iPlot

Multimedia 2.0: From Paid Media to Earned Media to Owned Media and Back

Marketers face three types of media as channels of interaction with their audiences: paid media, earned media, and owned media. We know that in today's hyper-relational, atomized micro-markets, paid media's effect is somewhat limited. The days of broadcasting one-way messages via mass media are gone. Traditional advertising is struggling to cut through the clutter in an economy in which attention is the scarcest resource. Most ads are ignored or perceived as spam.

Earned media, on the other hand, has the merit of third-party credibility, and it reaches people when they are opted in and value the information. Media coverage in the right publications is still the single most effective tool to raise brand awareness. But what are the right publications? The big media juggernauts are ailing, and their authority is increasingly undercut by social media whose vibrancy and dialogic nature has turned static information into a constantly evolving conversation. Blogs, social networks, file-sharing sites, and micro-blogging services have reached the critical mass needed to dominate the mainstream agenda. The timeliness of Twitter, the quintessential conversational medium, makes it a direct competitor to traditional news outlets (which is why Umar Haique suggests the New York Times should buy it). Just ask yourself: Would you go to the NY Times, CNN, or to Twitter if a disaster hit the US?

The stark difference between traditional media and social media is that the former provide original content whereas the latter provide an open forum for content from third parties. This has given rise to the notion that everyone is a media channel, and the rise of owned media. With paid media being largely ineffective and earned media facing the growing irrelevance of traditional media in face of burgeoning social media, brands pursue the avenue of becoming media companies in their own right. Bypassing traditional media channels, they either set up their own TV channels, print publications (corporate publishing), or blog networks (McKinsey's What Matters is a recent example), or they actively participate in the social web conversation, shaping and following the meanderings of the status update economy.

Owned media alone, however, is no longer a differentiator when most consumer and enterprise brands have their proprietary media channels in place. No matter how fragmented the new media landscape will look, there will still be a hierarchy based on authority of voice, and there will be winners and losers. Brands still need to find the right balance between talking and being talked about, and they still have to distinguish themselves from others by having a unique voice and perspective.

Smart marketers realize this and embrace a branded content distribution model that spans all three types of media: By producing compelling proprietary content (owned media), they attract the attention of traditional media and extend it to social media (earned media), and can then amplify the exposure via advertising if needed (paid media). Only this three-pronged media approach works. Multimedia, in this sense, does not only mean a richness of media formats (video, text, audio), it means the combined use of multiple types of media to yield maximum brand exposure through sustained cross-media conversations.

@SXSW: Branded Conversations / Some Quick Thoughts on the Past, Present, and Future of Twitter

Someone blogged that SXSW Interactive is just like the Internet itself – disjointed, decentralized, scattered, fast, aggressive, random, fragmented, and so on. In fact, the main commonality between the two may be that the number of attributes to describe them is infinite. Like the Internet, the annual tech conference in Austin is an echo chamber of an echo chamber, a place where original thought and commentary get mixed up and mashed up in a highly self-referential meta-conversation.

That was already the case before Twitter entered the scene at SXSW two years ago but the micro-blogging service has certainly amplified the effect. It was both comical and frightening to see the uber-individualistic geeksters at SXSW captivated by the invisible rules of an ostentatious behavioral uniformity: Within one mile of the convention center you could observe the strange ritual of groups of people standing or sitting together, chained to their iPhones, twittering instead of talking: “#SXSW. Twittering about SXSW.” The real conversation was often limited to a quick “What’s your name?” or “Where’s the next party?” just to have some input for the next tweet. It is indeed a Read-Write generation that is coming of age in the wake of an all-dominant present, with no particular loyalty to the past and maybe not even an interest in the future (see Peggy Orenstein’s recent piece on “Growing Up on Facebook” in the NY Times Magazine).

Yet the rise of the social digerati is unstoppable. New data by Nielsen Online shows that social networking sites (which encompass social networks and blogs by Nielsen’s definition) are experiencing growth rates of twice as much as any of the main destination sites (search, portals, PC software sites, and email). The time spent on social networks and blogging sites is growing at more than three times the rate of overall Internet growth. Furthermore, social networks are gaining traction among new audiences. On Facebook in particular, “the greatest growth... has come from people aged 35-49 years (+24.1 million). Furthermore, Facebook has added almost twice as many 50-64 year old visitors (+13.6 million) than it has added under 18 year old visitors (+7.3 million).”

