on top of it.

The Web is the culture of the world. Cultures not only influence the people within them but people in turn influence the culture themselves. The Web is what we have made it to be and it can be whatever we wish it to be. We are connecting to it everyday more than just electronically. In fact, over time we’ll realize more and more that everything around us, including each one of us, is connected more than we know.