WIFI Zone

Poblado de EL CUCO, el Salvador, Playa las Flores. 5:30 am


Surfing the Web & the Waves.

Rupert Murdoch: Oportunities of New Media

Companies that take advantage of this new meaning of network and adapt to the expectations of the networked consumer can look forward to a new golden age of media. Far be it from me to suggest that either I or my company have all the answers. No one does. But the future of media is a future of relentless experimentation and innovation, accelerating change, and--for those who embrace the new ways in which consumers are connecting with each other--enormous potential.
Rupert Murdoch. via Forbes

The Power of the Web 3.0 by Paul Hawken

Moore’s Law, which predicts that processing power will double in power and halve in price every 18 months, is meeting Metcalfe’s Law, which states that the usefulness of a network grows exponentially with arithmetic increases in numbers of users. These laws enable big corporations just as they do small NGOs, but the latter gain greater advantage because these new technologies amplify smallness more effectively than largeness. Large organizations don’t need networks; small ones thrive on them. Webs are complex systems of interconnected elements that link individual actions to larger grids of knowledge and movement. Web sites link to other sites with more links to other sites ad infinitum, creating a critical, fluid mass of information that evolves and grows as needed—very much like the response of our immune systems. At the heart of all of this is not technology but relationships, tens of millions of people working toward restoration and social justice.

From the book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming (Viking). Paul Hawken is the head of the Natural Capital Institute, and author of The Ecology of Commerce, Natural Capitalism (with Amory Lovins) and other books.
taken from the article: The instinct to save the planet, appeared in Ode issue: 43

Lesson four: By Paul Hawken.

"If everyone thinks you have a good idea, you're too late"

Chapter Eight: Mass collaboration is "framing" Corporate responsibility.

Where we’re heading

These three forces –the revolution of the social sector, sustainable development and the participatory media– converge in the dawning of the 21st century to generate a radical change in the way we communicate, do business, and cooperate with the rest of mankind. Each of these currents in turn drives the growth of the others.

The “tipping point”, that moment in which something that is unique will become commonplace, is very near. The signs are out there for all of us to see.

Ordinary people’s participation in the media cannot be turned back. While YouTube, Current TV, and AOL are supplying them with simple publication and edition tools (for blogs, photos, and videos), mainstream sites like those of BBC and CNN are demanding contents created by this rising and powerful army of citizen journalists.

From participatory journalism to interactive advertising

People who increasingly participate in the communications media question and reject unidirectional advertising. And the phenomenon is on the rise. The new individual become global citizen participates and browses the Net as part of his daily activities. He connects when and how he likes. He demands a new relationship with companies and the manner in which the latter promote the sales of their products. Accustomed to conversation (permalink), this individual asks to engage in dialog with companies and expects to be heard by them.

Companies that progressively adopt sustainability practices will be the ones able to engage into and sustain an authentic dialog with their clients. Those that have grasped the fact that, in order to stay successful, they must change their way of extracting raw materials and producing – and reduce their impact on both the environment and humans.

There are myriad consumers looking for corporate information on the Web, talking among themselves about the products they consume and the history behind such products, and reading company blogs. The post on Kryptonite the padlock manufacturer is one of many proofs of the existence of a watchdog community operating via the Internet. They observe, share information, denounce and reward the companies they identify with.

Conscious consumers are creating communities where they review the impact of corporate behaviour (check dotherightthing.com)


The power of networks

The new participatory media is making an unprecedented impact on the social sector as well. Online communities are the natural ecosystem in which change-makers multiply. The tools for this are out there and within everyone’s reach. Thanks to the use of available technologies, every day there arise more people who –like Rodrigo Baggio and Iqbal Quadir– create their own networks for social transformation.

As Bill Drayton said in words quoted above, “if we multiply the number of change-makers from 1% to 20% in the next fifteen years, that will be the most radical change ever witnessed since the agricultural revolution.” The participatory media will have achieved that – and more.

25% of Internet users participate in online communities. Glocalization ensures that, after conversing for hours with people from all over the world who share his interests, the new individual goes out to the street and starts building a commitment towards his neighbors, school, club, and community.

The new Internet, the Web 2.0 (blogs, vlogs, permalink, free software), is creating a space for conversation and universal community. Wikipedia and Ohmy, for their part, have shown that when the community claims ownership of the media, there grows a bond of trust that gives rise to a universal intelligence – where joint striving for the common good and collective building eradicate bad practices.

