Business

Saturday September 26, 2009

A revolutionary guide

Review by Abby Wong


Create Your Own Economy
Author: Tyler Cowen
Publisher: Dutton

EARLY this year, Mr. K, an Australian colleague, teased me for installing cable TV. He said that was so 1990 and that I was so old fashioned. I smiled and did not take the remark as an offence because there was much truth to it. Indeed, who needs cable TV when you have the Internet?

Mr. K did not know, however, that the cable service was for my then 15-month old daughter and he, I figured, must have been fooled by my austere look and the old-fashion iPod I was proudly carrying to work. To him, I could be a stranger to Facebook, Myspace, or Twitter, and that the word ‘torrent’ truly meant downpour in the World Wide Web.

As a bookseller himself, Mr. K must not judge a book by its cover because I am, as Tyler Cowen describes in this book, an infovore – a person who has a voracious appetite for information from the Web and knows how to obtain, organise and categorise it to suit his or her own needs.

While my quaint looking iPod is blasting Black Eyed Peas’ Boom Boom Pow, a chart-topping song with lyrics that rant about the digital future, my RSS reader is sending me a deluge of news from over 100 websites or blogs that I have signed up for, making me a cool conversationist in more topics than ever.

I am able to connect with my friends in Facebook, and extended my social network in Twitter, through which I read about other people’s opinions on current issues. I have become, hence, more in sync with the situations in Malaysia more than ever, despite being thousands of miles away.

Furthermore, as an infovore, I am creating my own economy.

Never have I thought of it this way, that I have been doing my own micro-management in my own little world. But I am. No longer calling my stock broker in New York to place an order, I now trade online, making investment decisions based on information given to me through the web.

I share my trading experience with my Twitter friends, from whom I am also learning. I trade while my iPod keeps me company, song choice through which depending on whether I am in or out of the money. I am making the bastions of investment consultants weep because the advice that I used to have to fawn from them is now information readily available at my finger tips.

Cowen’s conceptualisation of these activities that I have all the while been doing makes me excited about the future.

But he goes deeper than just presenting clever concepts and offering acute insights. The main idea in this book is we have moved into a culture where we are constantly ordering, mixing, framing, categorising, orientating and re-orientating the input of information and creating our private web-based environment that is best suited to our own needs.

This remix culture is evident in everything from iPods, blogs, Google, Facebook, Twitter to Kindle. This culture, in a way, has upended the old economic model and is changing the way we live and the way organisations conduct their businesses.

What do companies need to do with the advent of more advanced gadgets and web 3.0 in the future?

According to Cowen, the need for companies to be creative is now greater than ever. The value of a product now lies in not how it looks, but how consumers perceive it in their inner minds.

For products to be successful, companies must be able to create relationships between products and consumers, enabling consumers to enjoy the products in a more intimate and personal way.

By allowing us to order songs, reorganise them in lists and play them in random mode, iPods, for instance, are building a relationship between us and music.

The value of iPods lies in the connection we have with music and the whole new listening experience that it allows, as if we are discovering the songs for the first time.

Unorthodox it may sound, the fundamental currency of the web is not money, but squibs of pleasures from anticipating and trying. Companies need to understand that infovores love new information and only smaller bits of information encourage trying and discovering.

Hence, the most effective radio ads are two or three seconds shorter; the bestselling novels in Japan are written to be read from cell phones, while some of the most popular magazines only print articles a thousand words or less.

A behavioural economist, Cowen’s prose is crisp and energetic, and his demonstration of the current cyber-phenomena clear and awe-inspiring. Sadly, he did not do as he preaches while writing the chapter on Autism, a cognitive trait of which he likens to the way our minds process information.

The chapter is so painfully long that as an infovore, you will naturally skip. I did, and the thrill of discovering the rest of the book became greater.

Only Tyler Cowen, a super infovore, can put Autism, Facebook, marriage, Buddhism and so much more together and come up with a book which essentially is a revolutionary guide to the future.

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