In my musings about the post-factory society, one of the key concepts seems to be that of entrepreneurship. While big corporations will undoubtedly continue to exist, they’ll work in an ecosystem of much smaller companies or ventures. Maybe the default option for professionals will be to work as such a small venture, rather than as an employee of some big corporation.
This seems not very new. In most countries small and medium-sized companies are the backbone of the economy. Journalists, programmers, lawyers and consultants often work as independent ventures, even though this often seems to be inspired by tax reasons while in reality they work very much as an employee for a bigger organization.
Things do change however when people-as-individual-entrepreneurs start using platforms to run their business, when they actually develop their very own business or non-profit project and when they rely heavily on social networks to get things done (see my previous post). In is also in this context that virtual worlds can be a crucial part of such an individual strategy – if those environments really facilitate work for such small ventures and not only for the Cisco’s and IBM’s of this world. Dusan Writer has an interesting collaborative project in this regard.
Mindsets in the media industry
The above described entrepreneurship (based on Jeff Jarvis’ analysis) is far from self-evident. I’m not sure at all journalism students realize becoming a media entrepreneur is maybe one of their best possible moves. They still dream of becoming a reporter working in the context of a big media newsroom. There is nothing wrong with that, but it’s not the only option. As publishers are cutting back expenses and publications shut down, the employment prospects are not bright. Instead of living through various painful reorganizations, why not try and build one’s very own media venture?
It does not make much sense to start a venture which tries to replicate the commodified news productions of the mainstream media (even though those mainstream media are getting more innovative).
Second Life offers a number of interesting examples of such new media ventures, and it also makes us ask some conceptual questions. We Are The Network and Metanomics clearly are media – a live forum and a talk show with a very live audience. But is it journalism? As the host of Metanomics, Robert Bloomfield, interviews his guests, he is doing what journalists all over the world do, even though I guess he has no formal press accreditation (so, is he a citizen journalist? but is a very knowledgeable and well-trained interviewer not just a journalist with or without any formal recognition?)
Even more difficult: is We Are The Network journalism? As I described in a previous post, the format here is that of a Socratic forum conversation. But why could we not call this an innovative journalism format? Maybe these conceptual questions should be treated in a Philosophy of Journalism course.
The other question is that of the underlying business models. I honestly don’t know whether those facilitating Metanomics – which after all is a major Second Life show – could earn a decent living producing the show – my guess is that it helps them somehow in their main professional (day job) activities, and even not necessarily in a financial way. Those main activities typically are outside Second Life – but then again, what means outside/inside? “Inside” is not the same as “in-world” (as Second Life residents call it when they are active in their virtual world).
The Second Life community is active on many other platforms such as streaming video systems, micro-blogging and blogging services. Even the notion of “Second Life community” is not really fully describing the scope of Metanomics, because the show can perfectly be watched and discussed on the web (where the archived or streaming videos can be found), whether or not someone feels inclined to become a “SL resident”.
Mindsets in education
As is often the case, developments in education are very similar with the evolution in journalism. Today, The New York Times published an interesting column by Scott A. Shane, Can Academics Be Entrepreneurial?It seems that the scope of academic entrepreneurship is not to be underestimated.
With some colleagues from Case Western Reserve University and the University of Bologna, the author conducted a survey of nearly 60,000 academics in basic disciplines (e.g., math, psychology, electrical engineering, biology, etc. — not law, business or other professions) on their entrepreneurial activities:
First, we found that academics are a pretty entrepreneurial lot. Approximately 16 percent of them run businesses that they founded. That makes academics more likely to be entrepreneurs than the average American. (So much for the old joke: “those that can’t, teach.”)
Second, while they found that a number of professors start companies to exploit inventions patented by their universities, there are also a lot of professors making commercial use of nonpatented know-how.
Third – and probably one of the most amazing findings – it isn’t just science and engineering professors who are starting businesses. They found a surprisingly large number of professors in fields like anthropology, psychology, economics and history…
I don’t know whether how and to what extent those professors use networks and platforms for their ventures, but academics have a rich tradition of networking and can be very innovative in their use of online platforms – just look, once again, at the importance of the education community in Second Life.
The education community is rather heterogeneous – there are the official universities like the university of Texas, and there are independent projects such as Rockcliffe University. The question is again what the business model of these ventures is – being part of established institutions, depending on volunteers who have day jobs, or whether we’ll see independent and financially sustainable projects. My guess is, that in order to have such a project, the virtual world can be an important component of it, but in need of being enhanced with the broader social web tools.
Roland Legrand