The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

I've had a bit of time to play with better titles for these posts and seeing the results in search engine listings. Theories are forming and I'm preparing to lob things over to NextStage's researchers for them to study (just what they wanted, another research project).

My simple question has generated some very interesting (to me) conversations. One of my mentors called to chide me; of course our technology shapes our habits. One needs look no further than our house designs and bathroom habits to see this. I won't pursue this further in a blog post although you can ask an anthropologist and you'll get an earful.

It is distinctly accurate that humans have evolved their environment rather than being evolved by their environment to a greater degree than any other species on this planet. I think this has been true until recently. If one considers the environment as a whole as a single megaspecies (and I'm not offering up an alternative to the Gaia Hypothesis. At least I think I'm not) then the rules of co-evolution apply more aptly than the statement "humans have evolved their environment...".

I think these factors are very apparent in the evolution of web technologies and humans. People are learning to think the way search engines need humans to think in order to accurately produce results and search engines are evolving to better produce results based on how people query them.

What's interesting in this co-evolution is that there's a disrupter species involved and I'm not sure people are aware of it (heck, I don't know how many people think of the development of web technologies as examples of co-evolution in action).

A disrupter species is a species involved in the co-evolution that sometimes helps and sometimes hinders the process. In this case, the disrupter species are some web technologies themselves. For example, the use of video, audio, Web 2.0 and beyond, RIA, Rich Media, social media, ..., are attempts to make cyberspace as human-friendly as possible. They are distinct attempts to create an environment suited to how people do think, not how they need to think to get something done.

(And let's be honest, anybody who's had an education, especially higher education, has been trained in specific ways to think in order to get something done. If you studied immunology, you were trained how to think in order to get immunologic things done. If you studied astronomy, you were trained how to think in order to get astronomic things done)

This disrupter species is (I think) going to cause the evolution of some new species. The differentiator will be what kind of experience people want and how they're willing to participate in it.

I think the greater question is what's forcing the evolution and here "forcing" means "what's causing it to go in one direction over another?". For example, ice ages forced certain evolutionary changes to occur pantheticly.

What's forcing evolutionary change now are the people designing new web technologies. That's a little scary, don't you think?

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

Upcoming Conferences:

• IMedia Brand Summit on 9-12 Sept 07
• XChange on 20-21 Sept 07
• DC Emetrics Summit on 14-17 Oct '07
• Society for New Communications Research Annual Research Symposium & Awards Gala on 5-6 Dec 07 in Boston.