Our future lies in the weaving of virtual networks, held together by common values and issues. Social participation and sustainability are clearly two dimensions deeply related to awareness, responsibility, and growing commitment. And, faster than we can even begin to envision, the world is heading in that direction.

The media is here and the truth is out there. This conversation has only just begun.

On Corporate Responsibility for Planet Earth

On Corporate Responsibility for Planet Earth

by Yvon Chouinard
Read the whole essay

As an alpinist who set out to make gear for my friends and never thought of myself as a “businessman” until long after I became one, I’ve wrestled the demons of corporate responsibility for some time. Who are businesses really responsible to? Their shareholders? Their customers? Their employees? None of the above, I have finally come to believe. Fundamentally, businesses are responsible to their resource base. Without a healthy planet there are no shareholders, no customers, no employees. As the conservationist David Brower liked to say, “There is no business to be done on a dead planet.”

But what does behaving responsibly to the environment mean? It took me nearly 25 years in business to learn how to ask that question. It has taken another 15 years of trial and error to uncover the process that Patagonia – or any environmentally minded company – has to go through in pursuit of answers. I think I know how to break that process down to five steps. These steps apply to individuals as well as to companies who want to reduce the harm they do and make a difference.

STEP 1: Lead an examined life.
STEP 2: Clean up your act.
STEP 3: Do your penance.
STEP 4: Support civil democracy.
STEP 5: Influence other companies.

Conclusion

In the end, Patagonia will never be completely socially responsible, nor at any time soon be able to make a totally sustainable (“cradle-to-cradle” recyclable) product. We have a long way to go and we don’t have a map – but we do have a way to read the terrain and to take the next step, and then the next.

SlideShare: Educational Materials on Steroids.

Eco consciousness in Patagonia thanks to Youtube

The Morenito lake

Last summer the practice water skiing on some Patagonian lakes suddenly went out of control. A significant increase of tourism, the economic reactivation combined with state deflated gas prices summoned, on any given sunny day, dozens of outboard motor boat fanatics.
Powerboats took a preference to the wind-shielded, still waters of the Morenito.

The ecosystem was deeply impacted as the natural habitat of black-necked swans and rainbow trout gave way to oily and raucous sketches of risky crisscrossing wave trails.
While authorities were well aware of the situation they acted obliviously to the many letters of eco conscious neighbors, kayakers and fishermen.

The impact of Cybermedia.
YouTube changed everything; all I had to do was to post this short video describing a normal summer day.

Suddenly the reality was there, accessible to anybody anytime. Over a thousand visits to Youtube echoed the mails that people were interchanging on the matter. In no time, the video link was reaching the local authorities. Not just another complaint letter to be filed in a drawer.
Two months after the video was posted the practice of waterski on the Moreno lake was banned altogether.

The video.




The Municipality resolution.


A letter sent by a neighbor describing some of this summer events.

Hi Ernesto,

Just wanted to thank you for all you have done to recover the tranquility of our Morenito!

Your campaign was successful; there was no skiing in the lake.

Things were rather funny: the day after you left (and during my siesta...) a group of 4 boats arrived jointly, took as base Scioli's place and started skiing.
One boat even stopped at your floating sign and spray painted it.

Well, some 5-6 kayaks showed up trying to stop them. I jointed, with Marina, in our gomon - camera and Prefectura's resolution in hand.
We had some very unpleasant discussions with the Sioli's friends and a tough (but more or less reasonable) conversation with this Repetto guy.
They finally left.

Susana Jimenez organized for the next day a visit of Prefectura. They showed up by boat and car. Whilst the boat patrolled the area, Susana visited with the Prefecto
Some neighbors. Since than Prefectura comes once a week.

The other day, apparently a newcomer, started skiing and immediately an armada of floating devices covered the lake. We saw these people never again.

Doubtless all neighbors appreciate the new situation, it is wonderful to see the lake with sometimes more than 25 windsurfer, rowing boats, canoes etc, plus people swimming without fear.

Susana than also invested a bottle of nail polisher to clean up your sign.

When we left it was common knowledge in Llao Llao that the Morenito was off-limit for skiing, actually plenty of outside kayaks come to visit.

Mission completed!


Regards to everybody

J

The sign painted by disagreen skiers.

Chapter seven: The Global Citizen, Sustainable Development Consciousness

“The medium, or process, of our time – electric technology is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. Everything is changing: you, your family, your education, your neighborhood, your job, your government, your relation to the others. And they're changing dramatically".

Marshall McLuhan, communication theorist

A new individual is arising. For two years we have seen these people pass like a shadow, but we haven’t lost their trail. They are people who are conscious of their role in society and participate through the media. And the medium of our era is digital technology.

