Is e-culture social or anti-social?
Does E-culture isolate people and create bad habits or bring them together and generate pro-social trends?
This question is really a hard one. At first side, I would say it is a good social experience. E-culture connects people, building communities (forums, chats) around personal or professional interests. It offers you the opportunity to meet new people. Max had an interesting experience told on his post “Paris is blogging”. Just read it and you will understand that E-culture is not at all disconnected of the real world. It is quite the contrary. In the same way, it offers you new opportunities to find a job, like the webside Altaïde does (thanks again dear Max!).
More important perhaps, Internet reinforces links between people and gives them a new power: public interests groups become more and more powerful: Internet gives the way to people to express easily their point of view because of the principle of transparency.
Internet gives you the opportunity to save time, doing boring tasks in a short time (to fill the refrigerator, to pay the taxes, to pay the invoices, to check your bank account…). So you have more time to do interesting thing and to meet your friends! That is the benefits!
But on second thought, you can really wonder if Internet is not isolating people behind their computer. You can surf on the web without meeting anyone if you just collect information, buy things and download files. I know someone who is so frightened by the real world that he just live in the virtual world, being a virtual heroes in a virtual game. He has such a bad face and is so disconnected to the real world that he quite doesn’t go out of home!
But in fact, I think he has just psychological problems. If Internet did not exist, he would find another way to isolate himself…
So definitively, E-culture is pro-social, with the only but essential restriction that digital fracture really exists. Some people are out of the Internet system because they don’t have access to this technology. E-culture is not for all the inhabitants of the planet and we really have to make progress.
Characteristics of blogs
Since the beginning of these e-culture lessons, I use my blog to analyse the principles of the e-culture, discussing with other students and my teacher.
Let’s try now to see how the blog itself is characteristics of the e-culture, with the help of the analysis I have pointed before.
Blog express personal qualities which are essential for the experience of the E-culture
First of all, blogs are created to share with others our experiences For instance, with the blogs of the other students from the Celsa and our commun blog, we share our English lessons with people. Generosity is the main point. Blogs are on the web to be seen by others. Moreover, you can open many blogs for free, which is relay generous from the editor! Comments allow people to communicate with me, sharing their experience and points of view. They necessitate discipline, because a good blog is a blog you bring up to date. If you don’t, people are upset and they will never come back to your blog. You have to be patient, because to collect interesting information, you need to think of it and see what is really interesting to be put on your blog. You also need perseverance, because you progress by working, and each day your blog becomes better. You learn how to add pictures (I still have to focuse on this point!) how to write better. A bad time is alway the time the system is out of order and you have to republish your post ! (I still have a headache when I think of it!).
You need contemplation to explore the web. you spend time to see how people use it, what kind of new services and new technologies are provided, new ways of surfing to kill the bad habits!
Endless, analysis is essential too. You have to provide relevant comments to make your blog a reference for a community, even if it is a small one!
Blogs express the qualities of the E-culture
Blogs are also mirrors of the qualities of the E-culture we discussed before. Like all the web culture, blogs are inhabited by impermanence. Blogs change all the time, new blogs are created all the day long, other die, abandoned by their creator who create a new one in another place or are closed by the regulator.
To blog, you must keep an open mind. You have to be open to change the way you do things. For example, blogs add more and more RRS flow. So you have to make the effort to understand it and use it because that is just the way it is.
Of course, blogs are also transparent. Anybody can access to your blog because the is the principle of the Internet. But if most of the blogs are really open, some of them reduce their access, like Philippe did with his French blog dedicated to his job research. And you can also make the choice not to use your real identity, like I did. But why shouls we hide? I think I will use my real name in my future French blog, because I am no more afraid of it now.
Blogs are precious opportunities to learn things for curious people like bloggers are. If you are fond of cinema and addicted to the Festival de Cannes, blogs give you the opportunity to focus differently on the festival, if you are not among the privileged people authorised to access to the famous Festival.
Blogs are killer apps
Blogs outsource to the consumer. Each of us does a part of the job by himself, even when the kind of system you choose is not free! We open the blog and we register, we add contents without the help of anybody.
