Cyberia And Its Communication Riches

“Follow me” read the sole  of a Greek prostitute’s sandal, designed to leave imprinted messages in the dust on the streets of Ancient Greece. I really can’t think of a more literal way to depict how we, creating content and weaving messages into it, leave semiotic trails on the streets of the Web. Communicating on the Web, we do leave trails inviting for an action in the moving sand of all kinds of streams and communication paths our users straddle. And these trails are not only words, they are also data pieces. The questions are: How a user, foraging vast quantities of information at greater and greater speed with lower and lower attention span, woud pick our trail to follow? What signals shall we send so that we get noticed and heard somewhere along the messy journey of the people we want to exchange with? How do we imprint our message in the digital space, to save it from the dust of information noise, the forces of oblivion or the perils of miscommunication?

The answers, I believe, lie in understanding Cyberia.

Cyberia is a concept referred to by anthropologist Arturo Escobar in a co-authored article Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture [and Comments and Reply]^[1] . In this work, Escobar presents technologies as non neutral force, creating a new social order which he calls cyberculture. The focus is on the human-machine dynamics of societal, cultural and semiotic arenas where a variety of elements and agents interact, forming new ways of living, working, codifying and exchanging meaning.

I see our Web as that same Cyberia, full of wonder, ads, trolls, curiosities. As many challenging scenarios it breeds, it is also full of riches – communication riches, the grade of Alexandria’s library ones.

It is from this vantage point that in this part we will explore the dynamics of knowledge, writing and code when it comes to doing marketing communications on the Web..

In Chapter 1: From Manipulating The Marketing Mix To Managing Knowledge you will find a simple mental model that puts marketing communications on the Web in the broader context of the shift in communication and exchange which our networked society brought. The model is a tool for seeing web content in new ways and conceiving marketing as a practice for knowledge management, rather than a practice of manipulating the marketing mix.

In Chapter 2: The Content Conundrum we will talk about spaces made of writing and code, places woven of language and semiotic trails leading people to things and things to people. We will look at content as a communication artifact, interoperable data code and semantic capital to crack it open for dialogic experiences.

In Chapter 3: Let’s Talk About Text we will follow the internal and external weaves of text and the relation of textual content to language and messaging dynamics. We will also explore text as collaborative effort, as a special space and also as a marketing tool for making connections.