Seth's hit form again with his recent post, Blended. Here are some snippets:
All the cues we use to figure out who’s real and who’s not appear to be fading away.It's great to hear this, as I sometimes wonder if I'm a lonely voice doubting so many marketing messages that hark back to the times when big was beautiful. (Like the current ads for Barclays Bank here in the UK, where they've hired big-name movie stars to tell us, in a very long winded and pretentious style, that Barclays is "Fluent in Finance", supported simply by a statistic to confirm only that Barclays is really, really big.)Years ago, there were “real” books and self-published books. The real books were worth buying and reading, the self-published were from vanity presses. Today, of course, some of the best stuff is self-published, whether as a book or a blog.
...Wearing a fine suit that fits you right was a great cue to others that you were successful and powerful and about to make something happen. Today, it’s just as likely that your potential partner is going to show up in a turtleneck and jeans.
...So, how do we tell the good from the bad? In a connected world where people don’t have letterhead, don’t wear suits (don’t even own suits) work out of tiny rented office suites (or their living room) have a simple website and buy only Adwords, have an answering machine not a PBX, don’t have a receptionist or a sculpture out front… in that world, how do we tell?
...Welcome to the blended times. The moment when the big and small, the impermanent and the permanent, the accepted and the ‘scammy’ meet. For a while, it’s going to be awfully confusing.
Of course, it would be easy to present confusion as a bad thing, but confusion is often a sign of some useful learning going on. We're learning - I hope - to make decisions more on the basis of our own judgements instead of relying on anonymous authority. It's a trend that's been running for a long time. I believe the way through is greater self-knowledge. It's not so much about deciding who to trust out there, it's more about figuring out how to trust ourselves.
Permalink
Email me
Facebook/Johnnie Moore
Linkedin/Johnnie Moore
Twitter/johnniemoore
Last.fm/johnniemoore
Del.icio.us/johnniemoore
Technorati/johnniemoore
MyBlogLog/JohnnieM
Blog/Johnnie Moore