from Amy Jo Martin, 5 characteristics of Twitter that will make the act of good scalable
- Accountability and transparency spin narcissistic acts into selfless acts.
- The rate of committing acts of good is only bound by the speed of technology.
- The peer-to-peer nature of the open network pushes value to the top.
- Participation is easily justifiable.
- Accessibility and lack of boundaries create an equal opportunity space
(via csessums)
The basis of caricature is to select a few prominent features of a subject, and then to overdo them: a large nose becomes larger, a slight regional accent becomes a drawl, a nervous nose rub becomes a psychotic tic.
Neil Strauss takes the ‘like’ gesture, and enlarges it until it becomes a bogeyman that threatens to consume individual liberty and Western civilization. As he writes in the Wall Street Journal, a bastion of free expression on the web, [with my comments in brackets]:
Neil Strauss, The Insidious Evils Of ‘Like’ Culture
“Like” culture is antithetical to the concept of self-esteem, which a healthy individual should be developing from the inside out rather than from the outside in.
[Oh, of course, people should be islands complete unto themselves. That whole notion about being socialized, and that we need to be connected to others to find the fullest expression of our inner selves? Or the idea that self esteem is rooted in the idea of being competent to deal with the basic challenges of life, which largely involve other people? Nah.]
Instead, we are shaped by our stats, which include not just “likes” but the number of comments generated in response to what we write and the number of friends or followers we have. I’ve seen rock stars agonize over the fact that another artist has far more Facebook “likes” and Twitter followers than they do.
[We wouldn’t want to be shaped by the social gestures of our culture, right? We should ignore that and listen to… what exactly? Inner voices? Our mothers? Authors of self-help books?]
Because it’s so easy to medicate our need for self-worth by pandering to win followers, “likes” and view counts, social media have become the métier of choice for many people who might otherwise channel that energy into books, music or art—or even into their own Web ventures.
[And after all, fooling around with web garbage is lower than books, music, or art, which are well-established cultural outlets, supported by Ivy League schools, unlike all that social media nonsense, (or street art, or any other artform-that-snobs-tut-tut-at.]
The same is true of the productivity of already established writers and artists. I was recently on a radio show with an author who, the interviewer said, had tweeted, on average, every 20 minutes for the past two years. Yet, despite all the time and effort spent amassing and catering to followers, as soon as a social network falls out of use, like MySpace, all that work collapses like a castle built of sand.
[Mustn’t get involved in new media when there is so much money to be made exploiting some established literary or musical persona! Oh, and forget that musicians and authors rely on other sorts of user feedback — like sales numbers or leader boards — from which they derive socially-grounded self-esteem.]
The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm presciently wrote over 60 years ago that man has “constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built…. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself.”
[Forget for a minute that Fromm wrote this over 60 years ago, in reference to the cultural strictures of his day, the peak of the industrial age. And let’s pretend he intended his words as a condemnation of today’s emerging post-industrial web. Please don’t connect these dots: whatever you do, please forget that web culture is an antidote to the monstrous machine that Fromm was writing about.]
So let’s rise up against the tyranny of the “like” button. Share what makes you different from everyone else, not what makes you exactly the same.
[How can you know what makes you different from everyone else if you are ignoring social discourse, and reading old books in some dusty room?]
Write about what’s important to you, not what you think everyone else wants to hear. Form your own opinions of something you’re reading, rather than looking at the feedback for cues about what to think.
[Finally, something I can agree with. But, what exactly has that got to do with the like button?]
And, unless you truly believe that microblogging is your art form, don’t waste your time in pursuit of a quick fix of self-esteem and start focusing on your true passions.
[Wait a second. I’m confused. You said “‘Like’ culture is antithetical to the concept of self-esteem”, but now you say that microblogging leads to quick fixes of self-esteem. Could it be that more microblogging could lead to deeper self-esteem, instead of just quick fixes, then?]
I reject his arguments, chapter and verse. There is no a priori reason that microblogging can’t deliver well-constructed arguments or insights to readers… or transcendent joy, for that matter. Just in passing, it is also untrue that street art is merely vandalism, or that comic books can’t express deep human truths, which Strauss doesn’t bring up, but which are the sorts of skirmishes that cultural elitists relish.
Strauss is a cultural elitist, a conservative who believes that the old ways are the best ways, and what’s novel is suspect, and inherently of lesser and — questionable — value to society. He is dismissive, and casts about for a rock to throw, so he questions how the ‘like’ gesture might conjecturally harm our self-esteem.
