Preamble - Chasing the Mammoth

It is eleven thousand years ago in central France. At the edge of a grassland stand a small band of humans, clad in skins and holding spears and equipment for camping and cooking.  The glaciers of the last great ice age have retreated far to the north, leaving behind a new landscape of plants and animals. Our hardy band of human ancestors are on the hunt, but the abundance of large game such as mammoths which their own ancestors had been chasing through the ice age for their meals has given away to a mix of bison, elks and plants with grains that are becoming the diet of these nomads. They are beginning to favor new techniques and tools for hunting and gathering to adapt to this environment - including the creation of more permanent camps to take advantage of more reliable food sources. If we were to check back with the great-great grandchildren of this tribe we'd probably see that their nomadic ways had started to give way to small village-like settlements with some permanent structures to store grains and a new concept that was evolving along with those structures - ownership of places and things. 

Most anthropologists date the origins of modern human history from such small village encampments that gave rise to ownership societies, societies that gave rise to another new concept - economies. With ownership came the growth of trading goods created through specialized skills, skills which would have been less able to create a sustainable lifestyle in nomadic societies. Construction, woven clothing, jewelry, decorations and crafts began to become the focus of human activities as agriculture and more convenient sources of meat simplified the basics of survival. Recently in Syria a dwelling fromten thousand years ago was unearthed that had walls decorated withcolorful and remarkably modern-looking patterns. It didn't take long for people to begin to think creatively about how to add value to their personal living environments once food on the table was more assured.

The concepts of a trade-oriented ownership economy and of adding value to one's personal environment eventually formed the cornerstone of the media industry. Ownership of hand-crafted enscribed monuments, scrolls and eventually books became a mark of distinction for the rich and powerful, spawning new industries of craftsmanship and distribution. From the days of the Roman Empire rich people would have their slaves record events happening in the Forum in Rome to be delivered to their villas in the neighboring hillsides. The first news services, then, were privately owned. With the rise of a merchant middle class and printing press technologies ownership of publishing and publications began to benefit great numbers of people, along with other mass-produced goods. Electronic communications via the media of radio, television and eventually today's Internet also have had growth predicated on a collaboration between high technology owned by content producers and mass-produced goods owned by content consumers. Media has thrived on ownership, and ownership in turn has used media to promote its growth.

But now new trends are emerging that are threatening the fundamental premises that underpin society's ability to deliver on previous expectations for ownership. One of the strangest and most fundamental things that's changing is as basic as what happens outside my home office window every day. It's now November in a Connecticut town outside of New York City and it's been a downright balmy Autumn. Again. Birds that are still in our backyard this time of year used to be native mostly to states hundreds of miles to the south only a couple of decades ago. Elsewhere record droughts and fires are straining the resources of the western United States while record floods are challenging European cities. Polar ice caps are receding to the point of endangering both animals and native tribes that have relied on their presence for thousands of years. The earth is in a period of major climate change, as major as the changes faced by our roaming band of nomads in a French field eleven thousand years ago. And like our ancient friends in that scene we're just trying to do the best that we can to get from one day to another.

Also like those nomads who had been chasing the mammoth and having to try something new to get by, getting life to work on a day to day basis today in an environment being shaped by rapid changes means recognizing that the changes that we're experiencing don't relate in scale very effectively to things that our grandparents or even their grandparents ever experienced. Strangely, though, today's human society seems to be pushing in the opposite direction from that prehistoric society's evolution - away from a sedentary life and towards a much more mobile human society that needs to look at opportunities on the run. Ironically, then, in an era of global climate change we seem to be pushing towards a society that in some ways may resemble those people who were chasing the mammoth at the end of the last great climate change - except that we're more likely moving towards a nomadic existence rather than further away from it. This movement, in turn, challenges the key component of our sedentary society's success - ownership.

The enormous scale of change in our increasingly mobile society is evident very noticeably in the publishing industry. As rapidly evolving electronic technologies such as search engines, mobile phones, weblogs and wikis have entered the awareness of average people we are witnessing a huge change in the climate for media production. Where ownership of publishing facilities and the technologies that delivered their output enabled end-to-end ownership of both the medium and the message, now we are beginning to see that the value found in publishing content is moving away from these relatively fixed economies. Once-unassailable media conglomerates such as TimeWarner, NBC and Pearson are giving way to publishers such as Google, Wikipedia and Facebook that enable value from content to be assembled on the fly by both technology and highly collaborative peers. In the past the concept of publishing value could be measured in the "village storehouses" of office buildings in New York City's Rockefeller Center or the thickness of a glossy magazine on a newsstand. Today's content value is as ephemeral as the last edit on Wikipedia a few seconds ago, your last search on Google or the last comment that you read on Digg or Newsvine. Its lasting value could be gone in about as much time as it takes an audience to consume it.