The new individual is a global citizen who is connected to the world and online. Not surfing but googling. These people don’t passively receive information, but participate – mistrust traditional media, and challenge them.


“Besides breathing, what else do you do more than 3,000 times a day? What you do, or rather what you get done to you, is receive thousands of messages aimed at making you buy something”. Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce

The new individual no longer watches a 30-minute news program or spends hours in front of the paper, but rather, on turning his personal computer on every morning (or entering a cybercafé), finds the news services he chose to subscribe to on the screen. He converses online and doesn’t want to be directed. He no longer writes to the paper’s “Readers’ Mail” page, but prefers the immediacy of Internet – and interacting to making speeches.

Signs: We are connected
• In Latin America, cell phones rapidly reached every social class and age group. Considered luxury goods or a working tool a few years ago, cell phones are now used by teenagers to send text messages (SMS) to their friends, by parents to know where their children are, by wives to know at what time their husbands will get home, and by those living in underprivileged neighborhoods, where telephone networks still haven’t arrived.
• Broadband connectivity is likewise reaching critical levels. Some access the new media via their laptop computers or iPods, and the majority of people do so at a cybercafé for less than 20 US cents an hour.
• 40,000 people participated in a cyber-activism campaign in Argentina. Encouraged by Greenpeace, they sent SMS from their cell phones so that Buenos Aires legislators would pass a “zero-garbage” law. It was a success.
• An amazing 500,000 million SMS are exchanged every year worldwide.

From consumer to selector
“By the time he or she finishes high school, an American teenager will have watched 350,000 commercial ads. The average adult watches 21,000 commercials a year. We are taught to identify car models rather than bird species, so much that we can identify a thousand brand logos but less than ten native trees. Besides breathing, what else do you do more than 3,000 times a day? What you do, or rather what you get done to you, is receive thousands of messages aimed at making you buy something,” remarked Paul Hawken in 1992, author, among other books, of The Ecology of Commerce.

The new individual, on the contrary, selects what he consumes, refusing to be overwhelmed and convinced by advertising to buy a certain product. Not accepting sales ads at face value, he wants to have things explained to him, wants to be engaged in dialog, to be heard – and is consequently more and more reluctant towards traditional advertising strategies.

The new individual does not reject consuming, but rather (since there was never so much information available regarding the history behind each product) makes, for the first time, purchase decisions based on companies’ ethical behavior. Pioneer brands such as American Apparel, Patagonia and Camper have made him used to reading labels, to learning which are the clean technologies and how his decisions can make a difference in issues of concern such as environment, labor and health. He is aware, and becomes a fan of trusted brands. He looks for authenticity and reacts strongly against deception and shallowness.

The new individual = The global citizen

Chilean students used SMS, MSN, and other Internet tools to paralyze all the schools in their country. With their students’ strike, they forced Michelle Bachelet’s government to promote a change in educational policies.

Local and global
According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project research entitled “Online Communities: Networks that nurture long-distance relationships and local ties”, some 45 million people who participate in online communities say that Internet has helped them connect with other persons or groups with shared interests, regardless of distance. Research also discovered that these virtual relationships are becoming offline interactions. “Internet also helps people increase their contacts with other people they already know and who live in their community,” the report concludes.

With regard to this, French-Canadian philosopher Hervé Fischer affirms that digital technologies offer more than one alternative to build a society that is more equitable and humanistic: “We have to go from the society of competitive loneliness to the society of shared responsibilities and solidarities. We have to create a ‘hyperhumanism’: a new social model based, like the digital hypertext, on links.”

Glocalization
That’s what the phenomenon is called. It refers to Internet’s aptitude for widening the social world of people who are physically far apart (global level) while at the same time connecting them in a deeper manner with the place they live in and their immediate surroundings (local level). It is thus that users start to gain awareness of problems afflicting their communities and to look for answers to those problems. They start wanting to cooperate, worrying about what happens on the block, at their schools, to their neighbors.

It’s just a few steps from this shared interest to the weaving of a web, a social and digital network. To thinking globally and acting locally.

