Monopolies Fall As Amateurs Rise

Barriers to entry are obstacles that make it difficult for a business to enter a given market. The higher the barriers, the more prone a market tends to be a natural monopoly. The reverse is also true. The lower the barriers, the more likely the market will become filled with competition.

Our social tools today remove older obstacles to public expression, and thus remove the bottlenecks that characterized mass media. The result is the mass amateurization of efforts previously reserved for media professionals. Social media has given new leverage of ancient behaviors. New channels to release existing motivations. Most of the previous barriers to mass organization have been eliminated, which is now causing the paradigm shift evident in the industry. In a sense, marketing & PR requires a deep understanding of crowd behaviors and dedicated strategists. We no longer distribute information, we battle with competent organizations for market share of customer attention.

We no longer distribute information, we battle with competent organizations for market share of customer attention.

Social media is no longer just pulling the audience away from traditional marketing; it’s cannibalizing digital media too. The fastest growing marketing sector getting people’s attention is social media. The strict dividing lines between marketing categories can no longer exist- they must all be combined with a layer of social. With the instant access to social media made possible by mobiles devices, there is no such thing as undivided attention anymore.

The social urge to share information isn’t new. Complex social networks have always existed, but recent technological developments have afforded their emergence as a dominant form of social organization.

Prior to email and blogs, we clipped articles and published family newsletters.

Recalling these older behaviors, it’s tempting to conclude that our new tools are merely improvements on existing behaviors; this view is both right and wrong.

Seen in that light, social tools don’t create collective action — they merely remove the obstacles to it. Now the organization of group effort can be invisible, but the results can be immediately visible. Because the cost of sharing and coordinating has collapsed, new methods of organization are available to individual people, methods that allow events to be arranged without much advance planning. This is why many of the significant changes are based not on the fanciest, newest bits of technology, but on simple communication tools.

Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies — it happens when society adopts new behaviors.

It took radio 38 years before it had 50 million users. It took TV 13 years. It took Instagram a year and a half.

The Power of Groups

Whenever you improve a group’s ability to communicate internally, you change the things it is capable of. What the group does with that power is a separate question. As more people adopt simple social tools, and as those tools allow increasingly rapid communication, the speed of group action also increases.

The power to coordinate otherwise dispersed groups will continue to improve; new social tools are still being invented. Any tool that improves shared awareness or group coordination can be pressed into service for political means, because the freedom to act in a group is inherently political. There are real and permanent social dilemmas, which can only be optimized for, never completely solved. The human social repertoire includes many such optimizations, which social tools can amplify.

For most church history, the priestly hierarchy was the church; the laity would gather in the parishes, but all of the power and all of the decision-making was with the priesthood. What wasn’t understood was that the lack of previous historical challenges from the laity was an example not of forbearance, but of inability.

Many legacy industries have enjoyed such a monopoly of market share before the internet that it was incomprehensible that customers would ever want to switch. Who would want to rent movies online instead of meeting their friends and chatting at Blockbuster’s physical locations? (The actual argument they used) It is a curiosity of technology that it creates new characteristics in old institutions.