The Elusive Big Idea - Neal Gabler

Neal Gabler suggests that we are rapidly moving into a Post-Idea era, hastened by the rise of the Internet and social tools:

In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us.

Marx pointed out the relationship between the means of production and our social and political systems. Freud taught us to explore our minds as a way of understanding our emotions and behaviors. Einstein rewrote physics. More recently, McLuhan theorized about the nature of modern communication and its effect on modern life. These ideas enabled us to get our minds around our existence and attempt to answer the big, daunting questions of our lives.

But if information was once grist for ideas, over the last decade it has become competition for them. We are like the farmer who has too much wheat to make flour. We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to.

The collection itself is exhausting: what each of our friends is doing at that particular moment and then the next moment and the next one; who Jennifer Aniston is dating right now; which video is going viral on YouTube this hour; what Princess Letizia or Kate Middleton is wearing that day. In effect, we are living within the nimbus of an informational Gresham’s law in which trivial information pushes out significant information, but it is also an ideational Gresham’s law in which information, trivial or not, pushes out ideas.

We prefer knowing to thinking because knowing has more immediate value. It keeps us in the loop, keeps us connected to our friends and our cohort. Ideas are too airy, too impractical, too much work for too little reward. Few talk ideas. Everyone talks information, usually personal information. Where are you going? What are you doing? Whom are you seeing? These are today’s big questions.

It is certainly no accident that the post-idea world has sprung up alongside the social networking world. Even though there are sites and blogs dedicated to ideas, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, etc., the most popular sites on the Web, are basically information exchanges, designed to feed the insatiable information hunger, though this is hardly the kind of information that generates ideas. It is largely useless except insofar as it makes the possessor of the information feel, well, informed. Of course, one could argue that these sites are no different than conversation was for previous generations, and that conversation seldom generated big ideas either, and one would be right.

But the analogy isn’t perfect. For one thing, social networking sites are the primary form of communication among young people, and they are supplanting print, which is where ideas have typically gestated. For another, social networking sites engender habits of mind that are inimical to the kind of deliberate discourse that gives rise to ideas. Instead of theories, hypotheses and grand arguments, we get instant 140-character tweets about eating a sandwich or watching a TV show. While social networking may enlarge one’s circle and even introduce one to strangers, this is not the same thing as enlarging one’s intellectual universe. Indeed, the gab of social networking tends to shrink one’s universe to oneself and one’s friends, while thoughts organized in words, whether online or on the page, enlarge one’s focus.

Gabler obviously hasn’t actually spent any time on Twitter talking with people who are concerned with ideas. And he also seems to be unaware of the recent surge in long format writing online.

Just another condemnation from a backwards-looking enemy of the future, like Nick Carr and Andrew Keen, wailing about the lost virtues of a golden era that we have fallen from.

Just to inject some facts: there doesn’t seem to be an decrease in the development of new ideas. Consider the number of patents created worldwide, that continue to increase year by year. Or the number of new words: although I bet that Gabler wouldn’t say “defriend’ or “frenemy”.

Gabler is selectively pointing at some set of behaviors that annoy him, and declaring it the fall of Western civilization. And he is explicitly saying that what we do online is illegitimate, immature, and probably immoral. This is what I have been calling ‘the war on flow’ for years, but perhaps I should simplexify and call him a social counterrevolutionary.

But what about ideas like the iPad, or digital books? Social networks, which have transformed modern society even if you don’t like them. What about open source software development, or cloud-based computing, or augmented reality? These are just a few examples of big ideas that are changing the world, and there are thousands more.

And, by the way, the rise of digital books seems to be breathing new life into the world of publishing, which is all about the dissemination of ideas, after all. The Bookstats survey shows that publishing had a 5.6% increase between 2010 and 2008, and ebooks grew from 0.6% to 6.4%.

So I think ideas have a fighting chance, despite us twittering online.