Andrew Curry writes:

Watching the SOPA/PIPA saga unfold from the other side of the Atlantic, it was difficult not to see it as a ‘wave war’, in which companies which grew up in different technology waves compete to set the frame of economic and policy discussion. On the one side, the media companies, creatures of the mass production era that dominated much of the 20th century; on the other, the technology companies that have grown up in the digital wave that followed it. (We wrote about these waves in our Futures Perspective report, Technology 2020).

The technology companies seem to be on the right side of the generational wave. As we noted last week in Futures Five, our fortnightly US newsletter for MONITOR clients,

most [Millennials] see far more nuance in pirated content-sharing than other generations: According to the 2011 Yankelovich MONITOR, 70% of Millennials indicate it’s “sometimes forgivable” if a person “views or downloads pirated content online (such as movies, television shows, music or shows),” almost double the 34% of Baby Boomers who feel the same way.

Of course, this is not a uniquely American issue. The proposed international treaty ACTA has the same intent as SOPA, as do sections of the UK’s Digital Economy Act. My view on this was shaped by James Boyle, the Duke University scholar who wrote The Public Domain, and his view was shaped by Thomas Jefferson, the first policy-maker to think seriously about copyright (yes, that Thomas Jefferson).

In a nutshell, we need copyright to reward creators, but in creating this legal privilege, we need to balance it so we don’t kill off the social, cultural, and economic gains from the free flow of knowledge, which let creators and innovators stand on the shoulders of others. The hugely extended copyright periods we now have in the USA and the UK are a grotesque tribute to the lobbying powers of media owners and old rock stars.

There’s another point here, too, about the way in which the mental landscapes of politicians shift only slowly. It’s been said that American politicians were surprised by the strength of opposition to the SOPA and PIPA bills, and more surprised to discover that their media industries were small fry, in economic terms, when compared to the tech industries.

The UK had a similar problem, in a very different sector, a decade ago. In response to an outbreak of foot and mouth disease, the government closed off large swathes of the countryside, only to discover that rural tourism and leisure were worth far more to the economy than farming. The policy-makers understood this. The politicians didn’t, because they’d got used to the farmers’ lobby. But, as with SOPA, the noise of the lobbyists had drowned out the quiet shifts of long-term change.

The image at the top is from the Bangstyle blog, where you will also find a perspective from the independent music sector. It is used with thanks.

Last week, we and 150,000 of our closest gearhead friends attended CES, the consumer electronics industry’s largest trade event – and with a few days’ distance from the Las Vegas hype and glitter, we’ve been able to identify some of the show’s most interesting trends.

1. The Center of the CE World Is Shifting

While the big Japan brands – Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba – still dominate the show floor, it’s never been more obvious that Korea’s tech titans, Samsung and LG, now represent the front line of consumer electronics innovation. Or at least the innovation on display at CES. The biggest U.S. gadget players – HP, Google and especially Apple – are conspicuous by their absence; Microsoft has announced that next year, it too will exit the show, selling the rights to its coveted exhibit space to Dish Networks and China’s Hisense electronics. The latter is also a sign of the times: While Chinese brands are still quietly building market share rather than trying to technologically leapfrog, it’s only a matter of time before the biggest China players – Lenovo, Haier and TCL in particular – make a move for mindshare as well.

2. Say Hello to the Internet of Things

As of 2010, there was an average of one net-connected device per human being on Earth; by 2015, there will be an average of two. This reflects the reality that more and more information is being exchanged between intelligent devices, independent of human agency. In fact, networking giant Cisco recently estimated that the single fastest-growing category for Internet traffic is “machine-to-machine,” with the amount of data flowing between M2M modules now soaring at a rate of 258% per year.

Several brands at CES pushed the curve on the thing-based Internet. LG showed off the second generation of its “Thinq-enabled” home appliances line – e.g. a smart refrigerator that’s capable of tracking grocery purchases and ordering favorites when they run low, as well as transferring recipe suggestions to a connected smart stove.

Not to be outdone, Samsung unveiled its own plans for a household ecosystem of connected intelligent devices, with the Smart TV at its center. Will the television go from digital hearth to digital hub? Samsung – the world’s number-one seller of TVs – is banking on it.

