Since The Internet, What Has Changed?

// March 15th, 2010 // Uncategorized

From a discussion with Riges Younan of Peerlo, I started thinking about what’s really changed in the ten years since I started working in employer marketing. And as a result, I started looking, not at what the technology allowed us to do as vendors and marketers, but at how I think it’s changed our behaviour as a people.

When we first began using the internet as a forum for classified advertising, with sites like SEEK, we found that we could significantly reduce the time and cost of going to market for jobs, provided our audience knew how to deal with internet recruitment tactics. Companies had a basic site (some more complex, obviously, usually aligned with interest in the internet’s tools, like computers) but content published online was still paid. It was a niche media stream, like running one’s own private magazine. The global economy which exists online makes it easier for people to find work, and the searchable nature of the information made it easier for us to find data on nearly any subject. The problem became quality control. Ease of publishing led to a loss of focus on quality, and a perceived dip in value (after all, publishing online was easier than newspapers, etc, so didn’t receive the same respect from the business community)

Now, as we enter a web which allows people, not brands or identities, to create content which drastically affects our world view, we are caught in a difficult equation. There’s plenty to learn, but there’s no objectivity anymore. We are compelled to find our truths by aligning socially (using technology) with subsets of online communities who share our position, issue by issue, until we feel we have found our tribes.  So as a result, the voice of the common man has started to have more relevance than the voice of a company (which is almost universally perceived as evil, or at the least, self-validating online). We are becoming a community driven by opinion, seeking out validation in shared opinion. So how do we apply this to work, to love, to life?

The internet made us able to connect, to be ourselves online. However, in exposing us to the brilliance of unpublished minds, it also exposes the ignorance, bigotry, fear and subjectivity of our collective dark-side. The internet amplifies humanity, and we are now, more than ever, in a position to choose which side of our humanity we wish to feed with content. And in doing so, we inadvertently create an online profile which telegraphs our personality to the world at large. What we choose to interact with demonstrates our interests, our passions, the things we’ll stand up for. (Quick example – I read a blog post earlier and the factual, grammar and spelling errors were more distracting than the actual theme of the post. I found myself wanting to comment on the inaccuracies at the expense of adding value. Now, I can do nothing, or I can educate the author privately about how this kind of thing impacts personal reputation, or I can publicly point out flaws, or I can write a post of my own, or I can email the link to friends who will find actual value in the post and not pick out the errors. If this were ten years ago, I’d have read this in a newspaper, and probably just turned the page. The ability to interact breeds interaction, almost ad infinitum!)

As a community which facilitates an emotional connection (and regular reinvestment) between people and companies/communities, our challenge in the technologically-adept social landscape is to elevate the conversation from “skill-set  = job” to “person = community member, commercial asset and private citizen” in a way which adds value to our clients/employers, and lets us embrace our human capacity to socialise and grow with technology as a tool, not as a motivator. If we accept the premise that people prefer to do work they love for a company they like, with a salary that affords them comfort and ataraxia outside their professional life, then we take it upon ourselves to apply the internet’s capacity for connection to achieve these aims. People love to connect with people – the skill in our business, which previously was about facilitating the delivery of a skill-set to a company, is now about delivering a person, with all their public faults, social connections, opinions and history. Employment ceases to be about the simple equations of demand and supply for skills. It is now about personality and personal choice.

For me, it’s simple. The internet lets you talk about anything, with almost anyone. However, you must first free yourself from the idea that published content has legitimacy. When you get to the core, the internet is a tool for connecting people, and yet it hasn’t made them smarter, wiser, less judgemental or less prone to ridiculous mistakes. In fact, it’s probably done the reverse.