Conclusion:
The Evolving Conversation of Content Nation

If you are reading this book after its appearance in print then our next President of the United States of America has been elected already. As I wrap up writing this book the election is in full heat, with many familiar themes being emphasized by the candidates and the polls of voters showing a close election ahead. Regardless of the ultimate outcome of this election, though, one of the most telling moments in the growing power of Content Nation happened just a few days ago when the campaign for Senator Barack Obama made its announcement of his choice for a Vice Presidential candidate not by television or radio or print journalists but through email and instant messages.

At about 3 a.m. in the morning on the day of the announcement hundreds of thousands of people were told about Obama's choice of Delaware Senator Joe Biden - including journalists for major news organizations who wanted to make sure that they were able to put out their reports on the announcement as soon as possible. Of course most of the people who were eager to hear this news had already received it. One of the most coveted scoops that a journalist could break as news was communicated to the public without the assistance of traditional pubilshers. Journalists have played many important roles in this election, but this announcement to the public without the press playing a key role is indicative of how far Content Nation has come as a global nation of publishers. People delivering their own messages to the world is now the most powerful means of communication.

If I were to choose one thing for you to take away from having read this book it would be this: you cannot underestimate how much our lives change when anyone can publish to everyone in the world. In ways sometimes small and sometimes enormous social media has the potential to change our work, our lives and our future in ways that would have been almost unthinkable only a couple of decades ago. Human productivity can soar to unimagined new heights. Markets can work far more efficiently and effectively to meet the needs of people on a more personal basis. Entertaiment becomes not a passive experience but a participation sport in which anyone can play with anyone else. Politics can move into the hands of the people who politicians are meant to serve. Society can both reclaim its roots as a means to connect people to one another through bonds of true altruism and leverage the most advanced forms of human organization to achieve astounding global and local goals that challenge some of our most basic assumptions about what humans can achieve as individuals, civilizations and every scale of organization in-between.

Perhaps most exciting of all social media offers us the opportunity to consider what it is to be human in ways that humankind has not been able to explore effectively for thousands of years. When the people with whom we build close bonds and upon whom we rely for success in life could be anywhere in the world from any walk of life, the potential for our future as a species of life on this planet takes on a new and startling form. Instead of the organism of centralized civilization holding the keys to our bonds of altruism through publishing we have been handed back those keys to create our own new civilizations as we please. Many will choose to enhance very traditional forms of human existence through social media, enlarging the rim of the "Big Sombrero" culture and economy with many rapidly evolving and shifting points of highly valuable collaboration and production, which can scale to mass goods and services very efficiently.

In enabling major shifts in where value is produced in human society we will not be throwing away the adantages and legacies of modern civilization. Instead, we will be leveraging them to support new forms of value, allowing mass production and mass culture to benefit us when and where it pleases us but being able to produce more value independent of the highly centralized distribution and control mechanisms of traditional civilization. The culture of artificial scarcity, encouraged by highly centralized publishing and marketing mechanisms, will give way through social media to a culture more focused on identifying and exploiting the natural abundance of human insight and innovation rapidly and efficiently, enabling more people to collaborate on projects large and small that respond to the threats and opportunities in a changing world more effectively.

In the process of becoming a society focused on exploiting the abundance found in human abilities we are likely to see political changes as well. It will become ever harder to communicate political themes and objectives that don't have authentic support from everyday people. If the era of television ushered in mass communications that enabled the selling of politicians like tubes of toothpaste social media ushers in the era of politics in which most facts impacting politics and policies are known instantly and openly. Political victories go to politicians who know how to influence grass-roots political conversations most effectively - again. Like many things in social media, the transformation that can come in political circles is less about technologies than it is about the ability of those technologies to scale rapidly and effectively to any level of human organization to build effective bonds between people.

While many of our fundamental relationships may not change because of social media - we will still have families, friends, colleagues, customers and sellers - social media expands enormously the range of contexts in which we can form close and valuable relationships and to focus rapidly on the most valuable relationships. The ease, affordability and incredible inventiveness of social media publishing platforms provide us with a wealth of models through which we can form and organize our relationships, making it easier for us to form new patterns of highly scalable communities knitted together through the altruistic bonds of publishing. We will still be human in all ways, but allowing our humanness to transcend artificial separations and bonds in favor of bonds that are closer to our natural relationships with one another. With social media our humanness may take on new patterns in our relationships but the cloth of humanity will be made more whole than ever.

The future looks bright in so many ways in a world powered by social media - even if it cannot replace some of our fundamental human darknesses. Thinking of social media as a way to change the genetic code of civilizations encourages us to recognize that evolving who we are as humans is not something that need be frightening or troubling. Our world was designed for change and for adapting to change. Inconstancy is the only true constant in the natural world, reminding us that the stability that we seek oftentimes in our own lives is an illusion. Yet in the overall patterns of this world in the middle of constant change we can discover that our willingness to be adaptive to change enables us to find constancy - our civilizations become like the wind, on the move at all times but returning again and again to press things forward without the presumptions of permanency. Social media encourages us to release our civilizations from the limitations of hierarchical control and to enable highly adaptive and flexible forms of human comunication and organization to scale our ability to respond to change in ways that both dinosaurs and earlier mammals could not ever attain or imagine. With social media, the opportunities for humankind to survive and to thrive for tens of thousands of years and more never looked so good. Content Nation provides us with tools that will help humans to endure longer than the pyramids.

Continuing the Conversation: ContentNation.com

I hope that you have enjoyed this book and that it has stimulated ideas that you would like to share with other people. You can do this anywhere using the world's abundant social media publishing resources, of course, and I encorage you to do so. In exploring places to create and to experience social media I encourage you to visit ContentNation.com, the Web site at which this book was developed. At Contentnation.com you can experience content posted by me and other social media enthusiasts and become a member of Content Nation to add your own content; you can also create articles, weblog entries and forum topics, build pages that embed content from other sources, build feeds of content that can be integrated elsewhere and much more. Members of ContentNation.com may be invited on occasion to meet at special events and to join forces to develop new publishing projects that will carry the concepts and the content of Content Nation to others around the world. Regular weblog entries and topics posted for discussion will stimulate your own ideas - and help you to meet other people interested your particular focus.

This book is just the beginning of the story of Content Nation. You and other people who wish to influence the world through publishing are the next chapter in the story of Content Nation - a story about influential publishers whose legacies of creativity have brought us so many new ways to survive and to thrive that will endure for many years to come. The story of Content Nation remains a story about you - one of the millions of people around the world who has the power of global publishing at their disposal to change our work, our lives and our future.

The world is a nation of publishers. Be a citizen.