I had a great conversation with Stowe at BlogON he wrote up some of what we talked about:
She suggested that we examine the asymmetries in relationships between individuals and businesses, and the likelihood that people will increasingly demand more symmetric relationships. As just one example, Kaliya maintains that people will want to retain information about their purchasing history, and not simply cede it to those businesses that we do business with. And, we may want to invert the normal course of business, based on this information. Imagine that I am traveling to San Francisco, and I could publish some version of my hotel rental history and interests through some as now unavailble solution (a mirror-image of eBay, perhaps?) that would allow hotels to publish bids to me for rooms. This general observation about increasing the symmetry in relationships through social technologies will be a springboard into related within-the-business topics, as well. I believe that social tools are inherently subversive, because they will disrupt established patterns of authority, and naturally push business toward acting as more democratic swarmocracies.
I can’t wait to talk about this more at the Symposium next month on the session “Is Business Ready For Social Software?”.
Leave a Reply