Social customer care: Make your own spaces!

I was reading a great post the other day by Steve Collis (@steve_collis) – Facebook is the East India Company. The idea that really resonated with me was:

“Now we have information technology, we are able to create new spaces. It is as if, rather than sailing to new countries to conquer and exploit them, we now create new spaces, to conquer and exploit them.”

Companies now have the opportunity to create these ”new spaces”, these “new geometries. New lands”, in a way they have never had before. The notion that companies can simply ’create new spaces’ (almost at will) is an incredibly powerful and far-reaching one, just as is the thought that each one of us, whether employee, customer or bystander can do so as well.

But, these new lands, these new spaces, require different ways of thinking, different ‘literacies’, gestures and currencies to converse with each other, to exchange ideas, to pursue serendipity; to ultimately take leaps of faith.

The irony is that at the very moment we have the power to create, to conquer, to exploit, we lack the conviction to do so. We revert to type and seek refuge (perhaps subterfuge) and comfort in discussions about privacy, ownership and value. Sooner or later, even these old chestnuts will require us to learn a new or different set of literacies to be able to talk about them.