Every Web page we see has a person behind it.
One of my favorite excerpts from influential 1999 book, The Cluetrain Manifesto, a call for the human in communication, including the Web. The whole thing is still worth reading and re-reading.
The voice emerges literally from the body as a
representation of our inner world. It carries our
experience from the past, our hopes and fears for the
future, and the emotional resonance of the moment. If
it carries none of these, it must be a masked voice,
and having muted the voice, anyone listening knows
intuitively we are not all there.
David Whyte, The Heart Aroused
I'm a potter's kid. When I was growing up, we always had red-brown carpet and rugs to help hide the terra-cotta dust we tracked home from Dad's shop. I have fond memories of watching Italian potters with doorway-wide shoulders spin clay into forms larger than myself, effortlessly raising planters, lamps, bowls, and jars from undistinguished lumps of mud, one after the other, parading dozens of seemingly identical forms across the studio floor. Whenever I see a large thrown shape, I remember the first time I tried to throw twenty-five pounds of clay, thinking I would start with less than the sixty or seventy pounds I saw growing like graceful mushrooms on my dad's wheels. I landed flat on my back, shoulder blades bruised, smelling twenty years of clay dust on the wood floor beneath my head, as the misshapen lump of clay took advantage of my first indecision, knocking me from the wheel and covering the studio wall in red mud. You can't learn to throw large forms without losing lots of them in the process.
Pots are made by people. Large ones especially remind me of that human authorship. Smaller things -- mugs, cups, pitchers -- touch me as well. They're fitted to a potter's hands, reflecting their measure. I can gauge the size of the artisans' hands, the length of their fingers, from lips, spouts, and pulled handles. There's so much more life invested in a thrown piece than in anonymous cast or stamped ware. A medium such as clay, elevated and transformed by human shaping, bears witness to the life that molded it into something more than plain stuff.
When experienced potters describe their craft, they often talk about seeing the form they're creating in their mind's eye, applying force to make the spinning clay match its virtual, internal archetype. There's an incredible amount of practice, failure, and learning that has to take place before we develop the courage and surety to trust such an internal, private muse, to ignore the contrary opinions of others and do what we know will succeed.
Despite too many years spent behind keyboards and display screens building software, creating Web sites, and generally using technology more than is good for me, I'm still a potter's kid. I consider myself an artist and a craftsman, and bring a craftsman's attitudes to my work and life. One perspective that seems to surface with some regularity is a deeply instilled obligation to do new work, create stuff people have never seen before. It's a peculiar approach to life, picked up mostly by osmosis at some early age from my parents and relatives. In execution, it's a standard requiring constant exploration and reinvention, but also a certain studied ignorance of what's considered right and proper. There's a bit of irrationality in believing that if I follow my own intuition and, at some level, don't pay attention to what other people think, I'll create unique works that will surprise and delight. Artists have a stubborn faith in their ability to create newness from next to nothing. This faith shapes their work, enables them to establish themselves as individuals, fingerprinting their way through their medium.
What's this got to do with business? With organizations? Lots. Most of the creative people and knowledge workers organizations depend on, those whose sense of self-worth is centered in the pride they take in the work of their heads and hands, will have an immediate "been there, done that" reaction to this description of artistic identity. From the electronic pressroom gang, to the MIS boiler-room toilers to the hackers building an insurance-entitlement management app to increase next year's sales -- all have some of the attitude of the craftsman. People in high tech take pride in their work. They are individuals who see the details of the things they produce in the light of the trials and triumphs they experience while creating products. In the courage of creation, they find a place to hang their individuality. Programmers and techno types appreciate elegant, spare code and the occasional well-turned architectural hack. My accountant friends get off on clever spreadsheet macros, and on being able to slant this quarter's results to shade meaning within the arcane constraints of the law. Even managers leave their telltale fingerprints on their jobs -- the well-coached team rising to unexpected heights, or the business relationship blossoming into a long-term sales annuity. Some people apply a craftsmanlike care to their work, and their voices are heard, remarked upon, and recognized as uniquely theirs.
The Web is no different. Every Web page we see has a person behind it. Sometimes their individual decisions are eroded and digested by being passed through a corporate colon of editors, gatekeepers and other factota, but there are clear signposts to individual care and concern on much of today's Web. While all print and broadcast media have at least some indirect personal authorship, there's a key difference on the Web. The percentage of "raw" content published, direct from a creator's fingers to our eyes, is much higher than in traditional media. The Web's low cost of entry to publishers, both small and large, and the amount of unfiltered chat/newsgroup/e-mail text finding its way into search engines guarantees our daily browsing experience has a very strong flavor of individual authorship. Inevitably, our heightened awareness of distinct, individual voices engenders the urge to talk back, to engage, to converse. The software and mechanisms developed helter-skelter for the Net cater to these urges. Chat, free e-mail, automatic home pages -- all reinforce our feeling that not only is it easy to enter into discourse with others, but also that we're by-god entitled to wade into the conversational stream. Heaven help you if you get in my way, or try to stifle my voice.
The good or bad news, depending on your perspective, is that it's hard to fake your end of one of these conversations. Ever been on the phone with a friend or coworker while sitting in front of a computer and trying to read or respond to e-mail when your wire addiction gets the better of you? I'm very good at multitasking, and can fool many folks some of the time, but I get caught more often than I'll admit. (By my wife, for instance. Every time.) We can tell when someone is engaged, listening, responding honestly, and with his or her full faculties. We're wired to interpret subtle clues telling us whether a person is all there, if we're the center of their attention, if we're being heard. No matter how starved for detail our communication channel, our brains manage to get a gestalt reading on the other party's presence.
In the same way we distinguish personal attention from inattention, we can tell the difference between a commercial pitch and words that come when someone's life animates their message. Try snipping paragraphs of text from press releases and a few pieces of printed person-to-person e-mail. Shuffle the paper slips. Hand the pile to your office-mate, your spouse, or your next-door neighbor. Can they sort them? Of course they can, in short order. People channel from their hearts directly to their words. That's voice. It comes of focus, attention, caring, connection, and honesty of purpose. It is not commercially motivated, isn't talk with a vested interest. Talk is cheap. The value of our voices is beyond mere words. The human voice reaches directly into our beings and touches our spirits.
Voice is how we can tell the difference between people, committees, and bots. An e-mail written by one person bears the tool marks of their thought processes. E-mail might be employee-to-employee, customer-to-customer or employee-to-customer, but in each case it's person-to-person. Voice, or its lack, is how we tell what's worth reading and what's not. Much of what passes for communication from companies to customers is washed and diluted so many times by the successive editing and tuning done by each company gatekeeper that the live-person hints are lost.
Authenticity, honesty, and personal voice underlie much of what's successful on the Web. Its egalitarian nature is engendering a renaissance in personal publishing. We of genus Homo are wired to respond to each other's noise and commotion, to the rich, multi-modal deluge of data each of us broadcasts as we wade through life. The Web gives us an opportunity to escape from the bounds imposed by broadcast media's one-to-many notions of publishing. Nascent Web publishing efforts have their genesis in a burning need to say something, but their ultimate success comes from people wanting to listen, needing to hear each other's voices, and answering in kind.
