Dogma 2.0 - The rules are there ain't no rules

This is the fourth post in my series on the A - Z of 2.0.

Get a pen & paper, or open Word or an email client, or whatever it is you use to take notes. Please watch the below video, and write down the first thing you think when it finishes. I'd love it if you shared it with us in the comments.



Indeed, we are going to have to re-think a few things. I've written in the past about not necessarily being right, just being least wrong. It is almost impossible to talk in absolutes these days - in Borders 2.0 I said the lines don't run where we say they do, this begs the question "Do the lines run anywhere at all?". The direction, if any, points not to a particular destination, just to an idea; open beats closed. The direction points endlessly to being open.

Transparency itself is a funny thing; for some reason it terrifies our selves, yet we respond to and admire it in others. It is interminably linked with confidence, an idea of "I don't care if you see what's in my bag of tricks, because what is important is not what I do, but the way I do it". If I can put the rabbit into the hat myself, and yet still be surprised when it comes out, I can remain one step ahead, because the trick becomes "How did I get this thing inside my hat!??!" and not simply what may or may not be inside it.

You see it in music a lot, chord progressions, melodies and harmonies designed to elicit a certain effect. I can tell you that playing a B over an E chord will produce a pleasant sound, or I can tell you to listen to the chorus of this song and you'll smile when you hear it. There are rules that work, for whatever reason they work, but when put in the wrong place the effect is nil.

It doesn't matter what you do, it is how you do it.

Last Sunday I caught up with some friends and met a whole bunch of other people I didn't know. Two guys, entering the last few months of their degrees were talking about plans after university; all their friends were starting their careers, meanwhile these two wanted to jump on bikes and ride around Europe for the summer. They felt an extraordinary amount of pressure to play by the rules, to find a good job, to start their careers. They were still bound by the dogma our parents worked through, and hadn't realised yet things were no longer as they seemed. They have their entire lives to build a career, and what nobody is telling them is they can get on their bikes and ride into oblivion, and their careers will still be able to be begun when they finally get off.

People, old and young, underestimate, endlessly underestimate the power of passion. There is a light in the eyes of a person when they start talking about things they are passionate about, an energy in their voices that cannot be manufactured. In this moment people are their most transparent, most honest, most happy not to fake it. They're speaking their truths, what is pure and personal to them, and it can exist outside logic and reason, outside dogma and regulation, and it can succeed when all evidence to the contrary suggests it will fail, because it operates in an entirely different schema to the one everyone else exists in.

Dogma exists to refine and control passion, which does about as much good as building a sandcastle in the middle of a sand storm. Somehow, for some reason, we've let that be par for the course throughout the bulk of human history. There exists such an extraordinary opportunity now for people to be who they are, to follow their hearts relentlessly. Dogma 2.0 says the rules are there ain't no rules, it says the lines don't run where we say they do.

It says open beats closed. So open up.

It's the only way any of us will get wherever it is we happen to be going.

I want it 'cause I want it 'cause I...

I have sometimes enviable, sometimes not enviable position of being THE digital guy in a small start-up dominated by traditional media folk. The ridiculous thing about the situation is it is a web-based business, and as such you would think the place should be flooded with people who live and breathe this stuff; the reality is the CEO, from a traditional media background has mixed feelings about online, even if he himself can't deny that it is the future, the whole future (and nothing but the future).

Being the Lone Ranger though does have its advantages. For example, I'm always the guy who finds the cool new thing to show. I run our weekly WIPs each Monday morning and always make sure to show people something they haven't seen before. The role is part educator, part evangelist, and if I wasn't the guy who people stared at when there were site errors, it would be perfect. They haven't quite gotten their heads around the fact that you can be the digital guy and still not know how the code actually works; telling them it's about understanding the philosophy behind coding more than knowing the code itself is an exercise in futility. Plus, I have guys who are good at that, and there's no room for doubling up.

This morning I showed them a great video titled "The Machine is Us" (found via Ian Tait's CrackUnit). This lead immediately into a conversation about YouTube and the web and how we should be more involved. Now, this should excite me, the fact that the company I'm trying to inspire to do things differently gets animated and discusses the medium's potential.

But it doesn't.

And it doesn't because instead of talking about how our company can get more involved, how we can talk to our audience and even what we want to say to our audience, people get bogged down on the medium. My company wants to be on YouTube, FaceBook, MySpace etc. because it is web 2.0 and we should be doing it. Not because they're excited about the conversation, they're excited about the medium. And if we have learned anything, it's that mediums are the least important part of the conversation.

Or, as was stated much more eloquently on Gaping Void, "The main thesis is that it's not the wine per se that is interesting, it's the conversations that happen around the wine that is interesting. And that is true for all social objects. People matter. Objects don't."

Until my company figures that out, the conversation is going to be decidedly Web 1.0. Of course having said that, that's why it's also an enviable position that I have. I get to focus that conversation, it's my job to make people excited about that. I have the good fortune to make a living by getting people turned on to possibilities they weren't aware of before; I don't know too many people who can say that.