About: CeBIT Webciety

We are at the beginning of putting together the conference ideas for the Webciety 2010, the open conference about business and society at CeBIT 2010. As the core notion of the “Webciety” is to talk about the implications of “the Internet” as the new social interaction layer for our society we are thinking about the trends and topics that are forming the developments during the next year.

For us there are four main aspects or views to be considered talking about the “society on the web” at the moment:

From a subject’s view: Me@Web - First of all the web is all about “me” on the web. It’s the subjective perspective of our engagement in the web. Everybody is talking about the digital natives as the prototype of the next generation of web users. Individuals that have grown up with the web and taking the web as granted for connecting, interacting and sharing with other people. It’s a place where we look for self-esteem through the gain of authority and good reputation. It’s the “statusphere” (Brian Solis) where we build our “personal brand” as a way to satisfy the need for “self-actualization”. But it’s also the sphere of too much information coming down on us and our attention - means our attention is becoming scarce and valuable that we need to protect and are willing to give to “things” that attract and engage us (aka the economics of attention) - and in return that gives us a new surounding to promote and brand ourselves.

The social view: Social Presence - As it is clear from the “Me@Web” the singularity of the websociety is the feeling of a “social presence” within this “virtual” surrounding. “Me is not alone” - that’s what we experience if we join social networks like Facebook or status-promoting networks like Twitter. The webciety is the “web of people” - a phrase of Tim Berners-Lee in contradiction to the “web of pages” the Internet was about during the “New Economy”. It’s a virtual gathering of family & friends, close or loose contacts, like-minded and not-so-like-minded persons - all documentated in each person’s social graph. As the “real world” has become a world of individuals (where family is more and more the closest we can get to in regards to our social environment) we are looking for “like-minded” people in the “long-tail” of the web. This is the fountainhead of our search for esteem, love and respect that is shaping the “attraction economy” and empowering this virtual social sphere. As “everybody wants to be someone’s darling” - this sphere is also “an environment in which the infections agents is operating” (M. Gladwell describing the “power of context” for social epidemics) - it’s the operating system for social memes for good and for bad.

The action view: Create & Share - The search for attraction and valuation of our attention shapes the action dimension of the websociety - that starts where the “gift economy” and the “barter economy” runs too short (aka “Share Economy” [only German, sorry!]). It introduces us to a world of “creating and sharing”, “giving and taking” and “refacturing and jointly using”. The rewards for “letting things loose” are brought to us by the “positive feedback” of the network - throughout the gained authority, the experienced social respect, the freely added value by third parties or the collective intelligence and actions that result from people taking part. And it’s all happening in realtime as there is always someone on the web creating something new or adding something to an excisting source. In the result the sharing principle and the “realtimeness” challenge the systems and structures of the world - as they have been known and functioned for so long.

The technological context view: Living in the cloud - As “Me” is interested in different things “Me” is not engaged in only one thing on the “web”. The web is an aggregation of different services we are using to interact and to “live on the web”. In total the web is an decentralized infrastructure that we are more or less experienced to use (which in return defines the challenge of our society not to let people outreached to this infrastructure). From a technological viewpoint we are more and more giving our “digital life” into the hands of digital services “out in the cloud” - which is a pattern for our personal way as well as it becomes a pattern for the provision of services that disaggregate and decentralize processes in the cloud. Dezentralization and abundance are the patterns for value-added service needs and market potentials. Providing the stabilty of the infrastructure of services is the overall challenge to the system.

So - that’s it - the compressed explanation of the webciety and its developing trends - as seen so far and projecting for 2010. What do you think about it? Is there anything missing on this? Does this explain what drives the society on the web aka webciety? Do you have examples and cases that support this view and should be discussed at Webciety 2010? We are looking forward to your remarks and feedback.