The new individual:

• Creates.........................................Wikipedia
• Communicates ........................... RSS / Permalink
• Cooperates ..................................Glocalization

Chapter Five: Wikipedia, collective intelligence and the long tail participation

“The call is historic because it doesn’t issue from a political party. It issues from the Internet, and it’s democratic because there are cybercafés everywhere. The Web is the weapon, and that’s why old politicians don’t understand what’s happened. They only use it to look at naked chicks”.
Chilean student

Our global society is in the early stages of what could be a media revolution as great as that produced by Gutenberg’s printing press in 1448: the birth of the participatory media. The era of the mass media, which began in the twentieth century, is undergoing a crisis. The way in which people connect to information is being crucially changed by a series of technological modifications. There has been born a new force of citizen journalists, armed with photograph-taking cell phones, connected via the Web and with blogs as their means of publishing.
The question is how does one join the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what the final picture looks like? By starting at the edges. That is why we certainly cannot predict the exact shape the communications media will take as a result of this revolution. Neither do we know what kind of citizen will arise as a consequence of the use of the participatory media. But at the edges of the system we perceive signs of change whose impact we can already see.

The long tail
The Internet made a U-turn after the 2001 collapse of the dot-coms. After the bubble burst, the only survivors were the software, sites and proposals that form the so-called Era of the Web 2.0. And this is not just about the Internet – because, in its infrastructure, it implies not only access to the Web (which has been in existence for decades) but also a widely spread, always-online broadband access. An access in which uploading speed will soon match downloading speed.
In the new model, small sites constitute the majority of Internet contents. Google’s success (and that of its advertising service, Google AdSense) lay in reaching the entire Web – the extremes and not just the center, the long tail and not just the head.
Thus, the most competitive companies will be those that reach a critical mass of information thanks to users’ participation and transform said contributions into system services. The challenge: to turn clients and consumers into contributors.

Signs: I participate, you participate, we participate
• Around November 2005, 57% of American youths created Internet contents, from texts to photographs, music and videos (source: Pew Internet & American Life Project).
• You can browse over 25 million blogs in the Technorati directory. The blogosphere has grown 100 times in 3 years.
• In the relatively small market of Argentina, 1 million people are broadband services subscribers. In any small town in the country, one can use Internet at a cybercafé for twenty US cents an hour.
• An Online Publishers Association research carried out in February 2006 has shown that 69% of American users had seen videos on the Internet, that 24% did it at least once a month, and that 5% did it every day .

Ohmy News, CNN & BBC: The birth of citizen journalism
In South Korea, Ohmy News, an online newspaper created by Oh Yeon Ho, a journalist retired from the traditional media, receives 2 million visits a day. But his newspaper has no editorial office or staff, no war correspondents, no prestigious columnists. Just 33,000 ordinary citizens who contribute their articles. It also possesses a rating system that places the most-read notes above the rest. A further novelty: just as people at a bar or restaurant leave a tip, Ohmy News readers can make small donations when they enjoy their reads. One article made USD 30,000 in one day. But Ohmy News is not an isolated case. The CNN has just launched the CNN Exchange section for the rising citizen journalism – where the public can upload texts, photos and videos. “Send in your story. Share your ideas. Leave your mark,” they urge. The English BBC, through its website, also encourages its users to participate. In that country, photos taken with cell phones during the London metro attacks surpassed any expression from the traditional media.

Wikipedia, the collective intelligence
Wikipedia is the best example of a novelty – collective intelligence. This free, user-written online encyclopedia already boasts 1 million articles in the English version and is 12 times bigger than the printed version of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Over 100,000 people from all over the world have contributed to the building of it. It has more visitors than the New York Times and CNN sites, among others. And it has been in existence for only five years.

We, the media
Every second that passes, a new blog is created in the world, according to the blog-searching engine Technorati. 50,000 new posts (entries of information, texts, photos or videos) are entered every hour. And yet a blog is more than a personal page such as have existed since the nineties – the difference being that now the new technologies allow us to link one blog with another, subscribe, and receive a notification every time the blog changes. It’s not just a link; it’s a “permalink”. The permalink is what has transformed blogs from a publishing tool into a conversation tool. From this chaos of dialoging and superimposing communities, the discussion has arisen. The Chat appeared. A “we, the media” world appeared. A world in which the audience is deciding what’s important.
It was none other than Charles Johnson, a blogger, who discovered that a photograph from the international news agency Reuters about the Israel-Hezbollah conflict had been digitally adulterated. The agency had to apologize publicly and withdraw from its files that and a further 920 pictures taken by photographer Adnan Hajj, who was fired.

The time of the Mojos
Research on audience tastes indicates that people increasingly want local news, sports, entertainment, climate, and traffic information, and less agency-produced, long reports repeated ad nauseam throughout the media. People expect to be told shorter stories and to be given relevant information. Based on this information, Gannett, the greatest newspaper group in the world, is trying to make its journalists focus on more local issues. That’s why it has invested in “mojos” (mobile journalists) equipped with laptop computers and always out in the streets, where things are taking place that matter to the community.

