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JP recaps Cluetrain: we are human amidst the tech

Among the many presentations at 2gether08, the one that led to lots of “did you catch that  …” remarks  was JP Rangaswami talking about the Cluetrain Manifesto ten years on. At the event is seemed like a touchstone for our explorations of the relationships of people, technology, commerce and society. Now you can see JP here, introduced by Euan Semple.

JP is Managing Director of BT Data, and widely known for his insightful blogging as Confused of Calcutta. Cluetrain in the late 1990s set out a vision of how the Internet would transform relationships and communications without and within organisations. The Cluetrain website said:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.
These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

At 2gether08 JP suggested that Cluetrain was as much reminding us of what we had lost, as it was talking about the future. It was taking us back to a time before organisation and communication was dominated by command and control, and broadcast mode. It articulated what people were already feeling, and enabled them to say: it’s not just me … and I can get on the Cluetrain too.

JP identified five themes from Cluetrain:

1. people are human beings
2. people work in communities, and community extends beyond the walls of the firm
3. hypelinks subvert hierarchies … and so conversations can go laterally, not just up and down the ladder of control
4. conversations are richer with the new tools available, and firms have less capacity to control their employees and customers
5. people, in that context, have some power, and what is happening has a democratising influence.

JP also offered four themes for future exploration: governance of the Internet; consumers’ ability to aggregate their own information; identify; and intellectual property rights.

You can see the original Cluetrain site, and also read Cluetrain here.

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