Of all the social networks, Twitter may well be the most pervasive broad- and narrowcasting channel, propelled by an ever-growing base of users. Every day more sophisticated Twitter business models are popping up that move the service closer into the hands of a mainstream audience: charity campaigns such as Twestival and Tweetsgiving (Robert Fabricant pointed out that there is a natural synergy between micro-blogging and micro-donating), as well as San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom’s efforts to use Twitter as an official channel for city-wide emergency communications are just two of them. And when even Jon Stewart features Twitter and all major publications run how-to guides, this seems to be a clear sign that Twitter is entering the mainstream.

But is it really? First of all, let’s remember that it took the service, despite all the hype, two years to reach today’s level of attention. And the adoption is primarily happening in the US. Even the Internet population of Germany (40 million), the third largest economy in the world, is still lagging: Twitter has only 27,000 registered German users at this point. Let’s also put Twitter usage in context of the overall digital footprint: Twitter has 11 million registered users and attracted seven million unique visitors in February, which represents a stunning 1,382 percent growth since last year. The total Internet user base, however, consists of 1.4 billion users. The most widely used data application on the planet is SMS text messaging: three billion people actively use it. And compared to Facebook’s 175 million users, Twitter’s numbers are miniscule. In other words: The whole world may be talking about Twitter, but the whole world is not yet talking on it. The next few months will tell us if Twitter is over-hyped or if we’re witnessing a revolution – and if so, if the revolution will eat itself.

That’s exactly the concern of Twine founder Nova Spivack who might speak for many other early Twitter adopters when he warns of the implications of Twitter’s massive growth and the increasing amount of uncontrolled abundance. Let alone potential security vulnerabilities, he flags “Mainstream Adoption” (“Tens of millions of new users are going to flood into the service. It is going to fill up with mainstream consumers. Many of them won't have a clue how to use Twitter”) and “Notifications Galore” (“Every service on the Web is going to rush to pump notifications and invites into Twitter”) as the two main threats. In his opinion, “There is soon going to be vastly more content in Twitter, and too much of it will be noise.” This raises an important question: Will Twitter remain an open-ended, self-organized conversation or will we see the emergence of more filters to make sense (and money) of all this chatter? Or, more philosophically put: Can we handle abundance (the entire Twitterverse) without any scarcity (the filter/curator)?

I’d say we need some scarcity, some reduction of choices. Spivack suggests introducing adding meta-data to save Twitter from its very eloquence, and there is definitely demand for organizing the ‘entropic chaos’ that characterizes the never-ending Twitter conversation. This could be an opportunity not only for Twitter itself but also third-party brands acting as curators. So far, almost all Twitter apps either add value on the input side (Twitterphone, Twitterific), visualize the output (see Pepsi Co.'s Zeitgeist app), or combine both (Tweetdeck). But one dimension is underexploited: accessibility.

“Brand curators” – operating along the coordinates of organization (self-organization vs. curation) and timing (real-time vs. past) of Twitter content could offer just that: making Twitter more accessible. For example, they could provide vertical search feeds (in real-time) plus some additional context. Both could be embedded in a visually rich ‘landscape’ view that features ‘favorites’ (domain experts), most popular (re-tweeted) tweets, and “breaking tweets.” In addition, Twitter curators could compile past tweets within certain categories or topic areas, as editorialized search results. Or they could create some ‘artificial scarcity’ and offer programmed Twitter slots, limited in time and audience (Liz Kelly from Brilliant Ink told me recently about a one-hour panel of journalists on Twitter as just one example). The brand would act as a ‘human’ search filter, as a trusted authority that uncovers and organizes relevant tweets. This could be interesting for media companies or brands that are transforming into media companies.

It’s worth pointing out that this scenario is not identical with just a branded linear Twitter feed. What I’m envisioning is a bias to commentary instead of immediacy. Not just a stream of tweets – a handpicked collage of various adjacent Twitter formats (replies, direct messages, re-tweets, searches). Think of it as Tweetdeck for the more passive mainstream user who wants to read tweets rather than write them. First steps into this direction are Breaking Tweets, Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop, and especially MyAlltop, the recently launched customizable version of the news rack. Offering celebrity MyAlltop lists, the service provides a blue print for brands: it creates a dashboard that offers curated content, features star Twitterers and their recommendations, and highlights tweets by categories. MyAlltop demonstrates that the verticalization of the Twitterverse is of most value if it goes along with a presentation that is horizontal.