Already in publishing, then,  we are well along the road to a new kind of "chasing the mammoth" nomadic publishing culture - and already we are seeing the impact of those changes on human society in ways that are as fundamental as was the shift from stone-age culture to modern civilization. This concept became more clear to me after I had read the book Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. Don and I had both delivered speeches on a program about the future of publishing at the BookExpo USA conference a year before Wikinomics came out (I'd like to think that my presentation influenced Don's thinking as much as his book has influenced my current thinking!). Wikinomics chronicles how an increasingly collaborative global economy is creating value in business today.

At its furthest extension, though, I saw that the Wikinomics concept is really about returning human society to the pre-historic era of nomadic hunting tribes, which could shift their location and resources as needed to respond to rapidly changing environments without the need to have external hierarchies protecting land and other owned property through wars. Given the issues of our physical environment that are unfolding before our eyes the timing of the development of Internet-based collaborative and peer-based publishing may turn out to be quite fortuitous. These social media tools now at our disposal may turn out to be as important to our future as the bow and arrow turned out to be to early humans shifting from mammoths to elks as prey. In our new world of social media we are surely chasing value in elusive contexts as our ancestors were chasing the mammoth through the frozen landscapes of the ice ages. This insight lead to an important presentation that I delivered at the Buying and Selling eContent conference entitled "Chasing the Mammoth: Redefining Publishing in a Social Media Ecology " in which I created the outline of how social media's rules for success were not unlike those of our Ice Age ancestors' rules.

But the world of today's businesses, governments and other major institutions is certainly not ready for the most part to accept the depth of this kind of change in their own structures that's being fomented by social media. We're still in the era of publishers trying to turn wild animals of content that we chase in the nomadic social media culture into the domesticated animals of an agricultural culture, through which we can gather the herds into the barns for milking every quarter. This is an important goal for the here and now, but it is going to take more imagination than that to keep up with the rapid changes that social media are enabling - much as our change in global climate is going to catch many vested interests by surprise, including political interests as well as business and personal interests. Every one and every thing and every way that we do things is going to change more radically than most can ever imagine. But what does this really mean? What are the real things that need to be done in the rapidly emerging world of nomadic value and what will it wind up looking like in the end? And, most importantly, what do you and I need to do to change in order to make the best of these changes?

In other words, in a world where everyone is a publisher, what does it take to be a productive and effective world citizen?

This question tied into an article on my Web site that I had written six months before Wikinomics came out entitled "Content Nation: A World of Personal Publishers Declares Their Influential Citizenship."  In this article I laid out the premise that the number of people who were really serious about publishing via social media had grown so quickly that if you added them up they would be one of the world's more sizable nations. Taken in the context of today's social media environment little more than a year later it's fair to say that this Content Nation is well on its way to becoming a superpower. Its economic and political influence is becoming enormous and growing so rapidly that even the most starry-eyed entrepreneurs in California's Silicon Valley have a hard time putting their minds around the global scale of these changes. I could see that it would take more than just one clever fellow in Connecticut or even a few smart people to chronicle the importance of Content Nation and its implications for business, governments and other key societal functions. 

This realization led to the Web site ContentNation.com , on which this book has been developed - and will continue to be developed over time.  I realized that the only way to develop a book on the topic of Content Nation properly would be to invite Content Nation to be a key contributor from "day one." The courage to do this came from another fellow who was on that trend-setting program at BookExpo - Chris Anderson, then the Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine. Chris was in the process of introducing his book on The Long Tail , a concept that Chris had introduced in an article in Wired more than a year before that fateful presentation. Stacked before Chris were massive piles of the pre-release version of his business book, all part of the typical book publishing publicizing event.

Good stuff, I thought, and it was a good book, but this process was ironic, to say the least: here was the author of the seminal book on how the Web is enabling producers to reach smaller audiences of targeted consumers more effectively and more profitably then those who focus on mass goods and experiences for mass audiences and yet the crowning output was a book that was being rushed to market to take advantage of the latest trend while the publisher could afford to print it in volume. What if instead a book didn't start as a one-time volume publishing event but instead was something that became a publishing event of varying volume over time? What if books could adapt to the "chasing the mammoth" model and reap different kinds of rewards for different people at different times in the concept's lifecycle? 

ContentNation.com was established to start building a community for the Content Nation concept that can be used to create value for different people in different ways at different times. For those who visit ContentNation.com for the first time, it's a place where you can read about social media. For those who collaborate on the Web site, it's a social media community. For those who want to know the latest on these trends, it can be an ongoing news service. For those who want to keep abreast of how it all fits together, it's a subscription eBook with periodic updates that can be delivered either electronically or via print-on-demand services. For those who want to gather and discuss these concepts its an events community. And for those who want to share with others the Content Nation insight and experience on a commemorative basis or to build relationships via gift-giving, it will be a traditional book offered by traditional publishers in their traditional editorial and production cycles.

In whatever of these forms and modes you're reading this, welcome to Content Nation. It's a privilege to be a part of a movement that is literally changing human existence beyond all imagining - and a privilege to be developing and sharing that experience with you, fellow citizens of Content Nation.