3. Rise of the Intuitive, Immersive Interface

For obvious reasons, traditional devices are awkward input and control tools for an Internet of Things. (A microwave with a keyboard? No thanks.) This year’s CES showed dozens of ways that manufacturers are attempting to solve for this problem: Wall-sized multitouch surfaces (including a massive 82-inch capacitive display from Perceptive Pixel, whose technology powers the “smart walls” used on CNN), face recognition, and, of course, natural-language voice control.

Behind closed doors, Nuance – the developers of the speech recognition technology used in the iPhone 4S’s Siri intelligent agent – showed off their new DragonTV voice-based television interface, and it was impressive; Nuance says the software will power the smart TV offerings of “all the major manufacturers” (including, perhaps, Apple’s hypothetical new iTV?).

Meanwhile, startup Tobii unveiled an eye-tracking system that senses what you want to select next based on the position of your pupils. And PrimeSense, developers of the technology used in Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect peripheral, demonstrated the next-generation version of their motion recognition system, which uses a 3D camera to allow users to control devices with typical touchscreen gestures (swipe, pinch to zoom, and so on) – in thin air, from up to ten feet away.

4. What’s Next
Though some have questioned CES’s continued relevance in an era of instant communications and social networks, the show remains one of the few opportunities to watch the dynamics of the technology marketplace up close – allowing active observers to spot new technologies, track the uptake of trends, and identify emerging standards in real time. We’ll be following up on the phenomena we saw this year, so watch this space.

Andy Stubbings writes:

Have you ever asked yourself what the travel guidebook of the future might look like, or why when it is arguably easier than ever to visit anywhere you like, it’s also more hassle to actually get there?

Andrew Curry and myself spent Wednesday this week with the global travel distribution company Amadeus, talking to journalists about the report, “From chaos to collaboration” we’d written for the company on the future of travel, and specifically how technology will change travel in the years to 2020.

In a nutshell: the report argues that over the next decade, thanks to a range of technologies as well as changes in social and economic contexts, there is great potential for travel to be enhanced at every stage of the journey by greater and more fluid interaction with other travellers and travel providers. The main benefits for travellers will be making the experience of getting to and from their destination less chaotic and stressful, and once they get somewhere else, they will be able to have a deeper experience of the place  by accessing other people’s collective experience. Most of the data that’s needed to do this already exists; the challenge is putting it together.

Sounds intriguing? The full report can be downloaded for free from here (opens pdf), and our friends at Kwittken, Amadeus’s international PR agency who worked with us on the report, have put together this infographic with some stats taken from the quantitative research done for the report.

A shareable version can be found here.

The picture is published here by The Futures Company under a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved.

Andrew Curry writes:

Stream, WPP’s annual tech ‘un-conference’, held by tradition at a former Club Med resort near Athens, has just finished. I’m going to try to catch a snapshot of some of the things I learned while I was there.

3D printing is a slow train coming
We’ve been talking to clients for a while about the potential of 3D printing, or ‘fabbing’, and a discussion led by Steve Sammartino of Grey got into some of the complexities of this. The principle of 3D printing is that you send the code and a machine makes the object locally – possibly even in your home. Costs are falling quite fast, with the ‘hobbyist’ fabricator kit, Maker Bot, now less than $1,000, although the professional machines used by designers are still above $10,000. The other limitations are materials and time; a machine is set up to use one type of material, and making an object, even a small one, is slow. A designer taking part in the discussion showed a tape dispenser made on his printer which took ten hours to produce. Is this a new industrial revolution? Probably not. But over the next decade it could transform the way we repair things, prototype them, and also change the way we think about manufacturing.

The new high level internet domains will be a lawyers’ paradise
You may not have noticed, but ICANN, which regulates the Internet’s top level domains (.com, .edu, .uk, etc) is quite a long way down the road on a radical transformation of the domain system. Instead of the current relatively constrained architecture, it’s proposing to let people buy words instead; ‘.cheese’, say, or ‘.health’, or ‘.yahoo’. In practice, this means that large companies will buy them, if they so choose, since the application costs around $200,000, and preparing the application another $300,000.

The thing is, it’s hard to see who benefits: the internet becomes a sea of noise, and businesses are faced with a sea of unprofitable competition for domain names. Esther Dyson, who led the session, described it as “a tragedy of the commons”. But intellectual property lawyers should do well for themselves. The only saving grace is that the decision hasn’t yet been ratified; pressure on ICANN might yet prevent the change.

