Plato's cave and the social web

The road from the boom years of speculative growth to where we are now has been long and rocky. Those were years built on easy enrichment rather than efficiency, where individualism was the defining trait and countries grew at close to four per cent on the back of construction, surrounded by symbols advertising a status that credit was quietly paying for.

The move from that social order, now in its death throes, to marketing and advertising built on matching real needs with real interests is a shift from one extreme to the other. Trust and commitment sit at the centre of what works now.

Consumer and producer became the same person

Today users and consumers, producers and customers, are one and the same. Freed from symbols that no longer persuade anyone, they have open access to knowledge and have broken the chains of the misinformation that came with the isolation of the years before the internet, and far more sharply since social networks settled in as a way of life.

The parallel with the cave

In Plato's Republic, prisoners chained in a cave take the shadows projected on the wall for reality, because shadows are all they have ever seen. One of them escapes, sees the world as it is, and returns to tell the others, who do not believe him.

The parallel with the years before the social web is hard to miss. Audiences received a version of reality shaped entirely by whoever paid for the broadcast, with no way to compare it against anything else. What changed was not that advertising became honest, but that the wall stopped being the only thing people could see. Anyone can now check a claim against a hundred other opinions in seconds.

That is why training and knowledge matter more than technique. The tools change every few years. What does not change is that an audience with access to the truth eventually finds it.