iPlot

The Power of the Crowd, Revisited

Almost three years after Jeff Howe coined the term in his seminal article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing," and, ironically, in the very week 1,300 handpicked scientists, entrepreneurs, artists, and other thinkers, movers, and shakers assembled at the TED conference in Long Beach, the term "crowdsourcing" yielded more than one million search results on Google.

That's quite an accomplishment. Crowdsourcing is no longer an exclusive noun for a few in the know, it has become a verb for the crowd. Mom-and pop shops, SME's, and large corporations, receptionists, interns, middle managers, and CEOs – everyone's crowdsourcing these days and calling it so (even if they just ask a few friends to particpate in a mini-survey...).

Here's a little piece of nostalgia, THE crowdsourcing primer starring Jeff Howe:

Interestingly, the power of the crowd has not translated yet into the one realm whose decisions have arguably the biggest power to impact the crowd: politics. Since Obama's masterful use of social media helped restore trust in the American ideal of democracy, and his emphatic election fomented expectations of all-inclusive "power-to-the-people" digital governance, most of the attempts to establish an effective crowdsourced model of policy-making have fallen flat, at least so far. While the new US president has issued several executive orders introducing a new level of transparency to governance (on this topic, for a divergent opinion, it is worth reading Noah Feldman's "In Defense of Secrecy" essay in the NY Times Magazine), the mechanisms of collaborative political decision-making have yet to find a proper forum on the social web.

Sure, there are dozens of open forums that aggregate input and funnel it to the decision-makers – from Public Agenda to the rather light-hearted advertising riff "Dear Mr. President" (Pepsi). And on change.gov, there were Obama's invitation during the transition to submit input for his political agenda ("share your vision") as well as Tom Daschle's video responses to people's suggestions on healthcare ("citizen briefing book"). Perhaps the most ambitious project so far, however, was MySpace and Change.org's "Ideas for America" initiative. The site yielded 7,875 ideas by way of crowdsourcing and then distilled them down (through 675,943 votes) to ten ideas presented to the administration. Yet even though a blog is tracking the progress, it is somewhat unclear if and when the top ten ideas are actually becoming action items incorporated into national policy.

What's lacking is transparency when it matters. If all the crowdsourced ideas remain in a sand box without visible, actionable outcome, the enthusiasm to engage in politics (that was so salient during the presidential campaign) will slowly fade. Yet the missing link between input and outcome is not an easy task given the many legal and bureaucratic restrictions the administration is facing. For the time being, it is the experts who govern. The crowd will have to wait before its ideas will make a real difference in setting the national agenda.

Obama's Elf

Top Social Brands 2008

The question which brands are the best at “socializing” with their audiences is often asked, but rarely answered. Now Vitrue, a social media advertising solutions company, has attempted to capture a snapshot by releasing a Top Social Brands of 2008 list. The ranking is based on the Social Media Index (SMI), a measurement system the company launched to help track brands' share of voice on the social web. The Top 100, which range from the iPhone, CNN, and Disney at the top of the list, to Jet Blue, Puma, and Sears at the bottom of the list, were drawn from Vitrue's daily analysis of online conversations about more than 2,000 popular brands in blogs, social networks, microblogging services, and photo and video-sharing sites.

Strikingly missing is the Obama brand, arguably the most social brand in 2008, and there are other shortcomings. Vitrue’s press release states that some powerhouse technology brands were omitted from the list “as they provide the backbone of many social networks. While Google, Facebook and others are top brands, The Vitrue 100 is measuring companies that are using social technology, not those who are the technology.” You could argue, of course, that this distinction is rather arbitrary as the lines between technology and content are somewhat blurry and will continue to dissolve. Just take the iPhone as an example – it provides social technology, per Vitrue’s definition, but also uses it to socialize its own brand. The same applies to Amazon, CNN, the New York Times, and all other brands that constitute either latent or manifest social networks online.

Another pitfall is the narrow focus on volume and the lack of analysis as to what makes brands score higher. A high score may not always be attributed to an effective social web strategy. Brands may simply top the list because their sales have been successful and they are therefore much talked about (or, conversely, everyone’s talking about them because their sales are tanking). There is no metric for measuring if the conversations were largely positive, negative, or highly contested. As one commenter on Vitrue's blog poignantly remarks: “Looking at brands as something capturing share of voice online, without understanding the drivers of said volume, is kind of like looking at shadows on the cave wall and mistaking them for the truth?”

In any case, Vitrue’s list has started an interesting conversation and helped socialize its own brand.

