Why does the world need another blog you might ask? You could also ask 'why are there not more blogs from market research companies?' Given that conversation, discussion and participation are at the heart of our work it seems a natural subject for this kind of medium.
Since the phrase ‘Markets are conversations’ was coined in The Cluetrain Manifesto. the whole meaning of the term conversation has expanded massively. A great example of this is danah boyd and Jeffrey Heer's paper that looks at what conversation means in the context of photosharing sites, social sites and, of course, blogs. They point out that unlike traditional notions of conversation the recipients in these cases are often unknown, this is a conversation in which the speaker shouts out to an anonymous public who can choose to respond or not.
They ask some very interesting questions: ‘if context is necessary for conversation, how is context transferred, created, and interpreted…? How are conversations initiated…? What are the goals of these conversations…and how are they maintained? And what are the possibilities and consequences of replicability, searchability and persistence?’
With some caveats, these are questions that could be asked of conversation in any medium and that's the debate we'd like to encourage on this blog. As Henry Jenkins says in his latest book Convergence Culture, ( a book everybody should read) in the intersection between old and new media, the future will be hinged on debate, negotiation and participation in a way previously unheard of, as such we'll be watching how the art of conversation changes alongside these emergent trends.
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