Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Earlier this year, Eat24 wrote an impassioned breakup letter to a metaphorical lover. The web-based food delivery service had used Facebook to accrue more than 70,000 “likes” and reach consumers on the social network.

... Over the last decade, the Internet has evolved much more hub and spoke”, IFTF Fellow Jamais Cascio explained. “Everything has to go through the major services. The idea with the second-curve Internet would push back into that other model. Peer-to-peer, mesh focused, and getting away from those central points of control and failure.”

Cascio’s colleague Mike Liebhold uses the Greek myth of Icarus as a metaphor for the “brief historical moment” where a first-generation distribution of online ideas has proven to be vulnerable. He concludes that just as humans surpassed Icarus in their knowledge of how to build a better aircraft, the Internet’s second curve will distribute knowledge more appropriately. Publishers are, and always have been, curators of content created by experts. The second curve will involve online knowledge networks where both internal and experts can collaborate....