What we mean by ‘news’ is changing before our eyes. The idea emerged from several different sessions. Vice presented data which showed that the average age of the US audience for mainstream TV news was 60-something, compared to the far younger audience for Vice News. Peter Hirshberg, the urban data pioneer, suggested that “you really need to be able to understand data to tell stories in the 21st century”. The Guardian, challenged by its editor, Alan Rusbridger, that “the public is not interested in what’s in the public interest”, is launching the ‘Finance Game’, off the back of an anthropological investigation of the City of London’s bankers, to see if this leads to new ways of understanding, researching, and presenting complex stories (and potentially to different audiences). But in his platform interview, WPP Chief Executive Sir Martin Sorrell observed that if – as a society – “we value professional journalism, we’re probably going to have to subsidise it”.

The picture at the top of this post was taken by Andrew Curry. It is published here under a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved.

Eleanor Cooksey writes:

It’s a month since I left The Futures Company after first starting working there in 1998, and during my final weeks I reflected on some of changes in the business over that time.

The first one seems obvious, although you still have to pinch yourself at the scale of the changes. In 1998, the internet was tiny (9% of UK households had internet access, and the web itself was far smaller). Instead, researching facts and figures was an activity valued in itself which required considerable effort and some expertise. The Henley Centre (as it was then) subscribed to many publications, which would arrive in the post and then be carefully filed in an extensive library, supervised by the company’s librarian. And when this wasn’t enough, off we would trot to public libraries to pore over more specialist titles.

Secondly, personal communication technologies were far less ubiquitous. People didn’t necessarily have a mobile phone of their own, and, indeed, there were several ‘office handsets’ one could book out for the day if necessary.

Thirdly, the company invested considerable resources in knowledge venturing – our thought leadership programme -  and developing proprietary content. This is one area where there has been some continuity, but with twists and turns along the way. Back in 1998, much of this content was published regularly in print editions and sold to clients. Over the past decade, knowledge venturing has remained critical, but publishing it commercially less so. Interestingly now we see a return to publications, but for our time. Instead of the book, one size fits all, there is Global MONITOR, with its searchable syndicated  insight, customised to the profile of a particular client.

Finally, there is one small change which, from a personal perspective I regret. In 1998, the company strapline was ‘Seize the Future’, which I must confess to preferring to our current version of ‘Unlocking Futures’. But then, all things must pass.

The image at the top of the post was taken by our design manager, Stacey Yates, and is published here under a creative commons licence: some rights reserved.

Alex Steer writes: We think of riots as disorderly. We observe the way in which an initial silent protest outside Tottenham police station, seeking answers from the police over the death of Mark Duggan, burst first into focused violence, and  then into crime and looting that was more dispersed, less explicable, less clearly connected to its initial cause. But riots are also a form of social networking activity, an impressive (though intimidating) coordination of individuals, each self-motivated but guided by a set of common practices and ground rules, even in the absence of clearly articulated goals.

Sound familiar? In social networks, ideas are transmitted by memes, not manifestos. The Metropolitan Police made much of its impressive ‘command and control’ structure. But the rioters didn’t need one. Since the uprisings of the Arab Spring (far more coherent, and legitimate, in their orientation), it’s become fashionable to talk about ‘leaderless’ revolutions. While the lack of chains of command has been exaggerated, in both the Arab demonstrations and the London riots, it’s good to see more attention being paid to our ability to ‘organize without organizations‘ (in Clay Shirky’s memorable phrase).

From a technology perspective, the story has been the role that online social networks have played in the coordination of the riots. The media – and perhaps the authorities? – found themselves blindsided by a misunderstanding of how consumer decisions shape their use of online social networks. (We can say with some confidence that these looters were acting as consumers, though not ones bound by the usual laws of market exchange.) When the riots began, and as they spread, it became obvious that they were being coordinated online, as people used their social graphs as a recruitment mechanism to get more people onto the streets – and, in the days that followed, to pre-arrange tactical looting in towns and boroughs. The media’s attention turned immediately to the big, familiar social networks, Facebook and Twitter.

Using our Pivot Points framework, we can describe these as ‘Big Net’, ‘Open Hand’, ‘Turn On’ networks. They are built for scale, openness, and immediacy – as you know if you’ve ever tired of having a thousand ‘friends’, accidentally left compromising pictures visible to the wrong people, or tweeted in anger. They are the perfect tools for commenting on emerging events, as we’ve seen, and even for organizing legal activity, as the mass ‘riot cleanup’ operations of the last few days have shown.