Clip culture: vlogs
Towards the beginning of 2006, the vlog (video blog) Rocket Boom was being watched by 350,000 people a day , half of which are outside the USA. A perfectly ordinary girl who every day issued her own three- to five-minute television program on the Internet, giving her own peculiar vision of reality. The cost of producing that program? Twenty dollars a day, plus a USD 14,000 Sony HDV camera and a set in producer Andrew Baron’s apartment in New York’s West Side.
YouTube was born in December 2005 out of the simple idea of making it easier to upload homemade videos to the Web. A million videos had already been published before its official launching. Halfway through 2006, 50,000 videos a day had been uploaded, and people were watching some 100 million videos a day. And these are figures that keep growing.
Contents change, supporting devices change too. Multimedia reproducers become portable. Users download videos to watch in their iPods or cell phones. Entertainment has ceased to be a synonym for sitting on the sofa in front of a square box. Reception moments become more personal.

The end of the media as we know them
For the first time in more than a century, ordinary citizens represent a challenge to the few corporations dominating the mass media. Borders between audience and communicators become blurred and sometimes downright invisible. The old media model was “there is a source of truth”. The new model is “there are multiple sources of truth, and together we’ll determine which are the most important contents and values”. An Oxford professor’s blog can become as popular as that of a Shanghai secretary telling about the trivial details of her daily life in China. The decision is in people’s hands.

Challenges
Questions arise: How will the brands make use of these new media? How do they want to talk with the new, participative citizen? Even though the media may have become sophisticated, successful models demonstrate that their strategy is among the oldest – telling stories. The challenge is thus to tell stories that move, inspire and promote participation.

We Media final conclusions: The influence of online communities on corporate behavior.

As the Web evolves beyond 2.0, thank to open source participative software, people are finding each other online around shared interests, and although these thousands of active communities are not tangible, they are real, this is a not virtual phenomenon as many assume.
Geography is been redefined and becoming totally irrelevant as a Brazilian organic grower starts sharing real time information and content in an extremely efficient knowledge created partnership with a New Zealand farmer who shares his same passion.
This goes further than getting information from Wikipedia, it is no longer about downloading content, people are grouping in specialty communities revolutionizing decision making processes in a way it never seen before. Consumption, production and communication patterns are changing as people, influenced by others they trust online, share news, information create a collective intelligence and constructive partnerships. Since this is a web occurrence, most people are not aware of the enormous activity that is taking place online, since in our “real” world everything flows as usual, but we are about to get our heads up when Technorati will soon announce 100 million registered bloggers and MySace 200 million users online.
Since the demographics are so overwhelmingly young and the Millennials are not in power positions, we are not experiencing yet any real transformation in behavioral patterns nor corporate changes. But these adolescents, that are now partying online, will soon be making corporate, political, and consumer decisions in the real world. They are accustomed to watch little television, and since they access the news online they seldom read newspapers. They do not respond to traditional marketing campaigns or advertisers. They respond to each other. Their trendsetters are their peers on MySpace, people who they trust. Opposed to us, the boomers, they are not to be influenced by mass media, they decide for themselves.
They are accustomed to the constant exchange of ideas online; therefore corporate communications will have to change dramatically in order to dialogue with, and between, these new stakeholders.
As these increasing online communities seem to build themselves around common interests and goals, companies that want to develop relationships, will have to open up and integrate management, employee and customer blogs into a common blogosphere where product, corporate responsibility and customer information will be shared in Wiki like platforms.
Stakeholder’s active participation will probably outgrow customer reviews, and powerful new models of production and consumption will be created based on a new integration of community collaboration and self-organization.

We Media Miami conclusions (II): Participation, the end of anonymity, the demise of traditional advertising

Broadcasting and telecommunication managers initially envisioned Internet as another distribution conduit to channel more content and advertising to the rapidly growing PC user market.
It was aimed at the broadest possible audiences, those anonymous masses they already reached through their TV, Cable and Radio frequencies.
As such, Internet was initially thought as a download content distribution media and the same agencies that created advertising campaigns for corporations, cloned the simple and successful billboards into Web banners, convinced that the same business model would work.
It didn’t, as the Internet Ecommerce evolved to a Web 2.0 Me media, advertisers discovered that the same communication formula wasn’t working. The audience was different, it was not passive individual, but an active participant who actually expected companies to stop “selling” and start dialoging, who wanted companies to speak a common language, that of the participatory media. People were searching for relevant contents to be informed, to learn, but also wanted to construct a personal history, and participate. They were “uploading” and sharing personal information. And as the Millennials appeared, a new standpoint appeared regarding Web identities: the posted pictures, comments, preferences, recommendations and ranks. They tagged and linked and voted. And as the chat evolved to MSN and blogs, identities became relevant and as important as the participation itself.