Press Release: Announcing The Vitrue 100

Advertising Age: The Most Social Brands of 2008

The New Permanent Crisis of Marketing

When I had dinner with my former boss and mentor in Paris a few months ago (formerly vice president of marketing at a US-based enterprise software company, now CEO of a French enterprise software company), he shared a dirty little secret with me: “Forget about marketing,” he told me, “it doesn’t really matter. I spend 80 percent of my time on HR, finance, operations, and sales. Branding, marketing communications, PR – not my priorities.” A few weeks later I came across a working paper called “Getting Marketing Back in the Boardroom,” and seeing the title gave me chills. Provided that both the practitioner’s view and the academic analysis signify a larger trend prevalent in the industry, then the days of marketing as a corporate function might indeed be numbered.

Is marketing dead or does it just smell bad? The new swan song for marketers is ironic as it comes at a point when the power of marketing seems not only so obvious but also so ubiquitous: Marketing is around us 24/7, marketing paradigms have invaded our private lives (“personal branding,” “self-branding”), the blurring boundaries between marketers and consumers have led to the rise of the notion that “everyone is a marketer,” and the Americans elected a president whose marketing prowess is widely admired (Advertising Age even voted Barack Obama “Marketer of the Year 2008”). And marketers are complaining about losing influence?

It is not the first time someone is ringing the death knell for this profession. Marketing, almost by definition, finds itself in a permanent crisis. Marketers are accustomed to constantly justifying their efforts. Marketing is an easy target because its targets are constantly moving. Audiences are fickle and their beliefs elusive, and marketers’ tools are easily outdated. As in the media business, marketers’ wins from the past are old news. What worked yesterday can be wrong tomorrow. Moreover, the lack of a formalized set of rules (as it exists for, say, accounting) makes the discipline prone to advice from all kinds of want-to-be experts from near and far. When so much of a profession is based on knowledge (episteme) and not craft (techne), there will always be those who believe they know more (or know-it-all, for that matter).

Marketing has traditionally been closely scrutinized from other corporate functions, particularly sales, not the least because of the inverse proportional ratio between the visibility of its efforts and the intricacy of quantifying their impact. Even in the heyday of marketing, when it was considered the flagship function in most companies and the fastest track for executives to be groomed to become the next CEO, chief marketing officers (CMOs) found themselves on hot seat. From the late 1990s to 2004, Starbucks appointed a new marketing head five times in seven years, and Coca-Cola changed its CMO four times in six years. This trend is mirrored globally: In a recent CMO survey by the Economist, 63 percent of survey respondents said that the global marketing head at their companies had served for less than three years. The average tenure of CMOs at US companies has shrunk to just 16 months.

But something is different this time around. While marketers have always been under scrutiny for what they do – they are now also being scrutinized for what they are.

A number of voices question the marketer's role today. McKinsey Quarterly believes that marketing executives are grappling with the new social media environment, arguing that “many chief marketers still have narrowly defined roles that emphasize advertising, brand management, and market research.” And even marketing guru Seth Godin asks whether “your marketing is out of sync.”

It looks as if marketing needs some serious marketing. Conferences that seek to redefine (and thus strengthen) marketing's role are burgeoning: The American Marketing Association offers seminars such as “Beyond Marketing 2.0: Harnessing the Power of Social Media for Marketing Campaign Results,” Forrester's Marketing Forum 2008 heralds "engagement" as the profession's "new imperative for success," and the (humbly titled) THE Conference on Marketing aspires to be the penultimate forum for marketing leaders who “seek certainty in experimental times.”

Pundits warn that this new crisis of confidence may be existential and usher in the inevitable demise of marketing as a corporate function. Today’s CEOs are more and more frequently selected from candidates who have proven their value by rising through the ranks of finance, operations, or sales. Marketing is perceived as “soft,” as the consolation prize for sales people who didn’t quite advance far enough in their own field to rise to the top.

There is growing concern among marketers about losing influence, as many strategically important aspects of marketing are increasingly distributed across other functions in organizations. A recent CMO survey co-sponsored by the American Marketing Association and the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University indicates that many tasks traditionally ascribed to marketing are no longer primary responsibilities of marketers. While marketers in the surveyed organizations oversee positioning (86%), advertising (92%), promotion (86%), marketing research (86%), competitive intelligence (71%), and market entry (67%), more strategic responsibilities such as new products (48%), market selection (48%), customer relationship management (49%), innovation (36%), pricing (22%), distribution (13%), and customer service (9.5%) have moved to other departments. Even more tellingly, only in six percent of firms marketing is considered to be responsible for stock market performance.