For organizing rioting or looting, though, Big Net/Open Hand/Turn On networks are a disaster. You want them to be ‘Turn On’ networks, of course – they have to work in real time – but scale and openness are perilous if you want to avoid the attention of the police. It took the rioters less time than the media to figure this out. In our framework, the opposite of ‘Big Net’ is ‘Tight Knit’ – smaller-scale, more intimate networks which revolve around connections with a few close friends. The opposite of ‘Open Hand’ is ‘Closed Fist’, where privacy and secrecy are paramount.

Under the radar of mainstream attention, BBM has seen a huge growth in popularity among teenagers and young adults. In part this is because it’s free; in part, because its PIN authentication system, and RIM’s strong pro-privacy stance in other countries, give a reasonable guarantee of secrecy. We know that intimacy and secrecy are of interest to British teenagers, especially poor ones on the fringes of hyper-localised gang cultures, so it’s no surprise that the perfect Tight Knit/Closed Fist/Turn On network was already in their hands – private group texting and instant messaging smartphone apps, and especially BlackBerry Messenger (BBM).

When we focus on the obvious, we can miss a lot. The Pivot Points framework is designed to test our assumptions about what the shape – or shapes -  of the social networks of the future. By concentrating on the types of networks they knew, journalists misunderstood how London’s, and England’s, disorder was spreading.

Lawrence Wykes writes: The idea of the generational cohort as a unit of social research and analysis goes back to the definition of the ‘boomers’ – America’s immediate port-war generation, now clipping to retirement. Since then we’ve had waves of new cohorts, from Gen X, to Gen Y, to the latest addition, Millennials. Millennials (the people, not the label) were born in the late ’80s, or so, approaching adolescence or adulthood by the turn of the century.

But the question of whether the Millennials are a coherent cohort is still open – the data has never quite added up. And our recent analysis, based on our Global Monitor data, suggests that as a group the Millennials are a fragmented cohort, refracted by technology.

In fact, we found four different groups (although more may have been lurking in the data) and these already suggest a more fruitful way of thinking about this generation.

• Striders have been relatively unscathed by the recent economic downturn; they are marching forth with enthusiasm, and keen for success and all the material frills they perceive will come along with it.
• Steppers have been hit hard by the downturn, which has left them price conscious and feeling negative about their future. They are cautious, considered, and want to make the most of what they’ve got.
• Satellites are optimistic about the future and know how to use the resources available to them, especially technology (they are tech-mad), to get what they want.
• Spirits are poster children for the Millennials generation; they are socially conscious and interested in things happening at a global and local level.

So if Millennials are fragmented and so easily segmented by their differing technology use and attitudes, why do they look like a generation to researchers?

I think Millennials look like a generation because there is a social-technology breakpoint between their cohort and all previous generations. Millennials are the first generation to have grown up with modern technology proper – and this is manifested in the fluid way they use technology to construct their identities and manage their environments.

But, in terms of social analysis, defining a group by technology – rather than their underlying attitudes and values – has problems. Technology evolves and changes, and it seems unlikely that the Millennial generation will grow older while remaining as inventive with technology as they have been in their young adult lives. And the next generation – however they get labelled – may well turn out to be just as creative with technology as we were

More usefully, though, this does open up a promising research question: do the different uses of technology by these different Millennial groups reflect differences in underlying values and attitudes? In other words, will these groups remain distinct as they get older? It seems possible – but so far, we just don’t know.

Andrew Curry and Andy Stubbings write: The Shell Oil futures guru Pierre Wack described his work as being about “the gentle art of reperceiving”, and the type of work that Alex Steer has laid out in his four blog posts this week on the future of social networks is about changing perceptions by improving anticiption. We can’t know the future, but we can improve our understanding of the present and our ability to respond to change. Better anticipation, in short, increases both the depth and the breadth of vision.

So what do the six social media Pivot Points (here and here), and the tensions they represent for users, tell us about the future of social networks?