The Spaniards have a saying, ‘Que no hayan novedades’, which can be translated as ‘May no new thing arise’. Perhaps that saying would have been a more apt quotation in Strauss’ caricature than Erich Fromm’s raging against the industrial machine of his day.
Pinker undoes Nick Carr’s attack on web culture in The Shallows without naming him, but this follows pretty directly:
Steven Pinker, Mind Over Mass Media
Yes, the constant arrival of information packets can be distracting or addictive, especially to people with attention deficit disorder. But distraction is not a new phenomenon. The solution is not to bemoan technology but to develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life. Turn off e-mail or Twitter when you work, put away your Blackberry at dinner time, ask your spouse to call you to bed at a designated hour.
And to encourage intellectual depth, don’t rail at PowerPoint or Google. It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.
The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.
The web is our only hope, on so many levels.
Weinberger beautifully nails the true value of an open web (or Net): it remains ours.
The Net as a medium is not for anything in particular — not for making calls, sending videos, etc. It also works at every scale, from one to one to many to many. This makes it highly unusual as a medium. In fact, we generally don’t treat it as a medium but as a world, rich with connections, persistent, and social. Because everything we encounter in this world is something that we as humans made (albeit sometimes indirectly), it feels like it’s ours. Obviously it’s not ours in the property sense. Rather, it’s ours in the way that our government is ours and our culture is ours. There aren’t too many other things that are ours in that way.
If we allow others to make decisions about what the Net is for — preferring some content and services to others — the Net won’t feel like it’s ours, and we’ll lose some of the enthusiasm (= love) that drives our participation, innovation, and collaborative efforts.
So, if we’re going to talk about the value of the open Internet, we have to ask what the opposite of “open” is. No one is proposing a closed Internet. When it comes to the Internet, the opposite of “open” is “theirs.”
via www.hyperorg.com
This reminds me of piece I wrote last year, Web Culture: Individuality, Belonging, And Scalar Freedom:
[…] people are discovering all over again, that connection to other
people around issues that matter can become the defining source of
happiness and purpose, in a way totally different from mass affiliation
— being a citizen of large and unresponsive country, where ‘culture’
has become a product of multinational corporations, churned out from
music, movie, publishing, and television factories.Our old dreams are manufactured. Our new dreams must be
bottom-up, like connection on the web, or in wiring within our heads.
If we are to make sense of the post-everything future before us, it
will have to come from our conversations among ourselves, on a social scale in which we feel that we matter.Post-everything will mean embracing something we know will involve
us, leaving behind our second-class status as members of the mass
audience, and become living, active participants in a new culture.
I gave a presentation yesterday at Reboot10 in Copenhagen called “Web Culture: Identity, Belonging, And Scalar Freedom” and I think I scared some people a bit. There is a broad streak of darkness throughout the talk, since I suggest that the future we are moving into — where we are already, actually — is being framed by the crumbling of mass institutions as a result of their cumulative failures, and this is creating a power vacuum into which something will move.
I hope that web culture will save the world, and if we don’t, I despair.
The notes below are what I wrote prior to the talk, not exactly what I said.
Thank you. It’s great to be here, in Copenhagen again, with so many good friends.
This talk is like the saying about weddings, “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.”
I am mixing a bunch of things together — social tools and the web culture they are shaping, human cognition — its limits and promise, deep thoughts from other thinkers, and the blue, well,… the blue might be the dark shadows holding onto the bottom of what I am going to be digging into. The shadows of our time: the limits of unfettered growth, rising populations, and our flirtation with global ecological catastrophe.
My talk is entitled “Web Culture: Individuality, Belonging, and Scalar Freedom” and I am trying to meet the theme of the conference — “Free” — halfway. I am only treating the “free” concept on one level: the notion of individual and social freedom in this changing future. I hope I can tease some challenging ideas out, and share my thoughts in an accessible way. I hope that you can help me develop them.
This talk follows close on the heels of presentations at the recent Enterprise 2.0 and Web Widget Expo conferences, and follows my explorations of the themes surrounding web culture, and its place in our future. I think I am working on a book, and it that is so, it’s likely to be called something like “Web Culture and the Post-Everything Future”.