Diana Derval, professor of marketing at the French business school ESSEC and author of the book “Wait Marketing,” mocks marketers as a nostalgic class: “The only reason marketing still exists is because of the big lobby power of its professional organizations, especially in the advertising industry,” she told me. Derval argues that marketing is a science and not an art, and makes a passionately cold-hearted case against the “myth of marketing genius.” She contends that most marketing dollars are squandered by “experimental” marketing efforts that fail to scientifically segment and target their audiences. Her skepticism poses some rather disturbing questions for marketers: If marketing is a science, who still needs marketers? Will marketing soon be taken over by non-marketers?

Marketing is indeed in an existential crisis as it faces unprecedented challenges to its conventions. But I would argue that it is accompanied by new, unprecedented opportunities. Companies have to radically rethink how they do marketing – marketing can no longer be viewed as a collection of programs, but instead as way of behaving in a networked economy of “market communities.” The industry has reached a turning point that presents a unique launch pad for marketing to reinvent itself – or to paraphrase German filmmaker Herbert Achternbusch: “You don’t have a chance so use it!”

To be continued...

Obama Inc. – Web Activism for Profit

[Photo by David Reece]

A few months after Barack Obama’s historic election, and a couple of weeks after the release of Barry Libert’s and Rick Faulk’s book Obama Inc. (and, of course, Obama's inauguration), the first start-ups are popping up that directly apply some of the widely heralded business lessons emerging from the innovative campaign. The fact that most of these lessons lie in the marketing domain supports the view I’ve expressed earlier and on numerous occasions: 1) Marketing will (again) become the number one change agent in business, 2) when it follows the new rules of “marketing with meaning,” that is, marketing which (simply put) consistently creates added social value – not as an afterthought but a sine qua non. While marketing has always been the art of turning friends into customers and customers into friends, it is now the art of finding, befriending, and “activating” the like-minded for a common cause, for the common good, for profit. Marketing, as the “voice” of business, is THE interface in a time when interface is everything. Marketing is the software. And software drives the value of products.

A recent example of this kind of Obama Inc. start-up, San Francisco-based firm Virgance, was featured in the Economist this week, and the article indicates that social impact in an activism 2.0 world is shifting from a welcome side benefit to an integral component in the business models of Internet entrepreneurs. The new kids on the web have internalized the lessons from the Obama campaign, and now they want to make a difference, too – and money. The Economist describes Virgance’s model as “for-profit-activism.” Named after a plot device in Star Wars, the company aims to support social causes through a multi-pronged campaign platform that resembles the way Obama for America mobilized its supporters, and it typically consists of four core elements: a web-empowered volunteer network, a presence on Facebook, a team of paid bloggers to promote the campaigns, and YouTube viral videos. Among the first Virgance-supported campaigns are 1BOG (“one block off the grid” – aiming to convince homeowners to switch to solar energy), Carrotmobs (public contests that incentivize retailers to become green), and Lend Me Some Sugar (based on the Facebook application that gives users virtual sugar cubes for donations to a cause of their choice).

Virgance is not the first for-profit-do-gooder of course; there have been plenty of others whose business model combines bottom line thinking with social value: the Economist, for example, puts Virgance in a line with Project RED. But Virgance is more like Facebook Causes. It adopts the forces of “Here Comes Everybody” and builds its entire business on a social web platform, embracing the principles of open-source, mass collaboration, and transparency: “If a for-profit company did the type of work that non-profits often do, but did it more efficiently, would people trust it the same way they trust non-profits?” the Virgance web site describes the company’s ambitious mission. ”What if everything the company did was completely transparent? What if it was open source? If we can create this kind of company, and succeed, how many other companies would follow our example? Along the way, could we change the face of the business world itself?”

Does that language sound familiar? The Obamapreneurs are adept at turning their campaigns into movements. Clearly, the Obamanization of business – both in terms of substance and style – has arrived in reality, and we will see more Obama Inc.’s in 2009.

On February 27-28, IESE Business School will gather entrepreneurs, scientists, foundations, and corporations at its annual student-run Doing Good and Doing Well conference in Barcelona. It’ll be interesting to see how the Obama gem will make its way into the more old-school world of CSR (corporate social responsibility).