The biggest opportunity may be something more fundamental, and it may be one for Twitter itself: a public archive of tweets. Have you ever wondered where the huge volume of Twitter-generated content goes? Who owns all your tweets? Are you giving away your data or sharing it? How can you access it (besides going back chronologically through the search function)? Sure, Twitter keeps tweets and doesn't auto-delete them. You can also set up a LoudTwitter account to generate daily blog posts that contain all your tweets from the past 24 hours. Or you can use Tweetdumpr, which creates a .csv file with your last 250 tweets (it used to be the entire record; the fact that Twitter has limited it lately shows that it may have an interest in monetizing past tweets). But all of these services work only for your own tweets and are rather cumbersome. What I’d like to see is a public Twitter archive. There is value in storing and distributing old conversations, the “now” that’s long gone. Clearly, the totality of tweets represents a massive library of human thought that we need to preserve and make accessible. In the future, wouldn’t it be interesting to go back in time to rediscover the SXSW tweets from 2009? Memory is a vital aspect of all communications, a prerequisite of accountability – yes, one could even consider it a human right. With traditional media eventually locked out of the conversation, we need to maintain the ability to revisit past events (even if they were just communicative) – if not to rectify them so at least to reflect on them.

Or is there no need to remember – and we just go with the feed? Can meaning be self-organized – without scarcity, without historians, without interpreters? And are we producing any meaning at all, or is true what the Boston Globe pointed out: Just as technology is giving us the ability to amplify every word we utter we have nothing really meaningful to say? I guess none of these questions can be answered in 140 characters. Let me know what you think – but take your time.

The Art of Life in the Age of Digital Reproduction

While not a member of the Net Generation (the 88 million Millennials for whom social networking is a birthright) myself, I have many friends and co-workers who qualify, and I am constantly baffled by their ease and eagerness to narrow- and broadcast their lives through digital media in post-privacy openness. The audience size doesn't matter, it can be narrow or broad, but cast it must be, even if it is often mundane. And yet, it is one of the ironies of such "ego-casting" that the status updates, which become critical life signs, the activity metrics of one's public life, do not begin with "I" but mostly appear in third person on Facebook and Twitter and the likes. This is because all these outlets treat the amateur publisher as a dramatic person per se: "Anthony is happy." – "Tim is working on an economic stimulus plan." – "Sarah loves Tea Leaf Green." When the Net Geners aggregate their social media publishing output into one FriendFeed, the effect becomes fully obvious: here we have the constant flux, the permanent Now as manifest and yet as fragmented as it can be. "It ain't why, why, why, it just is," Van Morrison sang, and another famous Irish artist, James Joyce, based on the concluding free-flow monologue of his Ulysses, would probably agree with the inevitability of "the river of life" as a never-ending "stream of consciousness" that affirms nothing but the fact that one is alive: "Yes."

For the Net Geners, the stories of their lives become more important than the lives lived. It is not the experience itself, it is what they can tweet, blog, Flickr about it. An event has not happened if it is not being shared. The narrative of life is the narrative of life. Life is an ongoing drama that must be dramatized. Engagements announcements via Facebook relationship status changes, travel itineraries via Dopplr, rants via blogs, moods and emotions via Twitter, instant gratification via GPS apps – or all of that cross-posted and mutually amplified across different locations and time zones, onto desktop and handheld. The seamless and fully immersive conversation is an imminent act of self-branding – what you click is what you get.

