The boy in the bubble and the baby with the baboon heart

I have mentioned before I learned my trade within the field of corporate communications and this post looks at communication issues from an organisational, as opposed to an individual level.

About 2.5 billions years ago, in the opening stages of the evolution of life on earth, tiny single celled organism created a problem for themselves. Cyanobacteria, as these simple forms of life are called, evolved a process called oxygenic photosynthesis, which takes carbon dioxide and water and produces stored energy (in the form of hydrogen carbon bonds) and pure oxygen.

This caused a problem for early life on earth because oxygen is a very reactive substance and once these early organisms had produced sufficient concentration of oxygen, this waste product destroyed their simple unprotected structures and killed them.

This Great Oxygen Crisis, as it is known to science can be an allegory for our own problems relating to global warming - but if we look at this issue on a technology level we can use it’s lessons to understand other facets of the world today.

On the one hand photosynthesis was a great technological leap over the previous technology, but it also caused problems for other systems which hadn’t evolved the capability to deal with the by product of this new technology.

The good news is that this problem wasn’t insurmountable here on earth, as you may have gathered, but it took a great deal of time and effort for life to work through the issue of oxygen.

Once organisms had evolved ways of coping with high levels or oxygen within the atmosphere, however, they could use this oxygen to fuel much more complex biochemical reactions; reactions that our own biology depend on to this day.

Social media is like the Great Oxygen Crisis

There are parallels between the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis and social media. In this metaphor social structures such as organisations replace organisms and technology replace genes and their resultant proteins.

Information technology, like oxygenic photosynthesis, provides organisations with a great advantage:

• Oxygenic photosynthesis allows organisms to turn the abundant energy of the sun efficiently into storable and accessible energy.
• Information technology revolutionises the way organisations store and communicate information, particularly financial information, which is the lifeblood of an organisation.

Like the effect of oxygen on unprepared and vulnerable biological processes, social media eats away at the organisations that have created it. It is very hard from a corporate communications point of view to even understand social media, because it is made up of the interaction of individuals, a level of abstraction below an organisation.

Social media also gives individuals the same capability in terms of reach that until recently organisations had a monopoly on, which has the potential to damage the large and costly consumer brands organisations have spent decades building.

So what?

Life on earth struggled with the problem of an oxygenic atmosphere for millions of years, before evolving the mechanisms to cope and if this metaphor is valid, we may be able to use it to predict what will happen as organisations struggle to cope with social media.

Like it did for early life, it will take time for organisations to reconfigure themselves to cope in an environment full of social media, but once they have evolved ways to deal with this new form of “oxygen”, organisations are likely to explode in numbers and complexity, in forms we can’t even begin to imagine.

One final point

Some early organisms had the jump on others in dealing with oxygen as they were already exposed to an oxygenic environment prior to the Great Oxygen Crisis and these organisms already had the technology to deal with oxygen allowing them to flourish in the new environment.

Are there organisations that have already evolved the skills and structures to cope with the new social media environment?