Marketing with Meaning: Starbucks' "I'm In" Campaign

In my recent blog post about the "Chief Meaning Officer" I suggested that "Only brands that give more than they take will be able to create sustained brand loyalty." Starbucks' "I'm In" campaign is a great example of a brand living up to this new concept: On the day after President Obama's inauguration, the coffee chain will be launching a major marketing initiative that encourages latte lovers to visit soup kitchens or otherwise commit to giving back. Between January 21 and 25, Starbucks customers who promise to do five hours of community service during 2009 will get a pledge card and a free cup of coffee at their local Starbucks store.

Starbucks' campaign is supported by Hands On Network, the nation's largest volunteer organization, and tied into the national call to service by incoming President Obama: "Everyone has heard loud and clear that this is a time to act, and what Starbucks is doing is breaking down the barriers of how to connect with your local community," says Starbucks spokeswoman Lisa Passe.

The campaign provides a blueprint for marketing with meaning and presents the quintessential win-win-win situation: The embattled coffee chain will reinvigorate its grassroots image and underscore its ties to the local community; consumers are recognized in their desire to do something meaningful and are provided with an effective and user-friendly platform to take immediate action; and – last but not least – the brand-facilitated volunteering benefits the common good.

The design of the "I'm In" campaign exhibits the key characteristics of marketing with meaning (see the work in progress chart below):

SOCIAL: The campaign helps the community but also builds one itself – offline and online (Facebook, etc.). Through their pledges consumers can connect with like-minded people, make new friends, and take collective action. This provides them with a sense of belonging and identity, social recognition and impact: "Let's get to work together!"

PERSONAL: Like Obama's fundraising campaign, Starbucks relies on micro-contributions (of time, in this case) that are feasible and fully customizable for the volunteers. To reach its goal of a combined one million pledged hours of community service, the coffee chain plans to sell the five-hour commitment as something anyone can do with just 25 minutes every month. The Pledge5 website gives consumers a list of convenient volunteer opportunities, and the consumers determine individually how exactly they want to be "in."

STORYTELLING: The campaign is cleverly timed with the inauguration week, as well as the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday which the president-elect suggested be celebrated through acts of service, and it hijacks some of the attention that is directed towards the big event on Tuesday. Participants become part of a greater narrative that echoes the memorable lines of JFK's inauguration speech: "Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country." "I'm In" weaves together a historic moment in the face of a national crisis of historical proportions, the consumer "power of one," grassroots activism, and the resurrection of a once proud American brand. That the campaign not only helps America but also Starbucks, is ok and "makes sense" in the context of the campaign narrative. The story transcends the brand.

DISRUPTIVE: The campaign challenges conventional advertising and will be a surprise for many consumers – something different and new that is immediately relevant for them. In addition, the campaign's signage disrupts the typical Starbucks store experience, and customers may even feel some peer pressure at the point-of-sale (especially when they come in groups) to commit to the program.

RESPONSIBLE: The campaign leverages both the Starbucks brand and the inauguration event to attract maximum attention to a cause on the national stage. Honoring its customers' desire to do good, Starbucks has implemented a powerful platform that offers personal recognition, a sense of community, and appropriate tools to prompt action, converting even those into community volunteers who would maybe not pledge their commitment without the push of a branded contest at the point-of-sale. Starbucks acts as the catalyst, and the campaign creates societal value far beyond business.

What marketers can learn from the Starbucks campaign: With production capabilities and financial assets off-shored and out-sourced, brands are ever more important as the only remaining indispensable value of a company. Brands are assets in the public domain; brands are social funds. The creation of brand equity is a cooperative act based on the values that you share with your customers.

Inauguration Immersion

It is only consequent that coverage of the eagerly awaited inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States on Tuesday is as crowdsourced, people-powered, and mashed-up as the campaign which got us this (once) improbable President in the first place. And it comes as no surprise that it is CNN, arguably the most innovative player among the big news networks, which is extending the experimental and experiential flair that has been a hallmark of Obamaesque politics 2.0 to the big day itself.

CNN has already demonstrated its ambition to embrace social media with its bold use of Twitter and iReport, the co-opted citizen journalism video site (well, let’s disregard the silly holographs for a moment). As part of its inauguration coverage, CNN will now partner with Microsoft Live Labs to launch a special micro-site called “The Moment” that offers visitors a photosynthed view of the historic event, combining snapshots of citizens with professional footage into an immersive 3D experience: “We’ll take your photos from every angle, combine them with CNN's professional shots, and produce what we hope will be an amazing experience that will be shown live on CNN.” Anyone with a digital camera can participate and take part in recording history. In addition to the Microsoft Photosynth and “The Moment” sites, all of the photos will also be shared via CNN’s iReport.