In those other presentations — Web Culture and the New Ethos of Work, and Social Meaning In A Fragmented World — and several talks last year, including the presentation here at Reboot last year (Flow: A New Consciousness For A Web Of Traffic), I have been poking a stick into the anthill that is the Web, and the connectedness that comes from it.
But we are not self-made. We do not live in a world where the Web is everywhere, and even if we did, what sort of world or Web would we have?
Like an infant, much of what we are capable as a society is derived from what is innate in us, as living creatures. We — individually and collectively — inherit much of how we process the world. But, again just like an infant, so much that we become is learned. We can all speak, and learn to do so merely by being exposed to language, like iron will rust if exposed to moisture. But we do not learn to count, or think logically, just by exposure to a world waiting to be counted or to be Venn diagrammed; neither will exposure to those who know how alone work. Learning to count takes training, and thinking about the world rationally may take decades, if it sinks in at all.
And then there are the darker aspects of the world we inherit and learn. Superstition and belief in the supernatural and magic is a universal of all human cultures, as is coalitional violence, innumeracy, taboos and rituals, a universal desire to control the weather, and thumb sucking. Ok, leave the thumb sucking to one side. Still, as many as 40% of Americans believe in witchcraft and magic, and 87% believe in angels.
On the other hand, there is a wellspring of hope in the universals we share. A universal resistance to abuse of power is a counter to our natural nepotism, as we favor kin over others less closely related to us. Murder is universally condemned, as is the principle that there should be a redress of wrongs when injustice occurs. We find laws and rights and obligations between members of social groups are ubiquitous, but so is the notion that outsiders — the others — do not have the same rights as do we. In this last instance, think about Guantanemo and the collusion between out elected officials in Western countries to deny basic legal rights to accused terrorists.
Which brings me to the second part of this prologue: we are living in this specific universe, this world, today. Here we are, in the preamble of the 21st century, at the close of the industrial era and at the start of… what exactly?
Well, a time of enormous changes, all of which factor into the Web Culture that is emerging.
Globalization is flattening the Earth, and for many the question is ‘can I avoid being flattened?’ Rampant growth in the past fifty years has not led to general improvement of the lives of many: in the developed West most have not experienced any significant increase in quality of life, while a small, increasingly disconnected elite has grown frighteningly wealthy, while chanting the industrial age mantra of unfettered growth at all costs. No western leader has really attempted to argue against growth as the fundamental premise of governance, the basis of the state, and the aspiration of the individual. And as a direct result, we are tottering on the brink of an ecological catastrophe of unprecedented proportions. And the power of coalitional nationalism is failing, as developing nations reject Western controls, and as the undeveloped world spirals into chaos.
In the developing countries, individuals are seeing the impact of growth — on an individual level, the quality of life is shooting up for many, while others are moving into slums, where crime, drugs, and alienation from the state are breeding an underclass with little or no allegiance to the state. There is tremendous vitality and enterprise in the developing world, but we are confronted with the sobering fact that 1990’s Western lifestyles if adopted by only China and India would lead to a tripling of the world output of CO2, and collapse of the deep ecology of the planet. While this tragedy of the commons rages, the undeveloped world is possibly worst.
Large parts of the world today are basically ungoverned, or governed through coalitions of tribal, criminal, or warlord forms of control. In many countries that appear to be a state, the state may just be the spoils of gaining control by some group. Even parts of developing and developed countries may be ungoverned, like breakaway regions, or so-called feral cities growing from the enormous surge in urbanism in the past 50 years. There are 200,000 slums worldwide, where the governments have basically given up providing the basics — water, sanitation, protection — and people will affiliate into coalitions that will provide them options. This is projected to lead to two billion slum dwellers — effectively outside of our world — by 2030.
The interaction between these societal realities and the cultural universals within us all is leading us to a very dangerous future.
I have come to believe that Web Culture is our only hope, is we are not to fall into what many are calling the New Dark Ages. We may already be in the New Middle Ages, a time following the peak of industrialism, the collapse of states like the Soviet Union that exemplified the power of centralized states, and the failure of industrial growth-based economic policies.
I don’t think there is a King Arthur out there, who will ride up and avert disaster. Not even Al Gore can do that. If we are going to change the world, it will have to be following Gandhi’s dictum: we have to become the change we want in the world.
Apologies. It was blogging that did this to me. No neat conclusions. A barrage of conjecture, wisecracks, and one-liners, disguised as a presentation.
My work has been focused on the technology underlying the web: social tools in particular. But my interests extent to what I call ‘webthropology’ — the anthropology of the web, specifically web culture.