The Future of Facebook

Looking first at Facebook, it says that the model at the heart of Facebook (One for All-Big Net-TurnOn-Open Hand) may not persist. Alternative futures, for example, include a version in which ‘One for Each’ emerges as more valuable and its Connect system becomes its biggest asset, the ‘invisible social layer’ which connects other web and mobile properties, a valuable utility, without maintaining a huge public presence itself. A less promising future sees Facebook losing out as users start to value privacy and specificity more online (Tight Knit-Closed Fist-One for Each), and drift away, leaving the social network as a legacy “first generation” social network. Somewhere in between these is a future in which Facebook is less of a warehouse, and more a series of rooms, in which the tensions between One for All and One for Each are more finely balanced. In this model, it becomes a series of smaller tighter circles, but with ease of movement between them. But of course, this is also the space into which Google+ has pushed itself into with its ‘Circles” model.

Innovation spaces

Interrogating the Pivot Points, combining them in ways which stretch thinking, also starts to throw up some interesting innovation spaces.  To pick up a few here:

• ‘Big Net‘ and ‘Closed Fist‘  don’t appear, on the face of it, to be good fellow travellers. One is ubiquitous, the other about strong privacy concerns. But this is a potential future in which value accrues to the institutions which can guarantee security of digital identification; it may be a ‘citizens.net’, which gives access to public services which also confirming one’s online identity to third parties who are concerned about anonymous behaviour online. And it might also be the gateway through which we manage our personal ‘official’ data, or volunteer, or alert public services to repairs or improvement.
• ‘Play‘ and ‘Turn On‘ obviously describes the world of immersive online multi-player games, but what if we add ‘Challenge‘ to that instead of ‘Confirm”? It becomes the safe space of the Fool or the Jokester, the place where one can challenge current assumptions without spurring revolution or retribution. Think of it as the ‘Carnival Incubator’, a space where communities of interest can engage with diversity or difference to innovate.
• And working through these in a short internal session at The Futures Company, we also saw an emerging world of ‘Hive Mind’, in which shared tags created created new associations between things and people, in which Delicious met location. Imagine a travel guide that reassembles itself in a thousand different ways, and has a hundred curators.

One strong possibility emerges from this overview: that marketers may look back at this early development stage of the social network with nostalgia, even amazement. It is not at all clear that the current dominant model, which emphasises mass engagement and openness, will persist at its current scale. In most of the futures which emerge from our thinking about the pivot points, marketers have to work harder, and smarter, to reach people who are more resistant to marketing.

Andrew Curry and Andy Stubbings lead The Futures Company’s thought leadership team on the future of media and technology. They are currently working on a report on ‘Technology 2020′. The earlier posts in this series on the future of social networking start here. The cartoon at the top of this post is by Jenna Cotton, was published by the Canadian University Press Newswire, and is used with thanks.

#4: Pivot Points – pervasiveness, utility, and worldview

Alex Steer writes: Yesterday I wrote about how different consumer decisions about scale, privacy and specificity create very different outcomes for social networking. Today I’m going to explore the other three Pivot Points.

Pervasiveness – Turn On or Tune Out?

Social networking has been driven by people’s enthusiasm for connectivity – yet many increasingly find themselves at risk of information overload. So will we want to be permanently connected to our networks, or to dip in and out as it suits us?

In a Turn On future, consumers will want to be “always on” in their networks, receiving updates and information in real time – a possibility made easier by the global mobile and smartphone boom. Buzzwords are real-time, context-specific and multiplatform, and marketers will be expected to feed the desire for constant novelty with content and deals designed to be acted on fast.

Tune Out futures, though, see consumers looking for ways to step back and manage the flow of information and complexity – good news for networks like Flickr or YouTube that function more like a library than an updates service. At this end of the axis, marketing activity needs to be opt-in, durable, asynchronous and polite – designed to be enjoyed wherever, but also whenever.

Utility – Plug or Play?

As we have said, social interactions online can range from the serious to the frivolous. But will consumers see social networks more as a useful resource or more as a form of entertainment?

In Plug futures, consumers look for networks that let them access information, opinion and tools without demanding too much attention. Application, utility and embedded socialization are our buzzwords, and brands which provide lean, useful branded tools will thrive.

In Play futures, though, entertainment is the name of the game. Consumers see networks as places to spend time accessing interesting and immersive content. Think interaction and fun – content creators seek to reward time, attention and sharing with sheer entertainment value, and don’t just push marketing messages.

Worldview – Confirm or Challenge?