They ensure the continuity for the customer: when it is open, you still find a service behind, with tools to help you to do the job. They replace rude interfaces with learning interfaces: even if is is easier to create a website, it has noting in common with the creation of a blog! You can really do it easily.
Intracom Paris 2005
As a student involved in the e-culture world, I was for the first time invited to a three days seminar of reflection on the Intranet, Intracom Paris 2005, organized this week.
During three days, professionals of the Intranet met to share and exchange their experiences, to observe the reality and the tendencies of the Intranet. It was a unique occasion to have a look at the secrete side of the enterprise networks, when you are not one of their employees. Intranet, such as Internet, builds communities in the restricted area of the enterprise, to help people to work together. New technologies, new tools, new functionalities are always in progress and things change so fast! Impermanence is self evident. Beyond the technical relevance, the essential is to help people to use and to appropriate the Intranet.
This time, I could really see how important is the collaborative dimension of an Intranet, with logic trades, projects and ideas shared by a group of people, like Renault did recently with the creation of e-rooms. Speakers from Quebec gave a few explanations concerning their problematic. Maybe you know Quebec is really in advance in the sphere of the new technologies? It was really interesting and it helped me to be sure that it was a job I could be interested in after having completed my master degree.
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My motivation
As my English class is almost over, I think it is really time for me to focus on my motivation for this class! In fact, for this course like all the others, what motivates me is curiosity and open-mind. I also needed to learn new things because after six years spent in the same company, I must admit I had the feeling to go round in circle. I needed a new challenge and new knowledge.
As I work for a multimedia company, I already know new technologies are crucial in terms of evolution of communication practices. E-culture is a new area to explore but I needed a few keys to understand it. I am now on the road, at CELSA, and I learn day after day how to deal with the e-culture world to be more efficient in my job and to live in my time.
Because of its identity, Internet makes us share our experiences. And that is great! Blogs are really attractive, building communities and sharing knowledge. I will keep on writing a personal blog after the CELSA experience. I will also keep on being aware of new technologies and use of new media in the e-culture world.
E-culture and social responsibility
With the democratization of the Internet, nobody can hide anything anymore. We saw that transparency is a major quality of the Internet. Companies have to give explanations about their activities. New times are born: companies have a social and ethic responsibility.
Nike has been attacked for a few years concerning the conditions of work in its factories. Thierry talked already about this company in his blog. Last week, the company crossed a new step by publishing in its last corporate responsibility report the list of all the names and localizations of its contract factories. For the first time in the textile industry, a major actor reveals this kind of information and anybody can access to it by a click on its mouse. Consumers want to know how the clothes they buy are manufactured: they are not ready to pay for clothes manufactured by children or people working in bad conditions!
Nike discovers the benefits of transparency: such a behavior can help the company to improve its image. And it helps all the textile industry because other companies may follow this example. Moreover, consumers know the names of the contract factories and could also ask them for an explanation. E-culture is a positive dynamics!
Old culture and e-culture
Virtual exhibitions
With the Internet, you have the opportunity to discover an exhibition located in the real world, so far away from you that you could not access to without it. And you can visit it at anytime, even when the exhibition is finished. You visit, you learn more about the artist, it work, its environment to understand his motivations. In fact, even if you don’t see the concrete selected works, you learn more.
The web creates more than a reproduction: you can access to exhibitions which would be complicated or impossible to organise in the real world. Some of them are also especially created for the Internet media.
E-culture provides you new opportunities to access to culture.
Sony is now inside you…
Maybe you know that Sony has an important department of research called the SCL (Sony Computer Science Laboratory) based in Tokyo, Japan. A second division exists in Paris.
For your information, Sony has just deposited a patent on a technology (for the moment, it seems to be rather a concept) allowing the direct sending of data in the human brain, without any surgical act and without any implant in your brain.
This should make you feel sensations inside your body when you play a game or see a film.
So, should I keep an open mind and say “That’s great!” or can I feel really alarming the idea of losing control on my own body?
The twelve killer applications
A killer application is a new machine or a new program which is so useful that people adapt it.