Regarding my work, I am more of a ‘synthesyst’ than an ‘analyst’. What I am offering is not analysiis, drawing logical conclusions from a set of data, using the clockwork side of my brain alone.
I am attempting a synthesis, looking for the big picture, based on intuition as well as reasoning, a ‘whole head’ approach to understanding.
This is more art than science, more storytime than than the News at Eleven.
I am aware of the incongruities here. An American speaking on the balance of individual and social freedom at an international conference in Europe. I spend enough time in Europe to know that this may lead to knowing looks being exchanged from one European to another. Another bigmouth American lecturing us.
But I like to think myself as part of Web Culture, for all my hopeless Americanisms. And this talk is about choosing one’s tribe, and helping it thrive, as much as it is about anything, which is a universal theme and that has to include even the most cowboy individualist in Texas.
The core of sociality is the individual. Individualism is a universal. People are universally concerned with what others think about them, and want to be considered in a positive light. As a result, people will manipulate the various facets of their ‘self’ to make themselves more popular and connected and through that to gain reputation and authority within their social groups.
It is through our connections with others that we define ourselves, the way that we actually become human.
As people sharing these motivations form groups, the individual is made greater through the sum of connections. And so are all the connections.
These dynamics work universally, and are exploited or harnessed everywhere. This forms the basis on which everything else hangs. And the social revolution on the web directly follows that model, as we have seen in all successful social applications and networks.
One of the major trends of the late twentieth century has been the gradual, but now accelerating decline of mass.
Mass media, for example is crumbling, as participative media has grown, largely as a result of the capabilities inherent in the web. Centralized media, and the dynamics that made it strong, have begun to fail. One:many publishing is falling fast, as individuals have discovered ways to communicate and connect through web-based tools. And this undermines the economics of centralized (or centroid) media. The entertainment industry has given up on putting the genie back in the bottle, and has surrendered to the inevitability of a whole new day, buying the massiest of the social solutions, like YouTube and MySpace, and trying to make them act like television. Worldwide social experiences like World Of Warcraft are being valued like movies, while in fact they are societies inhabited by the people exploring new ways to interact, globally, on a bottom-up, realtime basis.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of smaller scale social solutions grow, creating a shared order in a world of shared chaos.
People are relearning the ancient practice of shared community, shared understanding, and the benefits and costs of small scale human involvement.
As mass politics, mass government, and mass industrialization have reached their endgames, people, as individuals are finding less joy and meaning in being massed. We have learned that — after some baseline — happiness and purpose does not come from being a cog in the economic growth engine.
We do not find belonging in belongings.
The center cannot hold because those principles that have driven mass culture — unsustainable growth, exploitation of shared and limited resources, and the primacy of mass belonging — have been pushed beyond their limits, and the consequences are clear to us all, like potholes in the road.
These are the outcomes of what Isaiah Berlin referred to as negative freedom — the freedom from all social constraints — and as we move to the edge, we accept the constraints of belonging, and reject the negatives of mass identity.
One corner of the emerging world is web culture. It is perhaps a harbinger of what could happen in the larger world. Maybe it is like William Gibson wrote, “The future is already here. It is just unequally distributed.”
I have characterized this (like others) as a movement from the center to the edge. The edge is where individuals relate to other individuals, and derive their sense of self and meaning from these relationships.
And we know that this is a human universal: people everywhere are made human through their ties to others. This is how we root our beliefs and our aspirations — when we are most happy — and when we turn away from these natural ties, things fall apart.
Without that sense of belonging, we have alienation and hatred, we have people mistakenly believing that more — more possessions, more money, more square footage in their more isolated McMansions — is better.
Various people have taken to calling this future we are moving into post-industrial — just as industrial growth is exploding in the developing world — or post-ideological — even as ideological battles confront us on every side.
I lump this together, perhaps unhelpfully, into the post-everything future.
Why do we say post, when it seems to be intensifying? Because there is no general belief in easy answers. Those that have studied the costs of the growth economy — the core underpinnings of industrial growth — have come to believe that is is unsustainable. That we can’t stripmine the earth forever, pretending that there are no costs. We have to count the price of the CO2 being dumped in the air. We have to value the irreplaceable water in the aquifers that are dropping, dropping, dropping the world over. We have to realize that if every person in China were to want the same amount of fish that the average Japanese person eats, they would more than double the decline of fishstocks that are already on the edge of collapse already.
