IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

128 Chapter 6
the essential activity we have always undertaken to raise and educate our
families, get fed, and look after one another. Half of all the labor done in
industrialized countries is spent on unpaid work. The fact that this kind of
work is not considered to be part of ‘‘the economy’’ is partly a problem for
economists to deal with, but partly, too, a service design challenge that we
can sink our teeth into.
Convivial Services
Networked communications and wireless networks can be repurposed as
enabling infrastructures to help systems like local and complementary currencies,
Ithaca Hours, Time Dollars, LETS, microcredit programs, interestfree
banking, and other community-oriented monetary systems scale up.
These are not technology projects in the dot-com era sense of the word.
Ben Reason, a service designer in London, reminded me that LETS grew
strongly during the 1990s—the Internet decade—without themselves
migrating onto the Net. 48 Reason, who keeps a close eye on social innovations
emerging at a grassroots level, believes that the Mondragon cooperative
in Spain and the KaosPilots business school in Denmark are also worth
watching as new models that can have a big impact.
The world’s telecommunications companies should be rejoicing at the
news that the world needs these kinds of services. Communication, after
all, is their business. But most telcos remain stubbornly fixated on the ‘‘purposive’’
or task-related communications of business. Business callers pay
premium rates, which is why so many ads feature busy executives rushing
around being, well, busy. Social communications, by comparison, tend to
be a high-volume, low-margin business. Social communication occupies a
large amount of time in our daily lives—about two-thirds of our conversational
exchanges are social chitchat—but telcos don’t understand social
contexts and find it hard to shift the focus of their innovation from work
to everyday life.
Everyday life contains many distractions. Humans are hard-wired to chat.
The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar believes that humans gossip
because we don’t groom each other. In studies of the social organization
of great apes, Dunbar observed that these animals live in small groups and
maintain social cohesion through almost constant grooming. Grooming is a
way to forge alliances, establish hierarchy, offer comfort, or make apology.