A few months ago, Emily Gould, who had made herself a name as Digital Demise Cassandra with her exhibitionist account of web exhibitionism in the New York Times Magazine ("Exposed"), wrote a piece for Technology Review in which she sought to contrast new media author Clay Shirky with Walter Benjamin, two brilliant thinkers from different generations: a daunting task because the relationship is "complicated," as both of them would state on their respective Facebook pages. Gould used the bold juxtaposition to depict a fairly pessimistic picture of the Net Geners as a cohort of hyper-connected individuals who are ultimately blogging alone. In her eyes, Shirky is an Internet triumphalist who is far too optimistic about the social web's implications on our social lives: "You get the sense […] that he's somehow managed to avoid walking down any dark alleys, or staring too long at any piles of fetid garbage"

Tellingly, she finds Benjamin's seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, written in 1936, much more relevant for the assessment of today's "new age of technological reproducibility." Benjamin writes: "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. […] One might subsume the eliminated element in the term 'aura' and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art." Gould concludes that "Maybe, in the same way that Benjamin says the difference between "follow[ing] with the eye, while resting on a summer afternoon, a mountain range on the horizon" and experiencing that same mountain range at a remove (imagine a picture postcard) makes it harder to appreciate the real thing ('Gosh, this mountain is beautiful! Just like a postcard!'), social-media technologies are creating simulacra of social connection, facsimiles of friendship. By ignoring that difference, as Shirky mostly does, we keep moving heedlessly toward a future where the basic human social activities that these new technologies are modeled on – talking, being introduced to new people by friends – are threatened."

She misses the point though. While Benjamin rightly observed that the mechanical reproduction of a piece of art may lead to the decline of its 'aura,' the mechanisms of the social web propel the exact opposite: they grant a 24/7 continuum of time and space, an ever-lasting, ubiquitous (tele)presence that has perfected our ability to constantly produce 'aura' rather than destroying it. The web has democratized content, and art has made way for the art of life. When the Net Geners spill their beans through digital means, they are all about 'aura:' the allure of a life told in real-time, as a highly interactive application that turns all input instantly into output and renders the actual obsolete in favor of the staged, eventized, and narrated. Someone once said the US went directly from barbary to decadence without civilization. Similarly, one could say that the Net Geners go from experience directly to expression without reflection – it is indeed a read/write web. Context trumps content, and the appeal of social trumps everything.

Is that a negative? Who knows. What's certain is that Twitter, Facebook, and et al have inexorably altered the culture of human interaction. It will take future generations to craft a fair judgment – and ultimately, it may not even matter. In the meantime, it is helpful to assume that "Everything Bad Is Good for You" (Steven B. Johnson). Progress has no rear view mirror, and chances are you have no choice. If you want to have a life in this new "Age of Digital Reproduction," you better get your own social media platform in place.

Metromantics

Location matters. Black Swan-author Nassim Nicholas Taleb finds "living in big cities invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous encounters – you gain exposure to the envelope of serendipity." That's particularly true for romance. People move to big cities not to advance their careers, party, escape, disappear, be a star, and so on. The chick-flick fan that I am, I remember very well that candid line from Sex and the City (the movie): "I came to New York City to fall in love." Exactly. "Anyone who's predicting the decline of big cities has already met their spouse," writes Clay Shirky.

One of the most effective places for random but potentially life-defining encounters is the public intimacy of the subway. The underground is not only an object of affection but also its catalyst. As reported by The Australian, a recent study commissioned by the Paris Transport Authority ("L'Amour Mobile" – why studies in French sound better than poems in English is another topic) found out that the majority of Internet messages posted by Parisians seeking a stranger whose path they had crossed stemmed from a look, a smile, or a conversation on the Métro. More than 80 percent of the messages were from underground passengers, typically between 18 and 25 years old, and divided almost equally between men and women. They were often reading books or listening to iPods – activities that apparently unite passengers more than they isolate them.

"The Metro is without doubt the foremost producer of urban tales about falling in love," Frank Beau, the author of the study, commented. Mr. Beau further suggested that the physical proximity of passengers fueled romantic tension. The slightest contact – a glance, a word, a jacket brushing against your shoulder – becomes an "extraordinary experience," he said, adding that the seats by the doors were the best spot for romantic exchanges. Encounters in museums, parks, cafes or on the street were far less likely to produce passion.

A second study commissioned by public transportation executives in Paris showed that 12 percent of Parisians had begun a lasting relationship, as friends or lovers, with someone they met for the first time on the underground.

Despite Paris being the "city of love," one can probably find the same pattern on other underground systems: London, Berlin, Moscow, or Shanghai. The "Missed Connections" section on Craigslist is a popular compilation of frustrated amour in US metropolitan areas. In New York, the story of a romantic subway rider going many extra miles to find his subway acquaintance was a hit on local media outlets.

