What is Google?
Fred W offers a nice quote from Jeff Jarvis about Google. Jarvis says that Google is the first “post media” company. Fred likes this, and I do too.
We needed media when costs made extended “dialogue” impractical. So we accepted more centralization information dissemination through media — errrr —- what’s the right word — let’s call it ”presentations”. But the fact that we have tolerated, and even become connoisseurs of such presentations, does not change the fact that dialogue still works where it is possible. The question now is how to extend the possibilibites of digital dialogue as a cultural norm. To do this, we need to ask what we get from dialogue that is better than presentation, and then rely on these values to create new digital tools. This has proved to be more difficult than was thought just a few years ago. But it is coming.
FOLLOW - A new word has emerged that captures some of the ideas discussed above. The word is “platform”. Platforms are what empower people to have dialogues. But how to build them? Well, reasonably bright people disagree on that. Check out the discusison from the Web 2.0 Summit, summarized at TechCrunch.