You can’t fight the network- Jump Point

In follow-up to my last post about the book “Jump Point” by Tom Hayes, he predicts the explosion of nodes within networks with a reproducible velocity that will create a point in time in the next few years(2011) that will be a very recognizable leap or “Jump Point” to a whole new way of global existence.

One of the driving issues that he challenges us with is that we “can’t fight the network”. Here is my favorite quote in that section…”a customer is the shortest line between two other customers”. The network is based on a myriad of technological connections all over the globe, but ultimately it is a seemless relationship from person to person. You and the people you work with and the people that attend your church and the people you are trying to reach will be connected.

I remember the early days of small home type groups in the church. One of the big concerns was control. In a Sunday School environment you could carefully manage content and physical presence of all who participated, but small groups introduced a whole new element of “outside the walls” decentralization that was more difficult to monitor. After all, what if they taught heresy? What if they got upset with the church and were leading people to other churches? And that does happen, but we have all discovered that the benefits of a decentralized home small group system far outweighs the handful of problems that surface.

So now we are talking about a decentralized structure that connects people in your city, your state, the US and around the globe. How are we going to “control the network”? The answer is we can’t.

We will not control the network. The technology that leads us to the Jump Point will be freewheeling and abundantly flowing with masses of people and masses of information.

The network will be viral. The network will be people driven. The network will be populated by communities. It will be self organizing and will leverage affinities to create a universe of “small worlds”. The networked world is constantly getting bigger and smaller at the same time. While scale makes the network more valuable, the value of the individual grows in the affinity based communities that will form.

It’s not about control, it’s about leveraging.

With the same simplicity of an over the fence conversation in our backyards, we will be able to have a video chat with a friend in Afghanistan or China or Africa…from our phone.

That will change everything. Better be thinking about what you will say.

We better not fight it. How will you leverage the network?

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~ by Bob Seymore on August 19, 2009.