Credit card numbers together with Ebay reputation and Amazon preferences evolved to information of who we are as people, our interests, in music, books, and media. Our passions, secrets and habits are increasingly shared with our MySpace friends, our new community. We entered a new era, that of We Media, an era of radical change for media companies and marketers.
As Chris Anderson states in his recently published book the Long tail & Long Tail Blog:
“Faith in advertising and the institutions that pay for it is waning, while faith in individuals is on the rise. Peers trust peers. Top-down messaging is losing traction, while bottom-up buzz is gaining power. A Company’s brand is no longer what the company says it is, but what Google says it is.”

Peer Word of Mouth is more important in the decision making process that a product advertising campaigns, as Zara the Spanish apparel company confirmed in a recent study: peer recommendations, accounted for 39% of the purchasing decision of their customers while conventional advertising only impacted in a 27%.

As Anderson points out, "remarkable democratizing forces are remarkably un-democratizing industries".

We Media is here.

We Media Miami conclusions (I): The death of printed newspapers

The death of printed Media in 10 to 20 years?

Although it seems impossible to Oldmedians, and most of them are skeptical or deny it, think of this: Millennials, this new user-generating content self publish generation, is just flowing out of high school and they are not accustomed to reading printed newspapers in order to access the news.
Most Oldmedians say "but.... you need to hold something in your hands to read it", listen up, if this is true, for those that have this habit, of holding something in their hands, known as “the hold & Fold” factor, EInc, out of MIT will be launching a revolutionary slim sheet that beams custom made information from the internet.
Sony’s reader, although not as flexible, will also be in the market this year.

But......Don’t underestimate the Oldmedians, Big media will catch up pretty fast, Oldmedians are listening. The We Media convention was outbalanced by these “media elites”, networking, listening and learning. Newspaper editors worldwide are learning from the blogosphere, and although it seams that blogs are to drive the mayor media, this will probably won't be so......

We media Miami

New media explained:


Via Chris Anderson, Wired

The revolution of the Civil Society Organizations and The Sustainable Development movement will be empowered by the advent of the New Media

By Ernesto van Peborgh
For LA NACION

Permanent link to La Nacion article

Towards the most revolutionary change


Wal-Mart, the greatest supermarket chain in the world, announced its commitment to the environment. Muhammad Yunus, the economist who created the first bank for the poor, received the Nobel Peace Prize. The giant Google acquired YouTube, a website whose only assets are millions of homemade videos uploaded by users.

These and other events that took place towards the end of 2006 are signs of three powerful forces that are changing the world: sustainable human development, the revolution of the social sector, and the boom of the participatory media.

Sustainable human development is a group of concepts and practices that allow us to consider what kind of world we shall bequeath to our children and the children of our children. It represents a profound change vis-à-vis the industrial model that was established in the Western world in the eighteenth century. This current implies a different look on our planet, companies and governments, and our way of producing, consuming, and living.

What is most striking about the times we live in is the sensation that the future is already here. In the last days of 2006, economist Thomas L. Friedman wrote: “We reached a tipping point this year — where living, acting, designing, investing and manufacturing green came to be understood by a critical mass of citizens, entrepreneurs and officials as the most patriotic, capitalistic, geopolitical, healthy and competitive thing they could do…”

The recent world release of the movie An Inconvenient Truth, starring Al Gore, established the problem of global warming once and for all as a current reality, no longer the paranoia of a few scientists and activists. In California, the State has sued six big automobile manufacturers for their liability with regard to global warming. Wal-Mart has announced its commitment to sustainability and, in so doing, has become the world’s greatest organic cotton buyer. It has started a plan aimed at having several of its suppliers sell it products manufactured through sustainable practices, in a term of three years. In consequence, some 40,000 companies are adapting their manufacturing methods to satisfy this giant that has resolved to change the habits of the more than a hundred million clients it welcomes every week.

Everything indicates that the “tipping point” (a term coined by Malcom Gladwell to define the moment when something unique and unusual becomes normal) is very near.

For more than 20 years, another powerful force has grown at a rate between two and three times higher than that of the private area’s economy. It is the global associative revolution: the rise of millions of organized citizens who are working to find answers for mankind’s most urgent problems.

The Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Muhammad Yunus is powerful proof that mankind is accepting social change ideas which –just like microcredit- have little to do with the traditional concept of charity and philanthropy. Through his Grameen Bank, founded in Bangladesh in 1976, Yunus demonstrated that offering trust and responsibility to loan recipients is an efficient way of solving the problem of poverty and of building peace from a community’s foundations. Thanks to this financial system, among many other positive consequences, eight million Bangladeshi people earning less than a dollar a day obtained access to cell phones, which allowed them to be better communicated from their rural villages and to improve their employment possibilities.

Yunus is no longer alone. According to Johns Hopkins University, the total contribution of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) makes them the seventh largest economy on the planet. They are true armies of people connected between themselves, whose aims are to protect the environment, to fight poverty, to defend human rights, and democracy.

Google’s acquisition of YouTube made headlines worldwide. This union marked the peak of a third phenomenon with the power to accelerate the process of the other two currents: the rise of the participatory media, which for the first time in history allow common citizens to be heard in the world stage. The tool is the Web 2.0. The platform is the Internet.

Time magazine has just chosen as “person of the year” the Web user, the one who, through his or her participation in blogs and sites such as YouTube, MySpace and Flickr, is generating unprecedented economic, social and political changes. In this new model, a Shanghai corporate secretary’s blog can have the same relevance as an Oxford professor’s. The decision as to what is worth one’s while is in the hands of the people.

Internet natives, teenagers between the ages of 12 and 18, participate in social networks such as MySpace and Fotolog, very popular in Argentina; Orkut, with a big following in Brazil; and Facebook, the favorite of American university students. Meanwhile, citizens of all ages are making their own news through blogs or sites such as Crónicas Móviles (“Mobile Chronicles”), where anyone can upload videos filmed with cell phones, showing –for instance- what is going on in the city: from Daniel Barenboim’s concert to the Gay Pride parade.

The advertising industry is already reacting to this change. Companies such as Unilever (Dove), Chevrolet, and Converse have understood the phenomenon: the massive audience that passively received “buy” messages is on its way to extinction. In the year 2006, Dove Canada –through Ogilvy Toronto agency- launched on the web a video entitled “Evolution”, which shows all the steps cosmetics advertisers follow in order to transform an ordinary girl into an artificial beauty for an ad. It is estimated that over three million people saw this campaign of viral marketing through the brand’s official site or social sites such as YouTube and Daily Motion.

But, besides revolutionizing advertising, journalism, and communications in general, Internet users are transforming the concept of citizenship. Chilean students –a mass of half a million youths united through the Web- have used social networks, chatting and SMS to empty all the schools in their country in their demand for a reform of the education system. They put into practice the phenomenon some call “glocalization”, that is, the Web’s aptitude to widen the social worlds of people who are physically far apart (global level) while also connecting them more deeply with the place they live in (local level).

Notwithstanding this, users’ interests are not circumscribed to the public sphere — they are also looking closely at corporate practices. There are a number of consumers who look for corporate information online, conversing among themselves about the products they consume and the history behind them, and reading corporate blogs. In 2005, a blog informed that motorcycle padlocks manufactured by Kryptonite, a leader company in the market, could be pried open with a pen. A few days later, a user uploaded a video to show that the padlocks were really “made of butter”. The company ignored these comments. Days later, the news appeared in The New York Times and an estimated five million people learned about the incident. Kryptonite had to announce that it would change all of its padlocks, at a cost of ten million dollars.

According to a recent Ipsos research, presented in Madrid in November 2006, 39 million Europeans have refused to buy a product after reading a negative opinion in a blog. What will happen with the civil society’s power of action after it has massively adopted these new communication tools?
What will the corporations that don’t progressively adopt sustainable practices do to stop the wave of citizens-turned-activists, informed through the new media?

The tools are out there, within everyone’s reach. 25% of Internet users participate in online communities. Solutions for the future lie in the weaving of virtual networks, united by values such as social inclusion, responsible citizenship, and sustainable human development. The world is moving in that direction faster than we can perceive. The change is here and people are talking about it — online, of course.

Chapter two: Sustainability, New media and social revolution tangle together.

