global spiritual evolution

I have exchanged emails recently with Evelyn Rodriguez of the wonderful Crossroads Dispatches blog about i-together and the evolution of branding, and we agreed that I could share my most recent reply to her on my blog. Evelyn's words are in blue:

what's driving you to do this?

A conviction that I can only be truly myself in being deeply aware of and engaged with my holistic nature as a human being, in the sense that I am at once an individual, a member of a family, part of groups of friends and communities of common interest, English, European and... human. And beyond that, a spirit. : ) Furthermore, it is not enough for that awareness and engagement to be solely intellectual—it must be experiential. And while there is one human being on the planet who is not in that state of expanded experiential awareness and engagement, then—paradoxically—no individual can be completely in that state, for the very reason that the organism of humanity functions holistically (although of course we can have a whole lot of fun on the way, riding the waves of transformation). That's where i-together comes in.

What's the end-goal?

Global spiritual evolution.

Your purpose?

To facilitate the end-goal of global spiritual evolution by providing tools and spaces, online and offline, for people to explore their multi-dimensional identity through co-creativity and relationship. We're starting off with three main areas of focus:

1) an online-offline integration project with kids and blogs, working with NGO Global Generation: integrating i-together's online dimension with our roots in the physical world.

2) an i-together "next-generation del.icio.us" social, semantic bookmarking service, developing what we believe is a uniquely effective and simple way for people to build and share natural-language based rich semantic constructs and to archive, share and discover the web content they and others categorise with those constructs: we aim to make the whole process as easy as Google, so discovering, storing and sharing ideas on the web becomes radically easier even for computer newbies.

3) the Community Fabric IT network infrastructure open initiative, which aims to foster the values of creative and relational freedom within of a mutual respect for boundaries of identity amongst a diverse spectrum of socially-enabled network solutions (including i-together): this is a techie-focused aspect of our work, but facilitates the i-together platform becoming as integrated as possible with resonant yet different platforms (such as ethical travel sites, local directories, social content management systems, semantic and respectful ad services (!) and so on), allowing people maximum choice of services without compromising the integrity of their digital identity.

Motivations?

A love of humanity and of the Earth. Great personal pain (which manifests physically... another story).

What are you hoping to see in the world
ideally?

People creating and relating in wonderful ways I couldn't even dream of right now. A planet that keeps turning without throwing us off as a species.

I must admit my whole thinking about marketing is going some radical
transformation. I'm not anti-advertising, but I'm not so sure it's
necessarily the best way to engage individuals with a company. I'm
sure you've also been following the branding-is-dead-is-not-is-too
debate as well.

Can we understand "brand" as the visible identity of an individual, group or organisation? Taking that as given, let me suggest this:

Brands online may be understood in terms of the digital content (media and information) and relationships attributable to them by any given person (the relationships including that of the person in question to the brand). And the concepts of content and relationships begin to merge when one considers contextualisation of one brand's content within that of another (as, for instance, when a blogger hosts an ad...). So a brand's identity varies according to who is doing the perceiving and their co-creative relationship with the brand.

As I wrote above, I am interested in creating tools and spaces for people to explore their identity through manifesting it in co-creativity and relationship, and I just can't understand the concept of "brand", commercial or otherwise, as being intrinsically any different from that of "manifest identity". It's just that the word "brand" has traditionally been associated with a manipulation of "consumers" by "business" to want certain things or lifestyles. As you've written yourself so persuasively, that model is on the way out now.

Given the evolution of suitably-equipped social content management systems, I don't see why adverts couldn't eventually become just another type of content that people could choose to contextualise within their personal or community space as they wished, subject to the permissions criteria set by the advertiser. And wouldn't that be an amazingly powerful way for people to transform and transmute brands, mingling with those brands their own creative voice?