neo narrative nexus

New technologies enter a market by targeting exisiting practices that are ripe for opportunistic tech exploitation. By lessening the time to perform exisiting practices and extending the horizon of applicability, they pay for themselves and are adopted. That is a necessary step in bootstrapping the technology, but once adopted, users of the technology respond to it by creating new usage patterns, enabled by the new tech. Patterns that disclose how a business works in new ways. As such they reveal the world in which next technologies will work. Within those horizons the next tech must act.

Specific technologies, such as business applications, disclose practices and prompt us to construct narratives around their disclosures. The introduction of the CRM shows up some firms as custodians of databases, media producers, business services, and dealers in digital properties. Even small firms are disclosed as "multinational" as they position themselves in the global network economy. These disclosures appear in the way practitioners now talk about themselves, and the narratives they construct and in which they position themselves. Whether these firms now do business differently than they used to is another question, but they tend to see their business in different ways, and they construct new narratives, not least around issues of computing needs.

The way a user describes their work takes over metaphors from the CRM software, and vice versa. CRM becomes an activity along a chain of production, whether or not every participant uses the software. Having come under the disclosive ambit of the software, CRM is never the same again.

Applications provide spaces in which users can think what has hitherto been unthought. These processes are at work in what CRM discloses about customers to businesses. So listen to your new customers.

Aptly appropriated from Kevin Coyne's Technoromanticism, except for enpropriations entertained.