It does not seem that the ideas of westernized industrial growth and mass individualism is going to be sustainable, even while many in the developing world are watching Seinfeld reruns, wish for a refrigerator or a car, or the chance to shop in an air-conditioned mall.
Our old cultures have been stripmined too: the ancient relationship of people to the land and close group involvement has been converted to urbanism and alienation.
*Mass agriculture in the name of low cost output has led to the largest migration of people from the land to cities in human history. There are over 200,000 slums in the world today, because people move to the city and cannot find meaningful work. There will be 2 billion slum inhabitants in 2030.*
Meanwhile, on the edge, people are discovering all over again, that connection to other people around issues that matter can become the defining source of happiness and purpose, in a way totally different from mass affiliation — being a citizen of large and unresponsive country, where ‘culture’ has become a product of multinational corporations, churned out from music, movie, publishing, and television factories.
Our old dreams are manufactured. Our new dreams must be bottom-up, like connection on the web, or in wiring within our heads. If we are to make sense of the post-everything future before us, it will have to come from our conversations among ourselves, on a social scale in which we feel that we matter.
Post-everything will mean embracing something we know will involve us, leaving behind our second-class status as members of the mass audience, and become living, active participants in a new culture.
Much of the world lives at small social scale. It was the norm for millennia. We have had only a few hundred years of mass culture, and we have lost something critical: the sense that individual freedom must be checked by the needs and long term good of the group.
America is the place where the credo of growth has run to its logical end, and is perhaps the place most responsible for the challenges before us. But China is using 40% of the world’s cement, right now, and large multinationals the world over have developed a global food production and distribution system that is based on cheap gas and unsustainable water use. This is a global threat.
We know that is is those who are most connected, those that can create bridges from different groups, that usher in the creation of new ideas, new insights, and new solutions to problems. We, the edglings living our lives on the Web, have a new purpose. We can help create the cross linkages in the world, so that people experimenting with local food production in Vermont can connect with cheese makers in Switzerland, and experts in Kerala, a province in India, can provide insights into literacy to inner city education programs in the US.
People the world over will be moving to the edge, just as fast as they gain access to the web. For now, only some of us are here; we have to prepare for the refugees from mass culture as they arrive, and we have to help with tools to smooth the way between us, and to counter the failures of mass organizations.
It is the misdeeds and broken promises of mass culture that imperils us.
One aspect of the rise of the web that is central to this talk is the long tail of human relationships. Just as the long tail can be a metaphor for new economics based on the Web — with low cost or zero cost of inventory, companies can support a gazillion product niches with small markets — the long tail can be used as a way to think about belonging and identity.
As web tools drop the friction involved in being connected, we can meaningfully remain in contact with larger groups, and with more groups, than we could before. We are training ourselves — stressing the cognitive centers associated with theory of mind () — so that we are becoming a generation of hyperconnected.
Those that oppose community and shared identity will attack this as illegitimate. It”s ADD, they will say, it’s internet addiction, etc. And yes, everything can be over done. But at the same time, I believe we are growing more capable in our capacity for human connection: we can be more involved — in a distributed, partial way — than before.
This long tail of relatedness and relationships changes our sense of identity and belonging. We can meaningfully belong to many groups, and invest ourselves deeply — in parallel — in their purposes.
Those of us who become most adept at this may become the most important and respected citizens of the post-everything world: the bridge builders that can arc from one to other groups, and act as arbiters and mediators. Remember that reputation-based authority and the belief in mediated settlements of disputes are universals. So this suggests a future role for the most connected, as people worldwide begin to lose faith in mass organizations to solve our disputes, or to even come up with workable compromise.
I maintain that we are returning to ways of interaction that are ancient, pre-industrial.
This social revolution is subversive and will be fought by the mass culture machine. Bloggers were wild-eyed fringe lunatics, but now we are being joined at the edge by the best and brightest journalists, who are learning a new freedom at the edge. Our social tools have created a brand new place for people to congregate, play, and work, and those that at first suggested that all this was a fad, a mania, or some sort of plot have started to try to embrace it, if only to try to turn it to industrial use. But the endless efforts to suggest that web services like Twitter are failures because personal productivity does not increase through their use are laughable: we know we are trading industrial productivity for networked connectedness. We are basing our ethics on being connected and shared meaning, not industrial performance. We are embracing the ancient truths of deep play, and creativity, and love, and dropping the mass culture masks that were manufactured for us, along with the industrial dreams.