A Brief Timeline

Man gets to the Moon and the feat is transmitted worldwide via the television. Shortly before, May 1968 in France had defined the ideas of a whole generation. After the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, the first ecologic organizations, such as Greenpeace, are born, together with the first environmentally-aware brands: Patagonia and Natura.
Some time later, Anita Roddick creates The Body Shop, a pioneer in responsible marketing. With the birth of Ashoka, in 1980, the transformation of the social sector begins. That same year there appears CNN, a 24-hour news channel. And, a year later, MTV and a new visual language. IBM launches the first PC to the market.
The accident of the oil tanker Exxon Valdez has the effect of allowing the ecologic movement to be taken seriously. Marketing begins to massively adopt “green” messages. Activist Chico Mendes is murdered in the Amazonas. The Berlin Wall falls and democratic systems gain footing in Latin American countries, allowing for the creation of citizen groups. The AIDS epidemic also encourages global cooperation in order to fight it.
During the ‘90s, companies such as Shell and Nike face problems for their way of producing, and must render accounts to society with regard to their behavior. Anti-globalization activists get the world’s attention in Seattle. Internet is growing fast and advertising companies begin to investigate online advertising.
The new century begins with the bursting of the dot-com bubble. But, shortly after, the “long tail” paradigm arises. Google makes it possible for small sites to be as important as the big ones. It reaches the whole of the Web, not just the center or the head, but also the ends. Blogs and free software, open to collective participation, are born.
During the terrorist attacks on the London subway, pictures taken with cell phones and promptly uploaded to Flickr, a software for sharing images on the Internet, surpass traditional media coverage both in speed and quality. It is the birth of citizen journalism. Towards the end of the period, Google buys YouTube for 1650 million dollars. Less than a year after its creation, the site created for everyone to upload homemade videos to the Web receives 100 million visits a day. WalMart, the world’s largest supermarket chain, announces its commitment to sustainability.
And the world keeps changing.

Chapter one. Welcome the most paradigmatic changes in the history of humanity

Rodrigo Baggio is a Brazilian social entrepreneur who has brought informatics schools to the favelas (slums or poor neighborhoods in Brazil) and has already introduced 500,000 people to the digital world through Internet.

American Apparel, a United States company, has achieved a 900% increase in sales in only four years by manufacturing cotton garments without logos, using organic products and paying the highest salaries in the garment industry, which is one of the most competitive.

Iqbal Quadir implemented the Grameen Phone program in Bangladesh, which granted access to cell phones to 8,5 million peasants earning less than a dollar a day. These, in turn, sold the public phone service to their neighbors, and have thus multiplied communication in rural areas over a 100%.

Natura, a Brazilian cosmetics company, has experienced a 32% growth in two years (as opposed to its competitors’ 20%) by centering its strategy in environmental care. Its brand value amounts to 113% of its annual sales, a figure to which giant L’Oréal’s mere 33% barely compares.

The above are just four stories – of individuals whose ideas changed the lives of many others, and of companies that found their competitive advantage in respect for the environment, employees, and consumers, and were rewarded by rocketing proceeds. But there are hundreds of other stories.

Two years ago, we started working with advertising agencies, media, companies, foundations, NGOs, and social entrepreneurs, in an attempt to better understand the tendencies that are transforming the world we live in and the changes they are making in corporate behavior, in governments, and in our lives.

We traveled to Mexico, Brazil, Chile, the USA and Europe to interview the CEOs of a number of companies, several of which are in the communications business, and we set up an Advisory Board consisting of scholars and businesspeople.

We thus detected three currents that converge in the same historical moment and have the potential for generating one of the most paradigmatic changes in the history of humanity:

- The revolution of the social sector: the rise of millions of people, organized in foundations, NGOs, and other associations, that are working and searching for answers for the urgent problems of our societies.

- An arising sustainable development conscience: a new consciousness vis-à-vis the planet, companies and governments, and our way of consuming, producing and living, which is optimistic about the possibilities the former involve, but has and will have a significant impact on corporate action and communications as we know them.

- The participatory media: where audiences no longer wait passively to receive information, but interacts, creates networks and communicates. Internet is today their platform par excellence.

We perceive a type of person that is beginning to see these tendencies, people who aspire to be global citizens and realize that these currents can take them towards the goal they are striving for. People who act responsibly, without ceasing to be “ordinary citizens” – who cooperate in social issues without being activists.

People who actually expect companies to stop “selling” to them and start dialoging – who want companies to be where they are, and to speak their own language, that of the participatory media. People searching for relevant contents to construct a personal history, to be informed, to learn and participate.

We know what these people want. We have the tools and speak the same language. We can communicate. We are no longer “Out There”.
We are here.

Sustainable Development Communication: Why is it so difficult?

Its a New Paradigm.

People need to see the world from a different perspective.

Until glass was invented people could not see under water.

Glass made things easier, it changed.. or rather it created a new perspective.



So will New Media. It is a matter of time..