As The Australian suggests, companies should think about developing mobile web services to enable passengers to reconnect with a random encounter. Ultimately, of course, all this would be much easier if everyone just carried an ID tag (on an opt-in basis) – a Clear Card for Metromantics.

Ps. Frank Beau will discuss the findings of the studies at the LIFT conference in Geneva.

Monocle Launches Monocle Weekly: Small Talk, Big Issues

Yes, we live (again) in the "age of conversations." There is something reassuring about listening to smart people having cultured conversations. When I was young, I would listen for hours to music-free radio programming that sounded like black-and-white movies.

Today, Monocle Magazine brought some of that magic back by launching Monocle Weekly, a 30-minute audio podcast. Hosted by editor in chief Tyler Brûlé, the short-form show extends the publication's monthly print content by offering fresh angles on stories in current and past issues, discussions, previews, field reports, and interviews. The light conversations on serious issues are entertaining and informative, and the old-fashioned stereo split of voices evokes the coziness of good old vintage radio.

Highlights of the first issue include FT markets correspondent Rachel Morarjee revealing why 'under the mattress' has become a favorite place to keep your savings (at least in the UK), and philosopher Alain de Botton explaining why happiness will be more important than watching your salary in 2009: "There is no wealth but life, so concentrate on your portfolio of life, and not your portfolio of cash."

Well said. Although this may not be the most effective response to someone who just lost his or her job, the longing for new meaning in private and public life ("why exactly do we work?") will likely be an overarching theme in the forthcoming year. This presents a huge opportunity for brands of all kinds and industries: they are the arbiters of meaning.

Listen yourself: http://monocle.com/The-Monocle-Weekly/ (also available on iTunes)

The State of the Twittersphere (according to HubSpot)

When Twitter made its first big appearance (at SXSW Interactive in 2007), it was a relatively small community of techies and web 2.0 geeks. Now it's mainstream and keeps growing at an explosive rate.

HubSpot, the developer of Twitter Grader, just released its "State of the Twittersphere" report. The report reveals that an estimated 5,000-10,000 new Twitter accounts are opened every day. According to the study, Twitter appears to be most popular in major English-speaking cities. The top 5 Twitter cities are London, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

Also, not surprisingly, the Twittersphere has a long tail:

- Only 0.8 percent of all Twitter users have more than 1,000 followers.
- Five percent have more than 250 followers.
- 24 percent (the largest group) have between 11 and 25 followers.
- Three percent of Twitter users have ten or fewer followers.
- 22 percent have five or fewer followers.
- Nine percent of Twitter users follow no one at all.

Other interesting findings:

- Twitter is dominated by newer users: 70 percent of Twitter users joined in 2008.
- There is a strong correlation between the number of followers you have and the number of people you follow.
- The most popular days of the week to tweet are Wednesday and Thursday.

You can download the full report in PDF format and click here to tweet about the report.

Privacy Nostalgia

“For most of human history, people have lived in small tribes where everything they did was known by everyone they knew,” Dr. Malone said. “In some sense we’re becoming a global village. Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.”

(last line from an article on online privacy in today's New York Times)

We Feel Fine

We Feel Fine is “an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.” The site, created by Brooklyn-based artist Jonathan Harris and Stanford computational math professor and former Google employee Sep Kamvar, looks like exactly the result of these two minds combined: emotional data mining with a human touch and an artistic interface -- a particularly beautiful application of moodgraphics.

The site is driven by a huge database that browses the web for emotional expressions around the globe and maps them graphically: “Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases ‘I feel’ and ‘I am feeling.’ When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the ‘feeling’ expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.).”

The result is a recording of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 to 20,000 new feelings per day. Sounds Orwellian but it is actually pretty touching. Like the congenial PostSecret, We Feel Fine provides viewers with a voyeuristic act in mutual consent. Seeing other people’s feelings is emotional; seeing other people describe their feelings is comforting.

Since it launched in 2006, the site has been written up exhaustively. The Pop!Tech blog (hat tip) recently rediscovered it -- in the light of the strong collective emotions around Obama’s election and the rise of the new We Generation, “what we feel” is suddenly back on the map again.

Somebody Else's Phone: Would You Look Through It?