Photosynth allows a series of two-dimensional pictures to be interpolated into a three-dimensional representation of a moment in time. The more angles and photos, the more complete the rendering. The girth of photos from the inauguration will be particularly well-suited, given that there will be millions of images from thousands of different vantage points.

CNN “The Moment”

Also see this TED Talk with Blaise Aguera y Arcas (Microsoft Live Labs) about Photosynth:

The Business Leader 2009: Chief Meaning Officer

2009 will be a year of major uncertainty. The doom and gloom of the economic downturn, the deterioration of mass markets, the pervasiveness of the digital lifestyle, a host of explosive political conflicts, and the fragmentation of traditional societal institutions are causing anxiety and propel a new search for simplicity and non-economic value systems.

Consumption-driven wealth and status are being replaced by identity, belonging, and a strong desire to contribute and do something "meaningful" rather than just acquire things. Trust and reputation are no longer enablers for the exchange of goods, services, and information, they are replacing them. Values are the new value. Meaning is succeeding experience and customer satisfaction. "The job of leadership today is not just to make money. It's to make meaning," writes management consultant John Hagel. Out: Bottom-line-pragmatists and financial wizards. In: philosophers and ethicists.

This new cultural climate presents a historic opportunity for brands to transform themselves into arbiters of meaning. Becoming Chief Meaning Officers, business leaders must move beyond simply connecting products and customers with the goal to facilitate transactions – they must now create "meaning" through actions and interactions. When your brand is a vector, your base becomes a movement – that's what we learned from Barack Obama's campaign.

In 2009, we will see more examples of "meaningful marketing" and businesses generating value that goes beyond just meeting consumers' needs. This will imply several profound paradigm shifts: essence instead of luxury, free sharing instead of monetized scarcity, radical transparency instead of brand control, authenticity instead of image, empathy instead of focus groups, conversations instead of messaging, collaboration instead of dissemination. A "meaning surplus" will become imperative: Only brands that give more than they take will be able to create sustained brand loyalty.

We're Still Moving

My colleague Sam Martin posted this great preview of our upcoming design mind issue on "Motion:"

"I used to do a lot of traveling. First it was to see the graves of my literary heroes like Yeats (Sligo, Ireland) and Keats (Rome) and then it became something of a sight seeing tour – you know, a more traditional traipse to museums, temples, and historic and natural wonders.

Eventually, though, I traveled just to get away – to see how far away I could get, both literally and figuratively. I wanted to feel the distance, and I wanted to become completely removed from what I’d always known, to really step outside my own culture and experience what it was like to live in Sydney, Nepal, Thailand, or Honduras. 

It was a long journey. All told, it took me seven years before I could comfortably accept that it was time to stop moving around the world and start moving at home (we don’t ever stop moving). During that time, I saw a lot and met a lot of people, but one of the most gratifying elements of my travels was the movement. There were times – a lot of times – in which I didn’t want to experience any more culture, or see another temple, or sit on another beach. I just wanted to move. So I’d get on a bus or boat or train and I’d leave just to be leaving, just to be moving.

With the upcoming issue of design mind (due out January 22nd), we wanted to capture this notion of movement in as many ways possible. People, ideas, and technologies move for many different reasons, and motion itself isn’t always what it seems. Our cover artist, French photographer Denis Darzacq, wanted to document the downfall of a generation of Parisians in his photo essay, La Chute, which translates to “The Fall.” And David Hoffer points out in his upcoming article, “Slow Innovation,” that new ideas may ricochet around the culture like pin balls but the ideas that really last move more like molasses in winter.

Also, what are we missing if we move so fast? Tjeerd Hoek explains the job of designing the spaces between moments. And what can we do if we can’t stop moving? frog President Doreen Lorenzo writes a touching essay about Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder, in which she discusses her son’s successful bout with the diagnosis, in an article  called “The Unique Brain: The link between ADHD and creativity is turning a problem into a gift.”

Of course, travel itself is many different things for different people. I plane hopped for pleasure, but my experience was nothing like the travelers in our feature story “Confessions of Extreme Air Travelers,” some of whom spend more than 300 days a year working the security lines and angling for the exit row seat (they have it down pat, by the way).

It’s also fair to ask about the auto industry. What will become of it? Our designers have their opinions on how we drive in an article entitled “Driver Experience Design.” Most auto innovations have come under the hood, but we think it’s time they get in the cockpit.

