Links = Passion + Voice

I’m quite nervous about speaking at the Nantucket Conference tomorrow (Tagline: “It’s on Nantucket. It’s a Conference. Did we leave anything out?”). This is a confabulation of about 170 people, mainly New England high techers with a slant toward hard core business and finance people. So, with my usual perversity, I’m trying out a presentation that is focused directly away from the bright light of money. I’m trying to communicate in 45 minutes what I think Small Pieces is about. That means getting abstract and conceptual in public. As I’m saying on my title slide: “Today’s debut is tomorrow’s rough draft.”

I want to end by saying the way in which the Web is ours because I think this is something that business usually doesn’t appreciate. We’re off having ourselves a good time on the Web, blogging with our buddies, emailing our pals, being who we are, and then we go to a business site and suddenly it’s all about them. “Oooh, aren’t our products just so gosh-durned splendid? Please sit still while we tell you all about them!” Bullhorn at a cocktail party. But I don’t want to say that the Web is “ours” in an Us vs. Them way. I mean that it’s putting us small pieces together in new ways.

So, I thought I’d try the following formulation:

The Web is nothing without links. It’s architected on links. But

Links = Passion + Voice

I put in a link because I care enough about something to send you towards it and away from my own site. And I do so within a context (a page, an email msg) written in my own voice. In fact, my choice of links is very much an expression of my voice. Without voice, the Web would be a mere information resource.

And this gets at what is for me the contradiction that above all others — e.g., the contradiction between the Web being both mass-ive and full of individuals who don’t become face-less in the mass — gets at the pull of the Web: On the Web we join with others who share our passions, but we do so in our own unique voices. Sameness and difference, the ultimate contradiction. If the Web lets us resolve such a basic duality — which means embracing both sides fully and simultaneously — no wonder it matters so damn much.

Now, let me pull back from the dread disease: Ontological Overstatement. It’s not as if we’ve never overcome this contradiction before. In fact, we resolve the duality every time we have a conversation with someone in the real world. The importance of the Web, in this regard, is that as a medium (because of its hyperlinked architecture) it enables the resolution of this duality on a scale we’ve never seen before.

(Oh, this should go over real well at a hard-core financial conference. Sigh.)

Categories: Uncategorized dw