Preoccupation with Occupation

When you see an “occupied” sign on a restroom these days, do you think of it differently?  Personally, I picture folks camped inside with tents and generators and cooking pots and placards.  Whatever else the Occupy movement has accomplished, they’ve certainly changed the meaning of the word for all of us. It will never be the same again.

That’s the power of the crowd + media. It enables ordinary people to occupy the space.  I was talking to someone the other day about how difficult it used to be to get a book published.  Or to get a song aired.  You had to know someone, or be extremely lucky.    Influence was the province of the affluent, well-educated and connected. Today, everyone can publish their work or post a song to YouTube.  Heck, anyone can even make a dictionary entry on Wikipedia!

What does this all mean? 
Danged if I know.  I do know the crowd is very, very powerful.  We’ve always known there is strength in numbers.  And this can be a wonderful thing when harnessed wisely. What’s a bit dismaying is that I also know the crowd can be wide of the mark.  Wretched writers can get published. Tone deaf singers can become famous.  Urban legends can be passed ‘round and ‘round, and people will believe them.

Unless we’re proactive in harnessing the crowd’s power, consumers can potentially cause a business to veer off course, or off mission. The other night on the radio I heard a piece about an online game called cow clicker.  The inventor, Ian Bogust, created the game as a spoof on games like Farmeville.  He thought it was idiotic that folks would pay real money to buy props in games, so he created what he thought was the world’s dumbest game.  It consisted simply of clicking on cows to get points. That was it.  You clicked; then couldn’t click again for six hours.  Well… the crowd loved it.  They began demanding more and more.  Different kinds of cows.  Different ways to earn extra clicks.  Before long, the game inventor found himself acceding to the demands.  He got carried away, describing the encounter thusly:  Just like playing one, running a game as a service is a prison one may never escape.  He finally realized what was happening and killed the game with a virtual apocalypse.

Whoa! How do we stop the crowd from becoming an out-of-control mob from which we seek to escape?  The Occupy movement started to falter when it began to be perceived as rabble. We know the crowd has power to make or break us.  How do we harness this energy for good, and not become so preoccupied with the effort that we end up sowing the seeds of our own destruction?

We’re all now focused on occupying the cloud and sourcing the crowd.  Yet occupation takes time.  And it takes time away from other endeavors.  There’s opportunity, for sure.  There’s also lost opportunity.