Somebody Else’s Phone: Would you Look Through It? If you found somebody else's phone, would you look through it? That’s a rhetorical question. Of course! Your phone is your life, at least if you’re under 25, and there’s nothing more interesting than the “Lives of Others.”

Wieden + Kennedy London translated the idea of “Cellular Oversharing” into a much gushed-about advertising campaign for Nokia. "Somebody else’s phone" depicts the lives of three twenty-something’s through their text messages, MMS, and pictures, and it essentially creates a new story format: the phone novel. Fusing scripted content with real life audience interaction, the campaign runs in ten different languages, following the characters’ evolving storylines through a 24/7 feed of content, across three time zones, over 6 weeks.

Nice idea although the Luon blog comments: “Sometimes it feels a bit like trying too hard. The advertising-tries-to-be-socially-smart’ thing, where it's not clear what is real and what is fake.” But that’s exactly the point. Fake authenticity -- I’ve already written about “Mad Men” on Twitter in this context -- is a burgeoning trend. Fake is fine as long as it feels real. We’ll see more of it in 2009.

Scarcity and Abundance: The Short Form and the Long Now

“Scarcity and Abundance” is the theme of this year’s Pop!Tech conference, and one can’t help but draw a parallel between the planet’s environmental resources and one of the most powerful capacities of its citizens: attention. Both are scarce. What is abundant, though, is the human need to communicate–and the vast number of channels a digital media society has for that purpose.

Something interesting is happening now that exposes the complex connection between these two scarce resources–nature and attention. With the emergence of micro-blogging services such as Twitter –- effectively filling the void between blogging and instant messaging -– a communication format is made scarce by design. Twitter allows users to post only Haiku-like short messages (140 characters or less) for their friends and followers. This “artificial scarcity” is a burgeoning marketing technique applied in other fields as well (from micro-dining to micro-brands to micro-literature to business-class only microjets to SMS to Radiohead’s “pay-as-you-will” release), but nowhere has it been more influential than with micro-blogging, which seems to have fostered an entirely new paradigm of human interaction. Twitter makes even blogging look antiquated; Wired in a recent article (“Kill Your Blog”) recommended blogging for “long-form content.” The regime of the short-form has gone mainstream.

 This trend implicates consequences for cognitive processes, and it points at what might be an important underlying dichotomy of our time. Let’s call it Twitter vs. Al Gore. With accelerated news cycles, attention spans shrinking, and communications fragmented into 140 character “tweets,” instant gratification and presence seem to have become the predominant paradigms of online interaction. This immediacy stands in stark contrast to the equally popular concept of sustainability, and a tension between the rise of the short form and the call for long-term thinking is inevitable.

Micro-blogging diversifies meaning into myriad atoms of communication, a hyper-targeted in-the-moment form of looking at the world by expressing it in real-time. Sustainable stewardship of nature’s scarce resources requires the exact opposite: a holistic, systemic view on the world, and big-picture thinking beyond instant gratification and self-actualization – both of which based on the insight that the “Future” will not happen if we only think about the “Now.” Philosophically speaking, aren’t speed-dating and sustainability diametrically opposed? And practically speaking, if we’re serious about sustainable solutions in housing, infrastructure, product design, and other areas, don’t we have to start with our day-to-day communications? If “Now is Gone” (Geoff Livingston) – how will we ever secure the “The Long Now” (Alexander Rose)?

Of course you could flip the argument and argue that imposing strict structural constraints on communications (as micro-blogging does) can help us recognize and responsibly deal with the scarcity of environmental resources. But that’s only half the truth. The irony is that the more sliced down the content, the more abundant the channels of communication; the shorter the attention span, the more abundant the volume of micro-formats. So how do we as digital citizens stay focused on the future under the tyranny of permanent distraction? How can we pay attention to the big issues, if attention is becoming an ever more scarce resource in a flood of abundant, ubiquitous micro-communications? Or can we perhaps find a way to utilize both scarcity of attention and abundance of communication for managing natural resources?

You may find these questions quite a stretch, but communications and behavioral change are naturally intertwined. Micro-communications vs. systemic thinking and instant gratification vs. sustainability present two daunting conflicts. If we believe it is paramount to find a more human balance between “scarcity and abundance,” we should start right there.