The farthest away I ever felt on my travels was Perth, Australia, and the farthest away from home I ever felt was, ironically, in Canada. But some of my fondest memories are of the transit between those places, when I abandon my expectations and stopped checking the train schedules – those times when I gave myself over to the passing of time and to the pure, comforting feeling you get when you can’t be anywhere else.

Look for design mind issue 9, Motion, in bookstores and for sale on this website in the new year. Until then, happy travels."

Small New World of Micro: Short Tales and the End of Big Ideas

The world is small. Art has known this for centuries and embraced a tradition that goes all the way back to Zen: the ability to reduce the complexity of the world into small things and short forms, geared towards niche audiences. Poets, novelists, sculptors, painters, and composers have always had an affinity for the beauty of small things and short forms -- sonnets; Cycladic figurines; La Rochefoucauld's Maximes; the two-and-a-half minutes of Webern's Five Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 10; photomicrography; Very Small Buildings in architecture; or the Japanese haiku. All these artifacts are tiny in scale, short in duration, and excessively modest in the claims they make on our attention. They occupy very little time or space and imprint themselves only lightly on the human senses -- like a stinging ray of light that illuminates hearts and minds for the blink of an eye and celebrates the presence of absence.

A particularly moving example is Hemingway's super-short tale "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." The loquacious laconic of Hemingway's micro-story has now been given a new congenial forum with the emergence of micro-blogging -- an obvious match. New York Times writer Matt Richtel is writing a "Twiller," a murder mystery story in 140-character increments starring hookers, killers, and (surprise!) Barack Obama (more about him later). Other micro-story attempts on Twitter include Small Places, Slice, novelsin3lines, GoodCaptain, Twittories (a "Twiller" wiki), and Copyblogger's Twitter writing contest from earlier this year. Moreover, there are off-Twitter programs such as Wired Magazine's Very Short Story collection from 2006 (that featured six-word stories by renowned futurists and science fiction writers), mobile phone novels (so called "keitai shousetus," big in Japan), Nokia's (Wieden + Kennedy's) ad campaign "Somebody Else's Phone," Shortfolio (a blog that publishes stories with less than 500 words), Facebook application Just Three Words, and Brave New Fiction, a web site that helps writers compose entire stories by writing one 140-character line every day. Baby steps towards "War and Peace." And this is just the top of a whole long tail of short tales…

For (micro-) novelists, structural constraints (which, as we all know, fuel creativity) may result in "saying more with less," but how do you express big ideas such as, say, philosophical treatises, in micro-formats? That seems more of a challenge -- although one could argue that "what cannot be twittered, must remain in silence" (to paraphrase Ars Technica's cute paraphrasing of Wittgenstein).

This raises a bigger question: What if, on a philosophical level, the need for conveying big ideas is on the decline? What if the short tale is replacing the grand old narrative and in fact remains the only appropriate format in a small world that creates a growing number of small ideas in the absence of the big one(s)? Has the "end of history" (Fukuyama) bred the beginning of our stories? Are Twitter novels (and other micro-formats) perhaps the manifestation of a new plural, a new relativism that is not only salient in the fragmentation of media outlets ("Global Voices" instead of "Voice of America") but also the intellectual discourse itself? Or do they rather represent an activation and visualization of a plurality that has been latent anyway?

In a riveting BBC radio talk (listen to the full recording below), TED curator Chris Anderson (whose conference's mission is to promote "Ideas Worth Spreading") and philosopher and writer Alain de Botton recently discussed whether "the age of big ideas is over." De Botton opined that "I share the nostalgia for big ideas, but I'm also weary of them to some extent. I think that part of the problem of a big idea, as it's sometimes defined in the media, is that it has a certain simplicity and naivety to it. Many of the best ideas are really quite secular and quite small and have to do with very small but very important improvements to certain areas of life: an aspect of how to teach mass, a side of how you improve insulation in a building. These are not necessarily things that will get people out in the street, but they are significant ideas nevertheless."

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But what about Obama? Wasn't his entire platform built on "big ideas?" Doesn’t his election contradict de Botton or at least suggest that big ideas will enjoy a renaissance? De Botton offers a nuanced answer to this: "He didn’t say 'I've got one big idea.' He said 'We can make a change.' And I think that’s the right way to do it. If you say you've got one big idea, and that idea somehow comes on stock as one big idea normally does, then you're in trouble. Much better to say we can find inspiration and we can make a change, and then look for the smaller ones."

Hemingway on Obama: "Big challenges, many ideas, little time."