So much of what is being turned up as we plow these apparently virgin fields is old stuff, things that we threw away as we left socially scaled communities, as we migrated to the cities and took our seats in the factories to make goods, or building buildings, or drive trucks. We are going back to participative norms, and social systems based on high levels of personal involvement on a personal basis. We are moving back to the deep rules before mass organizations rewrote all the rules.
Even the rules of mass government will be reconsidered, and our relationship to the nation will be made less important, as we find the benefits of being intensely involved in small, human scale polities. The future made be the past, when we find the most important relationships are those tied to growing, distributing and consuming food, the systems we contrive locally to care for the young, sick, and elderly, and how we come together to find common cause in the face of crisis, uncertainty, and fear.
The subordination of the individual to the needs of the group is what has allowed some ancient people to share common resources in a sustainable way for millennia. We will have to learn those tribal ways agina, and real fast, if we are to survive the next hundred years.
I’ve used the terms Centroids and Edglings to distinguish people based on their orientation to mass; those deeply involved in mass institutions are Centroids; whose of us that have migrated away to the edge, defected, are the Edglings.
Note that I don’t say democratic. The web isn’t democratic. Web culture is based on networks, and affiliation. All people are not equal on the web: there is a decided inequality, based on reputation and influence, just as in tribal cultures. This is a force that is both positive and negative. It has strong conservative tendencies, since reputations are built over time.
However, new people, companies, ideas emerge on the web all the time, and some catch on. There is constant change against a conservative backdrop. The cream can rise to the top. Actions and words matter more than position or organizational position. So, its egalitarian in the sense that anyone can jump in, but not everyone can swim well, and some will sink altogether.
Moving to the edge is almost by definition a rejection of the hypothetical objectivitity and impartiality embedded in the myths of journalism (and mass government, where hypothetically all citizens are equal). Edglings embrace subjective, whole head, and situated partiality.
Hierarchies are left behind, and we return to networks.
The nuclear family is a largely industrial model, based on grinding larger, richer, and more resilient family systems into irreducible components, like interchangeable parts on the assembly line.
Falling back to larger collections of people to distribute the demands and obligations of childrearing and caring for the old or infirm is a sign of tribal norms reemerging.
David Ronfeldt has described tribes as “the first and forever form” of social organization. As he has noted: “even for modern societies that have advanced far beyond a tribal stage, the tribe remains not only the founding form but also the forever form and the ultimate fallback form.”
Mass government — nationalism — will become significantly less important as Edglings get more involved in local networks and global affiliation.
I discussed the transition from mass to participative media earlier on.
The thread that I am banging on the most in this talk is the movement from unsustainable to sustainable solutions — like the defection away from industrial food — will move to the immediate foreground in the near term.
We have learned that people are not made happy by their increasing belongings. On the contrary, there is an upsurge in interest in finding more meaning in life. One of the universals is that people are happier relative to the degree that they believe they are immersed in social networks in which what they do and say matters.
Mass religion is collapsing. Even in the US, where an evangelical resurgence is taking place, it is in effect an explosion of hundreds of small Christian sects, for all intents and purposes, as protestantism is being fragmented by the tug-of-war between liberal and conservative ideals.
Meanwhile, the edglings are reverting to something like Taoism, an enigmatic sort of personal spirituality, derived from a generalized sense of connection to the universe, as part of something large and wonderful. No more angry gods on the top of a mountain sending down commandments, or martyrs dying for our sins. We are left with Father Time and Mother Earth spinning in their special ways.
We have to come together in new ways, and not just to find purpose in life, not just to coordinate work, or to find a mate. We will have to apply what we have learned about the dark and light of open social systems to recapture the future.
The bonds of trust and friendship that we are building at the Edge, today, may become the initial bridges that connect the tribes of this post-everything future.
We have learned that trust and reputation is personal, non-transferable. That obligation is between individuals, and that any group — elected officials, criminals, prisoners in jail, slum dwellers, and web edglings — will attempt to use whatever power they have to attempt to benefit their own, potentially to the detriment of ‘others’. So we need an ethical system — like that which is emerging on the web — where abuse of power is not tolerated, where rank and office is irrelevant, but where one’s reputation and honor is everything.
Sounds like the Mafia, right?
