Tuesday, October 10, 2006

The Very Ordinary Case of Anna Eagin

This is a piece I wrote & have used in projects with Office an Taoiseach (Ireland) & Department of Communities and Local Govt (UK). I've doctored it slightly here...

It is called 'The Next Revolution Will Just Walk In The Door', or 'The Very Ordinary Case of Anna Eagin.'

Here we go ....


Anna Eagin is aged 15 and a half: Top of the Pops is now dead. MTV and its like are the source of constant enquiry: Can they survive? Anna (favourite bands The Arctic Monkeys and Sandi Thom) is typical of the new generation that don’t need Top of the Pops or MTV. They have YouTube and MySpace. Anna is skilled in both. She communicates with school friends and family using these sites and a variety of others, including Flickr and her blog site. She also meets new friends through these sites. Tonight she is talking to fifteen-year-old ‘SydneyKid’ over in Australia. He turns out to be called James and is into English music and volleyball.

Aged 17 and a half: Anna has become a concerned environmentalist. She has an RSS feed to the BBC for news on this subject. She also uses sources from Greenpeace and other organisations. Her particular passion is campaign for the whale. She enjoys several ichat video conversations with Cath and Mike, two well-known environmentalists in their research station in Canada. She also writes very succinct, poignant messages about the whale on her blog site. She builds up a small but appreciative readership.

Aged 19 and a half: ‘Reclaim the desert’ is the name of a local campaign in Anna’s neighbourhood. The desert in question is a small area of open land that has fallen into disuse. Although it is just behind a row of shops, it features a pretty view to the local canal. It used to be a green site but now cars have started parking there and local market traders store equipment and trailers over weekends. It has become alternately muddy or parched (hence the name for the campaign). Anna can remember when she played there as a small child and joins the campaign, helping to create the website. She also uses her video camera & Mac to record and edit the recollections of elderly people. ‘There wasn’t a romance in the district that didn’t at some time find its way to the small bench there by the canal’ says Betty, aged 71.

Aged 21 and a half: Anna applies for and gets a management job in your organisation. What will you tell her? Will you tell her that her skills (writing for new media, blog, wiki, video) are no longer needed or that they should be confined to her evenings and weekends? Will you instead teach her the traditional art of writing papers and reports (black on white, stagnant paragraph after stagnant paragraph, token colour graphs to liven up the beleaguered reader). Will you encourage her to conform to a culture of formal meetings (the longer and more snooze-inducing they are then the more worthy they must be)? Or will you instead decide that it is the organisation that must learn from Anna? And what will Anna say? What will she think when she encounters staff who don’t know what’s happening in the next department, never mind across the globe? Do you think that she will tell them about Cath and Mike? Do you think that she herself will be bold enough to say that there are lessons to be learned & that she can teach new things to an old organisation? Do you think she will tell them about Betty?

I think Anna will speak up.

She will say, “I think there’s a better way of doing what we are trying to do.”

The next revolution will just walk in the door.

5 comments:

Stevo said...

I actually agree with Peter and the case of this girl Anna Eagin. In my company www.edge10.com we are trying to bring new technology into the organisation. In our new website www.edge10.com/test which is currently under development. I have implemented the following features as part of the site.

1) News - I have used typepad some development fees.
2) For photos and image downloads of products, logos and accreditation. I am seriously considering using www.flickr.com.
3) for the glossary I intend to put the WIKI hyperlink.

Soon in my plans is to make our own IPTV channel in partnership with Youtube, where insread of giving our client spec sheets that they can download. they can watch small videos of our products being demonstrated.. who knows we may start producing a video blog soon... I am just ordering the mac, camcorder and video to see how we get on.

Definitely the first few weeks of the course and in particular the input from the class have helped me open my eyes to Web2.0 and how we can benefit from using it rather than wondering how the young kids can make so many millions from simple sites.

Peter said...

That's brilliant Stevo & the edge10 website is very impressive.

I hope you all see, or will see, that as well as being mesmerised by the YouTube/Skype/MySpace stories, I believe that we will see a host of everyday strategic and operational impacts arising from this 'new world.' I am an academic, so my mind is not closed.... but the evidence seems to be stacking up so quickly.

As mentioned, I've created a wiki site for you all (url to be announced), thanks to the help of Paul and the loan of his company website. On the wiki there are two exercises (a) Web 2.0 hypotheses and (b) the MBS bar.

I just want to see whether we can use this technology to develop a shared opinion on these topics.