1. Outsource to the customer
With the web, the customer becomes a kind of provider of services because he does most of the job by himself to get what he wants.
For example, if you want to buy a plane, you don’t need the help of anybody anymore. You can find all the information you need on the web, with many advises. Then you can buy a plane .
2. Cannibalize your markets
E-commerce offers the opportunity to buy things without moving from home. It is really a new channel to sell products and services. But sometimes, it can make the company lose parts of markets in its classical channel of distribution.
If you want to offer some flowers to someone, you don’t have to go the florist’s anymore. You just have to use a website like Interflora. And you have the choice, various prices and you can deliver it in four hours only! From six months, the sales dedicated to the network of the florists on the web increases regularly by 30%. But the traditional network of sales continues to decrease. So Interflora has started to group together the various shops of florists to be offensive and improve the service on its website.
3. Treat each customer as a market segment of one
A good example is provided by the websites of search for emploment. You have a personal area to manage your researches: creation and deposit of CV, management of the candidatures, alarm e-mails created with your criterions, storage of the letters of motivation, creation of short cuts to have a direct access to your favourite headings.
4. Create communities of value
On the web, people can exchange informations about their centres of interest, creating communities of value.
Forums and chats are favourable areas to the expression of these communities.
The forum of the website plongeur.com federates an important community of divers. It is the first forum dedicated to the world of diving in Europe and the third one in the world after two American websites. With a main forum and many others dedicatedts…), it is a really frien to particular topics (material, beginners, apnea, children and diving, good spodly place to discuss its passion.
5. Replace rude interfaces with learning interfaces Many services are available on theInternet to inform you and to save precious time without doing the queue.
For instance, if you need information about your medical expenses in France or if you just need a form, you just have to consult ameli.fr.
6. Ensure continuity for the customer, not yourself
Enterprises have to guarantee the continuity of their services to their clients.
When a company launches a new software, people can have problems to install it, to use it, and sometimes they need a few explanations about specific functionalities. They have already bought it but you have to provide theme a good quality of service if you want they keep on being your client! That is why the CRM (Customer Relationship mnagement) on the web is important and companies have to answer fast!
7. Give away as much information as you can
The Internet provides you much information and more often you don’t have to pay to get it. In return, people can also provide new contents for the web, like the wikipedia community does it.
8. Structure every transaction as a joint venture (partnership)
The industry of video games can illustrate the idea of the partnership between the Internet and its users. When the development of a big new game is quite finished, the company offers a few hardcore gamers the ability to test a beta version.
Those people are so fond of games that they really appreciate to be selected to test it. They discover the game before everybody! In exchange, they give many comments about the game, its quality, its functionalities, they contribute to optimise the game play and they find the bugs in the game for free! That is what happened recently with the new version of Warcraft saga World of WarCraft, a massively multiplayer online role playing game launched in February in Europe.
9. Treat your assets as liabilities
Internet changes the evaluation of assets. Assets can be physical objects, and the web offers you the opportunity to dematerialize them to reduce the costs. So assets should be in fact considered as liabilities. Photoways understood well this concept. The company proposes the on-line development of your pictures. So they don’t need real shops.
10. Destroy your value chain
Internet is a great opportunity for business because it helps companies to create new business models to maximize the creation of value while minimizing costs. Amazon understood well this concept. The company began in 1995 as an online book-selling company but has now branched off into many other areas, including DVDs, music CDs, computer software, video games, and more.
11. Manage innovation as a portfolio of options
The Internet forces you to innovate all the time. If you develop a killer application, you should think of adding new tools to give more to people. This will reinforce the power of your application, its usability, making it a reference.
A video game can be a real innovating product. When people like it, you can develop more versions or added programs to make them play and buy the next one you develop because of the power of the brand. The famous saga "The Sims" is available for various machines, you can find many titles, a community exists.
12. Hire the children
Children are fond of new technologies. They are already very present on the web, exploring its possibilities. The actors of the Internet have to take care of them because those young people are especially the consumers of tomorrow. Providers take care of them. Just have a look at the MSN website: teenagers are the most important community on the various MSN groups in the world.
