I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes the work I do and the ideas I have different from my contemporaries. Rather facetiously, I talk about the internet as a new religion embraced by the masses in search of salvation. By resisting internet orthodoxy, I deliberately try to see our society and its relationship with technology in a unique manner.

This begins with refusing to use the same jargon and phrases as others, and playing with words to find more accessible and meaningful ways of explaining trends and phenomena. The internet is full of technical concepts that have exclusive and rigid meanings.

Yet the power and resilience of the internet is derived from its open nature, so it only makes sense that we embrace freedom when we talk and think about related ideas and concepts. I do this by generally distrusting technical authorities, including early adopters, technology executives, and I.T. admins. I respect their knowledge, but always question whether their perspective has the potential to be transfered to people who aren’t in a position of technical authority (the vast majority of us).

When it comes to the world of social media, which is both technical and non-technical, elitist and also accessible, I find myself consistently frustrated by the level of “group think.” In contrast to other technical areas, social media accommodates anyone and everyone, so jargon isn’t an acceptable vocabulary to control the discussion and analysis.

What you commonly find is a spoken and unspoken orthodoxy, rules that dictates how tools should be used and people should act. The problem is that this stifles innovation and doesn’t allow for the kind of true experimentation we should be seeing in this sector.

Public relations, marketing and advertising people lament the rash of social media experts who project their own industry orthodoxy onto an emergent discipline. Few understand the dynamic involved when in a long chain of diverse individuals and organizations who have a range of expertise culturally acclimatize their own networks and friends.

The seeds of this kind of internet orthodoxy were sown in Ursula Franklin’s definition of technology as being “how we do things around here”. The variable comes in how we define where we are, with the internet collapsing space into time and everyone being “here” at some point in time.

William Gibson notes this changing relationship between space and time by declaring that “the future has already arrived, it’s just not evenly distributed yet”. The problem is that the pioneers who are eager to get wherever first are eager to assert their control over new space, and in this case it’s quite simply a definition of how things should be done (i.e. carried out over time).

Ironically, another source of internet orthodoxy is the rigid culture of mainstream media, and the efforts to frame our world for easy consumption in between increasingly boring and irrelevant commercials. Television, radio and publishing, while becoming less dominant everyday, still set the tone for how we should be sharing stories and analyzing the world. The orthodoxy that governs the operation of these industries not only stifles society, but also threatens their survival.

For example, this past week CBC News has gone through a rebranding, redesign and renewal process, that has been a total travesty as far as critical Canadians are concerned. It’s not that something new wasn’t called for, but rather that what they’ve done is stay entirely within the orthodoxy of sensationalist cable news, a position which is neither appropriate for a public broadcaster nor desired by their audience.

What they should have done is try something new. Something that reflected both the opportunities the internet has to offer, and its potential to bring real substance and investigative journalism back to televised news. A number of newspapers, like the Toronto Star, have returned to a heavy diet of investigative reports as a means of differentiating themselves from aggregation services. This kind of unorthodox approach in an age of journalist cutbacks is exactly the type of contrast that courageous old-school organizations need to embrace in order to renew their relevance.

The business world plays a role in perpetuating a hypocritical approach to orthodoxy. They demand that everyone conform, except for a successful few who have the privilege to rebel. This ignores the fact that rebelliousness is the source of much of their success.

Had the CBC done anything other than pimp their personalities and superficial redesign, the corporate world would have been in an uproar: How dare the CBC do anything different? You can bet that my ideas about what they could have done would be condemned as anarchistic and “just not how things are done around here.”

That’s something you hear a lot in politics, where orthodoxy is perhaps the strongest force against reform and genuine change. The big news out of Ottawa this week has been the change in office of the leader of the opposition. Peter Donolo was brought in to save the floundering leadership of Michael Ignatieff.

From day one Iggy has been a joke, and rather than admit they made a mistake, the Liberal Party turned to orthodoxy as their means of salvation. Unfortunately, short of dumping their leader, they may be right that politics respects tradition, especially when it comes to back-room power deals.

I think one of the reasons my clients and audiences enjoy the work I do and the perspective I bring is that I help them see problems and our society in a way that opens doors and opportunities rather than locking them.

As space continues to collapse, and time continues to accelerate, people will increasingly wonder why the promises of the internet are not being delivered. The reason is simple: internet orthodoxy prevents us from realizing the true potential of open and distributed networks. Now is the time for us to build our own vision of what the internet should be, and to do so we must reject just about everything that anyone is saying about it.