The last of the hypotheses is is that Web 2.0 will undermine bureaucratic culture. This culture (perhaps not much in evidence in edge10) relies on forms, reports, agendas & minutes as its instruments. That's why its called a bureaucracy! Its been under attack for some time now (if you think about it, a .com is a kind of antithesis). I propose to you that Web2.0 will further undermine the bureaucratic culture and model. It might even be the final nail in its coffin/the Prussians arriving at Waterloo etc.

Can I really be saying this? Should I really be so bold?

Anonymous said...

I've also had my eyes opened to the possibilities of web 2.0 over the past three weeks. However, before we allow ourselves to get carried away with the possiblilities of web 2.0 (and believe me I'm no luddite!) here's an alternative view of how Anna Eagin's life might evolve:

Anna Eagin is aged 15 and a half: Top of the Pops is now dead. MTV and its like are the source of constant enquiry: Can they survive? Anna (favourite bands The Arctic Monkeys and Sandi Thom) is typical of the new generation that don’t need Top of the Pops or MTV. They have YouTube and MySpace. Anna is skilled in both. She communicates with school friends and family using these sites and a variety of others, including Flickr and her blog site. She also meets new friends through these sites. Tonight she is talking to fifteen-year-old ‘SydneyKid’ over in Australia. He turns out to be called....Tony Studabaker, in reality a 32 year-old US Marine. After 'grooming' Anna, Tony flies across from America and abducts her. She is rescued 3 days later in Germany.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/3481219.stm

Aged 17 and a half: Anna has become a concerned environmentalist. She has an RSS feed to the BBC for news on this subject. She also uses sources from Greenpeace and other organisations. Her particular passion is campaign for the whale. She enjoys several ichat video conversations with Cath and Mike, two well-known environmentalists in their research station in Canada. She also writes very succinct, poignant messages about the whale on her blog site. She builds up a small but appreciative readership....Anna and her readership are distraught to find out that the information Anna has been posting (un-edited) from Greenpeace has been heavily biased to support the pressure group's own agenda and is factually incorrect. As a result Anna's blogsite loses its credibility. Anna begins to question her own support for Greenpeace.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brent_Spar_oil_rig

http://www.highnorth.no/Library/MediaWatch/le-of-br.htm


Aged 19 and a half: ‘Reclaim the desert’ is the name of a local campaign in Anna’s neighbourhood. The desert in question is a small area of open land that has fallen into disuse. Although it is just behind a row of shops, it features a pretty view to the local canal. It used to be a green site but now cars have started parking there and local market traders store equipment and trailers over weekends. It has become alternately muddy or parched (hence the name for the campaign). Anna can remember when she played there as a small child and joins the campaign, helping to create the website. She also uses her video camera & Mac to record and edit the recollections of elderly people. ‘There wasn’t a romance in the district that didn’t at some time find its way to the small bench there by the canal’ says Betty, aged 71...One of the local market traders (an amateur computer hacker), angry at Anna's interference, sets out to discredit her. He guesses correctly that one of the most frequently used words on her blogsite might be her password. With this he hacks into her home PC and accesses personal information which he then uses to access child pornography sites. An international FBI investigation leads to Anna being arrested by the local police. She is eventually manages to clear her name, but not before having been expelled from University and her family's house has been daubed with graffitti.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/yorkslincs/series6/computer_doctor.shtml

Aged 21 and a half: Anna applies for and gets a management job in your organisation...How will you convince her that personal information held on your company's HR files cannot fall into the wrong hands? Will she believe that your corporate wiki or intranet is not simply a tool for corporate propaganda? How will you prevent fraudulent use of her system log in details? I think Anna will be scared. How will you make her feel protected and reassured?

(Just in case some of the hyperlinks on this post haven't been copied correctly I've posted the 'alternative' Anna's life to our team's blogsite:
http://disruptiveinfluences.blogspot.com/ )

Peter said...

Touche! Class!!

Euan said...

I wrote the following in a post some time ago:

Is the internet a good or a bad thing?

There is a clever pair of adverts for AOL on the television here in the UK at the moment - one portraying the internet as a good thing the other as a bad thing.

Some time ago I got to meet Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, and to hear him being interviewed. When asked whether he thought. looking back over the last thirty years, the internet had been a good or a bad thing his responses was "It is just a thing. Whether it is good or bad depends what you do with it. If you don't like what you are doing with it then it is simply a reflection of what you are as an individual, an organisation or a society and that is what you have to fix"

This was why I got into blogging all of those years ago. If the internet is going to be a good thing we have to be in there making it good. Like society we have to take part, stand up and say what we think, and behave in ways that will make the internet somewhere where our kids can learn, grow and connect with each other and not somewhere where the darker side of life prevails.