commerce Archives | Ian M Rountree

Everything has a price tag these days. How do we decide what has value? In a culture where anything can be acquired for a sufficient amount of money – land, real goods, art, ideas and other intangible objects, even integrity – how, or perhaps why, do we insist on assigning a flat numerological factor to anything?

Anil Dash asserted yesterday that having a million Twitter followers isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. How Kim Kardashian gets paid $10k per tweet, I have no idea, but it seems to me this is where the entire followers system falls down.

Commerce demands an objective sense of value. There isn’t a lot of bartering going on in western culture, at least on the business scale. Set prices help us get some indication of what went into the production of a product, or what will come from the hiring of a service. We look at ten nearly identical computers and decide value based on brand and price tag. We look at quotes from contractors and decide based on price and reputation. Often, we can trick ourselves into thinking it’s entirely a play for getting the most value out of each dollar we spend, but again, by what method do we demarcate the value of each dollar we spend?

Think about this: You have some vacation coming up, and you’ve got a few options, assume you have the budget for any of these following, and for the sake of argument, let’s say they all cost the same amount of money. The less pressure here the better. Here we go:

You can spend a few thousand dollars going to an all-inclusive resort with your partner, have an excellent week of recovery and recouping from the stresses of a busy season at work;
You could instead rent a car and a digital SLR camera, take a road trip across the country, load up on breathtaking pictures and souvenirs, and fly back home loaded with more booty and less of a headache;
Or, you could fly to another continent (assume there’s a seat sale) and backpack for a week, stay off the grid, maybe take a few pictures and enjoy some exotic food.

How do we decide between these three obviously appealing options? With a lot of consideration, if we’re smart. But it requires something western culture often fails to train into us; a sense of relational value. Which one of these three dream trips gets our vote requires a lot of bartering with ourselves. Perhaps I don’t like taking pictures. Maybe my partner has a desperate yearning to see Spain. Or maybe we’ve done one or two of these options, and all we’re left with is the third.

How we make these decisions relies heavily on personal value, and that’s the kind of thing business and commerce is simply not set up to handle. Here’s the kicker; neither is much of what we do online.

There’s a pendulum effect we can see clearly when we’re dealing as a society with new modes of communication. Just like learning a language, adapting to a new process goes through a number of stages; incomprehension, misunderstanding (or incomplete knowledge), savvy, exploitation, and fluency. We go through various fields of “I can’t do this” to “Others can’t, I win by default” and settle in the middle on “everyone can, hooray!” – but it takes time, and critical mass, to get the pendulum to stop, and a lot of interference to ensure it stops in the middle ground. That’s objective value, that’s where we are right now. Everything online is a transaction. You follow me, I follow you. I tweet, you retweet.

It’s not conversation. It’s not bartering. It’s exploitation, and it’s right in the middle.

Oddly enough, incomprehension, savvy and fluency are all on the side of socialisation. Incomprehension and misunderstanding fuel exploitation, and demands objectivity to be corrected; this is a good thing, because objectivity is great for commerce, but very bad for people. It doesn’t leave any room for personality. And with all of the hype around the human business and personal brands – all of this oomph moving us away from the middle, away from mediocrity and towards individualising the world, we need room for relational thinking. Without which relationships are transactions, and transactions are nothing but ephemeral.

On a bizarre side note, this happens to be entry number 100 on this blog.

Photo by Richard0

How do you approach big problems? You know, the ones you feel – at first glimpse – can never be solved? After you ge over the shock, how do you go about tearing down the mountain? On the other hand, what do you do when confronted with a big project at work? Perhaps liaising with a Fortune 100 company at the C-level to get a contract? Do you treat it differently than working with a local entrepreneur?

Of course you do. You have to. Don’t you?

Apparently, Berkeley High might be cutting out its science labs in order that the massive ethnic gap in its students grades might be levelled. I think these teachers are missing something. The move comes with the aim of diverting resources toward helping “underachieving” students get up to snuff; their studies say that black and latino students are doing poorly, and the science labs only benefit white students. I can’t help but wonder if this is an indication of educational idiocy, or if they’re playing to their audience. It’s hard to tell until the work gets done.

But we’re used to bureaucracy doing this sort of thing. It feels external. Often, we’re unaware of treating things differently because of size, because the prejudice is so ingrained it’s mental furniture. If you go shopping for a TV, you probably want a big one, the biggest you can afford, right? Who cares that if you’re sitting six feet away, a 37″ screen is just on the high end of useful for viewing – that 60″ plasma just screams take me home.

It doesn’t always work in a good or productive manner, but we tend to treat anything bigger than our estimates as better when it’s a perceived benefit, and worse when it’s a perceived threat. I should know – I’m 6’2″ tall and fairly large. My friends treat me as localized security, because without more than five seconds exposure (I’m the goofiest person I know, most days) on the face of it, I look big and threatening. Useful? No. Clothes cost half again as much as they do for anyone else, I hit my head on everything including some doorframes depending on my shoes, and I’m vastly out of shape. Still think being 6’2″ and having a football player’s frame is better than whatever shape you’re in?

As a proving converse argument, I had a friend in school who was 5’10” tall and less than a hundred pounds – and still more threatening than me. Is scale still impressive, putting these descriptions side by side?

One of the things we need to be able to do to combat these clouding assumptions is change our paradigm away from immediate impression toward utility. Often these are one and the same, but in the ever-more-convoluted twenty-first century, we can no longer afford to let first impressions count for anything if we’re given evidence the impression was imperfect. Minds are like parachutes, they work better when we let them open.

Another thing we need to get better at is making sure we’re aware of where scale is of any benefit. I’ve got less than three hundred people following me on Twitter, for example, but those I’ve connected with (and if you’re reading this, it’s likely you’re one of them and know where to find me there) are awesome people, well worth following – and well worth promoting on my part as well. Does this make my stream less valuable to the world than @Scobleizer‘s constant ReTweet storms?

If the small fish is connected to the right big fish, does the small fish need to grow?

Photo by jurvetson

A Definition Of Value

The Automated Prejudice of Scale