In marketing, advertising, and many communications professions, we talk about channel-neutrality, channel-agnosticism, and multi-channel approaches to work. The point of these approaches is to be less TV-centric, or more idea focused. But recently, I’m convinced that the equation of the internet/interactive with TV/radio/print as a channel is a fundamental mistake.
A good place to start, and a recent one, comes from Steven Johnson’s TIME cover piece on Twitter. It captures a fundamental dynamic about internet/interactive that separates it from other channels:
Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we’ve jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.
In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it’s doing to us. It’s what we’re doing to it.
(Italics added)
This highlights a key thing about the internet/web/interactive that makes it subtly, but fundamentally and absolutely, different from TV/radio/print: users and its usage changes it and determines its ever-evolving shape.
William Gibson has a great line “that the street finds its own uses for things”. It applies mostly to digital technologies — sets of functionalities with some content — which can be adapted from its original purpose to a better, more appropriate one. All you can do with a TV is turn it on, change the channel, adjust the volume. All you can with print is absorb it or ignore it. Radio? Same thing: listen/don’t listen, change the channel. You have very little impact on its shape and its use doesn’t change.
With the internet we constantly encounter a mix of content, functionality, and the ability to adapt it. Any time a user encounters functionality on the web or even on a computer, more likely than not s/he is also being invited to create new uses for it. If there is no invitation to co-create at one location, there is more than likely a place where users are already creating/mashing/editing/trashing/hacking the content. In the rare instances where there isn’t already a location, a user can quickly acquire a domain and in less than ten minutes have a presence on the web and a set of tools for distributing that content and allowing others to interact with it.
The same holds even more true for applications and functionality. Any application that is meant for the general public is designed in such an open fashion that it constitutes a blank slate of creation rather than a form to be filled. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Paint, Flickr, Blogger, WordPress, Access — all of them ask the user what do you want to do? Users with buttoned-up minds might look at these technologies, scramble to find an analog analogue (cute huh?) and port behaviors over, but, increasingly, users who are comfortable with technology will ask “what can I do with this thing?” and immediately and unconsciously use it for their own ends.
This dynamic of people finding their own use for things is so prevalent that products are being designed and launched with the expectation of emergent adaptation by its users. The increasing prevalence of open APIs and services and toolkits, the simple but rich functionality of Flickr sets, collections, groups and tags, machinima in games, all point to co-creation of the media as being a part of the media’s conception, not an after-publication hack. The best example right now is Google Wave, a set of functionality many are excited about even though they don’t know exactly what it is or what they’ll do with it.
A channel is a groove, a fixed shape through which things flow from one point to another. The word’s origin and current usage straitjackets us into reductive, broadcast, one-way communication thinking (note the image of a straitjacket — you can and some might escape, but it’s painful and limited). Time for a new one.