Recognizing, and Activating, a Pinhole

By definition, a pinhole is a very small hole. You can think of it as the aperture of a camera. You use the aperture to control the amount of light that gets through to create the best possible result. Make the aperture too large and too much light gets through, resulting in overexposure; make the aperture too small and not enough light gets through and your film is underexposed. Only when you adjust the aperture just right do you end up with clarity and focus.

Technology has become an aperture for consumers today, giving them the ability to adjust the size of their own pinholes. In the old producer economy, consumers did not have this kind of control. Producers determined where, when and how consumers would engage with their products, companies and brands. But today, consumers make those decisions. They decide where, when and how to engage.

And they are exercising this control on an ever increasing amount of data. From 1997 to 2001 — a period of only 4 years — the total number of pharmaceutical brands increased by 78%, and the number of beverage company brands increased 25%. During the decade of the 1990s, the number of brands on grocery store shelves tripled (15,000 to 45,000). Today, the average Fortune 1000 consumer goods company manages a portfolio of 240 brands. And the messaging needed to support these brands has exploded as well. Thirty years ago, the average consumer would have seen 2000 marketing messages a day. Today, that number is 5000.

As modernity marches on, there’s just more of everything. And the more choices there are, the greater the need to control the pinhole. Mies van der Rohe’s observation that “less is more” was a vision of the pinhole.  He saw it in architecture; we live it in information.

Never seen a pinhole? Bet you have one in your pocket. Next time you’re at a play or a concert you’ll see hundreds of pinholes glowing at intermission as data starved smart phones are activated for missed texts, emails, reviews or whatever strikes the reconnected pinholer’s fancy.  Pinholes are in every sense the manifestation of highly focused and managed conversations.

Because pinholes are personal, technology enabled, and adjustable, they can be quickly reconfigured if opened too wide. Have you ever unsubscribed from a retailer that abuses the opt in and barrages you with daily emails? Ninety-one percent of online users have.  That’s the pinhole at work. Technology, the gatekeeper of the pinhole, makes it easy to build preferences of what we’re interested in, who we want to interact with and what we want to learn.

In building those preferences, relevance and currency are critical. Instead of being at the mercy of what producers think we will find relevant, we calibrate our own pinholes to find what is new and meaningful to us.

Researchers use the Hubble telescope to comb through millions of miles of space and find the data that is relevant to them.  Audiophiles use Pandora to comb through terrabytes of digital music and find what is relevant to them, instead of listening to music that is formatted by some corporate office in a city hundreds of miles away.

And as consumer have begun to leverage their pinholes, smart companies are recognizing that sometimes, more is more. Amazon knows this. Now with over 1.5 million resellers selling a vast array of products, Amazon manages to put you just a few clicks from that book, garden hose and pimple cream you were looking for. All in one box and ready for shipping directly to you.

Netflix also understands the pinhole. Netflix makes sure that its recommendations for you are in line with what you like. It constantly adjusts and updates recommendations. The more data you provide, the more accurate its recommendations for you become. How else could anybody manage 90,000 movie titles?

Of all the companies that understand how powerful the pinhole is, Apple may be smartest. Everybody thinks of Apple as an innovation company, and indeed it is, but every innovation Apple makes shares one very important characteristic: It empowers individuals to build their own pinholes. From the very beginning, with the radical notion that everyday people would use a computer on their desktops, Apple has fed us a steady stream of technology innovations that give us greater and greater control. Think itunes, iphoto, iphone, ipad. Apple realized long ago that there is an “i” in the middle of pinhole. And they’ve never lost sight of it.

Part 1: A Changing World – An Introduction into The Pinhole Economy

Part 2: The Roots and Causes of The Pinhole Economy

Flickr photo courtesy of thrill kills sunday pills