Tribalism is based on shared obligations, and when we redefine ‘Us’ to mean everyone, although we are also ‘us’ working and living in the smaller, tightly connected communities that make up the lives of most people.
If there is an elite in the new future it will be those whose personal networks bridge many worlds, who help create solutions to large shared problems, those who synthesize views from many local cultures and viewpoints and make us richer for it. Those that aspire to bring us out of parochialism and division into a new sense of shared purpose and personal meaning derived from connectedness.
As in old tribalism, these leaders may not have title or office other than Doctor, Professor, or just plain Mademoiselle. But these new leaders will emerge, bottom-upped by the forces reshaping the world. Not produced by party politics, or even any democratic process. The most important ten million might be artists, musicians, whole-head entrepreneurs, writers, or community organizers. There’s plenty of room for new approaches to old problems, and the left hand of tribalism will mean that these bridges will be built to the warlords and criminals that will be managing the lot of the bottom billion, to the antidemocratic leaders of China, to the lost and alienated in Parisian suburbs and Brazilian favelas, and even to the so-called Islamists who seem intent on pulling us back into the 14th century.
All of this factionalism must be bridged. All of it. We can’t build a wall to keep some of us out. We are the whole anthill, the whole city of Earth, including the tough neighborhoods, the marketplace, and the University on the hill.
We can’t pretend to be just one group. We are many, but we can learn from the universals, and honor that which we all share: Law, rights and obligations to the group, fighting against the abuse of power, and a belief that the rights of the individual must be honored by the group. However, the freedoms and obligations of individuals to the group can be wildly different, although there is always a covenant. And mediated settlement for grievances is a universal, which gives us hope, despite patent idiocies like Guantanamo.
And it will fall to us, those living on the edge of the Web today, who have turned up at least some of what we need to be doing, and this is where we will build a bridge to all those teenagers in feral cities, to the two million living in US jails, and to the bottom billion in slums across the world. We must learn to hang together, or surely, we will all hang apart.
Consider farmer’s markets, as a trend, how they can link people back together through something amazingly basic: food. As mass agriculture falls back from its late 20th maximums, more food will be grown within a few hours of where it will be consumed. This will have all sorts of repercussions, but the increase in social involvement between growers and consumers will bring food back to the edge. This will be a global trend, as the costs, hazards, and unsustainability of mass agriculture become understood.
We should aspire to know the people growing our vegetables, or raising the rabbits, chickens, cattle, and fish that we eat. Food must become as participative as we have made media.
The increase of urbanization will lead cities to become even more important, and for nation states to decrease in their authority. People’s affiliation with small regions — through tax revolts, referenda calling for increased autonomy, and outright breakaway — will lead to a balkanization of power. While this can lead to all sorts of darkness — ethnic cleansing, brushfire wars, and so on — it will also counter some of the excesses of zero-sum western style nationalism. Consider a US or EU where state and national boundaries become increasingly irrelevant, but individual and social affiliation becomes increasingly localized. [This will also be driven by increasing awareness that nations cannot or will not respond to growing ecological crises, like Katrina.]
The concept of political or philosophical freedom is not a human universal, like thumbsucking or telling right from wrong. As understood in the West, freedom is a set of principles that define the relationship of the individual to the nation state that exists to protect the governed. It deals with property rights, what the individual and the government can do legitimately, and how conflicts between individuals and between the state, individuals, and groups will be handled.
Freedom has grown from the feudal roots of medieval common law into something intertwined with the expansionist aspirations of the industrial era. The dark shadow of industrial freedom is the inherent tragedy of the commons implicit in unfettered striving for individual advance without obligation to others except through the mediation of government.
We have lost the human scale of connection that channeled freedom in socially relevant ways. The freedom to exploit private property in such a way that leads to the collapse of shared resources is the outcome of this socially unbound notion of freedom. And we see it at every scale: the neighbor who cuts down a wooded area, leading to the collapse of the habitat for animals in a much larger region; the city upstream that siphons off too much from a river, leaving those downstream to suffer; the nation that burns so much fossil fuel that the world heads for ecological catastrophe; the blogger that takes money to plug a product without disclosing the relationship.
We have lost the core social feedback loop, where individual choice was bounded by social obligation. Where the notion that we are all in this together, and while a specific individual may own some piece of property, everything is connected. All people are connected. The habitat on your patch of land has an impact on mine. Pouring poisons into your back forty will leech into the shared aquifer, and all our grandchildren will have increased rates of cancer. We have learned these truths the hard way, by letting freedom get ahead of our obligations to the group, at whatever level.