Are social recommendation features and personalization a way to access the most relevant and interesting experiences – or are they trapping us inside a self-reinforcing ‘filter bubble’? Will we want social networks to confirm or challenge our worldview?

In Confirm futures, consumers want news, opinion and content filtered and curated by their social connections. Here, marketers make it easy and rewarding for consumers to share content, and target offers based on online habits and relationships.

In contrast, in Challenge futures, marketers provide exposure to new experiences and divergent points of view. Buzzwords are novelty, debate and surprise, and brands will thrive by standing out from the crowd, challenging, stimulating and offering genuine novelty and serendipity.

Using the Pivot Points today

These six Pivot Points are signposts, not predictions – by knowing the directions of people’s behaviour and preferences, we can quickly identify, and prepare for, different possible outcomes. They also offer present opportunities. They can be used to make better business and marketing decisions by tracking target consumers’ attitudes and values, and making sense of changing habits online. The Futures Company is already working with clients to show how to understand, measure and seize those opportunities. We hope that the Pivot Points provide a way to navigate an unstable landscape, and take control of an uncertain future.

This is the last of four posts on the future of social networking by Alex Steer. To read the earlier posts, click here. The image at the top of this post is from the New Medici website, and is used with thanks.

#3: Pivot Points – scale, privacy, and specificity

Alex Steer writes: I blogged yesterday about the ‘Four Cs’ of social networking – the constants that underpin people’s desire to interact online. Yet the future of social networking will be determined by how they choose to interact, and this changes far more unpredictably. We can’t know the outcome of those decisions – and they’ll vary, anyway, for different people at different times and in different places – we can identify the shape their decisions and behaviours will take. To do this, we have identified six critical uncertainties that will shape the future of online social networking. We call these the Pivot Points – scale, privacy, specificity, pervasiveness, utility and worldview. In this post I am going to explore the first three of these.

Scale – Big Net or Tight Knit?

We know that people around the world value the openness and connectedness of an increasingly global society – but at the same time they can feel daunted by its complexity and variety. So will they want the scale benefits of large networks, or the intimacy benefits of small ones?

A Big Net future would be good news for Facebook or Twitter in their current form, as consumers seek out big social networks, with large numbers of relatively superficial connections. Buzzwords in this future might be sharing, crowdsourcing, and entertainment; brands can connect by creating content with broad mainstream appeal, designed to be shared widely.

In a Tight Knit future, though, consumers would seek small social networks, close and meaningful connections, with content tailored to specific groups and interests. Buzzwords like curation, collaboration and community do well, and small and intimate networks thrive.

Privacy – Closed Fist or Open Hand?

The reconfiguration of ideas and expectations around privacy in a highly-networked world is likely to be a flashpoint for businesses and brands in developed markets in the next few years, but even in those markets behaviour and attitudes are out of sync – and in emerging markets the dynamics of privacy are very different. So which will people value most – safeguards on private data, or the easy transfer of personalization across sites?

In a Closed Fist future the data toybox is shut. Networks and marketers are required to respect personal data boundaries, and store only the data they need, for as long as they need it, and with the clear permission of users. Privacy, control and safeguarding are the watchwords.

But in an Open Hand future seamless, multi-platform convenience is king, and data is used smartly to deliver custom offers and add value through targeting. Networks and marketers would recognize their online users as soon as they log in, and tailor offerings based on data – no annoying tick-boxes or manual configuration required.

Specificity – One For All or One For Each?

The last few years have been dominated by the big networks, acting as one-stop shops for their users. But this is only one possible way of maximizing the simplicity of our online interactions – another is to be far more granular. So will we expect single networks to facilitate all our social connections, or will we divide our time between several?

In a One for All future, ‘umbrella’ networks – the Facebooks and Renrens – do well; the buzzwords are multifunctional, multimedia, multipurpose. Brands need to provide a range of ways for consumers to interact with them within the big networks – from video content to competitions, social gaming to customer service.

But in a One for Each future, consumers will expect to use many, tightly-defined networks for different parts of their online lives: think compartments, specificity, functionality. Brands have to respect users’ “digital partitions”, and be in all the right channels, without ever forcing customers to link up their separate social streams to access content or services.

In the fourth post in this series, I introduce the three remaining Pivot Points – pervasiveness, utility and worldview – and some implications for businesses and marketers. Click through to posts one and two. The t-shirt design at the top of this post is by Jazzmo, and it is used with thanks.