Late last month there was a mini feeding frenzy in the office as people scrambled to register for Social Media Week. This event is a collection of gatherings themed around different aspects of social media, from blogs to tweets, mobile apps to mobile chaps (and chappesses), and evolution to revolution. We’re even hosting our own event on the intricacies of business to business social media.
After registering for some of the seminars my thoughts turned to the Marx Memorial Library just down the road from the Catalysis office (about 369 steps). Behind the library’s anonymous white-washed walls the seeds of socialism were cast into the towns of Britain and across the vast plains of Russia. Lenin spent a year working there, from 1902 to 1903, editing and printing Iskra (The Spark) a political newspaper smuggled into Russia.
Then the Gherkin, the popular name for an iconic office block, came to mind. If you stand outside the Marx library and jump and jiggle a bit, you can just make out the tip of this glass-framed, thrusting vegetable. From our office it marks the presence of the City of London which brought to mind the deregulation revolution of the late 1980’s when financial institutions were let off the leash.
And in those sometimes strangely illogically logical ways that we all have, I then thought about the dull tract of postmodernist, traffic-blighted, and poverty-raked urban sprawl that lies between the Catalysis office and the thriving tech hub that has been dubbed tech city or Digital Shoreditch.
Now, if you’ve got this far, you might be seeing a common thread in all of this. It’s spelt out in the header – revolution. The Marx Memorial Library marks the great socialist revolutions of the last century; the Gherkin signals the financial revolution of the last few decades; and tech city points to the revolution of today and the future.
Marxism, for all its noble ideals, foundered on the rocks of human nature, while financial centres are fighting to retain their gravity in the face of demands for rectitude and accountability. Yet, tech city and other technology hubs are quietly revolutionising the way we live, breathe and have our being.
In fact it’s no exaggeration to say that social networks, blogs, virals, tweets and other e-things have created a revolution that is arguably having a greater long-term impact than Lenin or the financial market makers. You don’t have to look far to see, at a global level, how social media is helping safeguard the future of humanity by enabling human dignity, freedom of opinion, freedom of the press, the right to protest and sustainability in business.
Social Media Week focuses on the impact of social media at a microcosmic level by exploring the component technologies in different areas. These range from business to journalism and corporate communications, to education and the environment.
In a sense the revolution is being put under a microscope and it’s a great opportunity to see how the potential of social media is being harnessed. But given that revolutions tend to bubble up spontaneously, and this one is not going away, at Catalysis, we’re trying to stay one step ahead of the curve and understand where the next social media fuelled changes are coming from.