We are now moving into a time when we will scale freedom based on the social context involved. Ownership of a patch of land will not mean it can be destroyed for profit, because everything is connected in a fractal watchwork, so destruction always splashes onto those nearby. So groups will have to have a say in what freedoms will be accorded to their members.
However, those freedoms will be scaled based on many, some undemocratic, factors.
Those with the greater potential to cause damage will have to step to the greater degree of obligation associated with that. So the greatest landholders are those whose freedoms will need to be checked most directly by group sanctions to make sure there is a world for any of us in the future. At the present time, however, it is more like the opposite.
The modern western notion of personal property will be tempered by this new understanding: that we are all connected on a tiny spaceship moving in the direction of star Vega near the constellation of Hercules. Since we know that unfettered growth is unsustainable, we will have to rethink freedom at a fundamental level.
Most importantly, at every scale of social belonging a different sort of collective decision making (another universal) will have to be brought to bear to major problems. However, as we move away from mass government and into a Web future, direct participation in decisions of importance to us will be the norm.
However, new tribalism shows that democratic style voting and oppositionally entrenched political parties will give way to tribal chieftain style factionalism, hopefully tempered with social checks on violence and coercion. This is the way the Web works, and it appears to be in our wiring, for better or for worse.
The hope is that this new elite will be selected based on their ability to bridge across diverse groups, who excel at finding common cause. And we will learn to avoid those who seek to make personal benefit from their position of power, and we will turn away from leaders who treat the state or the land or the people as plunder.
I can safely predict that the journey ahead will not be easy. It is a true revolution with all the discord, disruption and contention that revolution implies.
The powers that be will resist our defection to new social systems that devalue their authority. We will be called names, derided, even imprisoned.
But the alternatives are even worse. If Web Culture — we, the edglings — don’t work to save the world, I fear that the many groups who share common cause will not be brought together.
We have to become the bridges between these pockets of the revolution. We have to be the midwife of the change we need to happen.
It falls to us to bridge these new social worlds. We must choose, we must accept this new and limited idea of freedom as the price of moving from the center to the edge.
I have been throwing the term “Edgling” around a lot recently, as has been noted by various folks. I think that Jay Rosen’s term, The People Formerly Known As The Audience (TPFKATA) is unwieldy, and subject to all sorts of theatrical metaphorical clashes, as Doc Searls noted:
I don’t deny that I am sometimes on stage and sometimes an audience member (the latter more often than the former). But I’m uncomfortable with the theater metaphor (Shakespeare withstanding), at least in respect to blogging. I think bloggers have readers, not audiences. And I think the distinction is important, if not essential.
It’s different with podcasting, or any other kind of ‘casting. There, often (though not always) we are performing. The theater metaphor is more appropriate. Yet even here we run the risk of perceived hierarchy, since the audience is subordinate to the performer. (Podcasting, blogging) is Theater is an example of what cognitive linguists call a conceptual metaphor, or a frame. It’s something we think and talk in terms of. Meaning, we borrow a concept (a frame) and and its vocabulary to understand and talk about a subject. There are entailments to the theater metaphor. One is the old top-down media that really were comprised of performers and audiences. Because peer practices like blogging and podcasting don’t require the same asymmetries, why continue to use an asymmetrical frame when symmetrical one will do?
Also, what works best with blogging and podcasting is just being ourselves. Without artifice. Without performance. Without contrivance. No less talented, but far more relaxed, than what being “on stage” traditionally, reflexively, requires.
Personally, I favor the term Edgling because I want to move away from media metaphors, and use economic or sociological ones. This is not about who is “producing content” and who is “consuming” it: which is the basic paradigm of media thinking. Instead, it is about control moving from the central, large, mass-market organizations — which includes media companies, but also other large organizations, like government, religious organizations, and so on — out to the individuals — we, the people — at the edge.
As power moves from the center to the edge the “Centroids” — those that hold with the centralized power of an industrial era — will scream about all the negatives that they perceive in the out-of-control future that threatens the basis of their world view. But the Edglings will find it liberating to get out of the stranglehold on information, communication, and the marketplace that centralized organizations attempt to impose.
Just as importantly, I think that Edglings share a common base of perceptions about the world and our place in it that transcend the media market, and form what I think of as the basis for a future metaphysics, or, at the least, a new worldview. I have written about the central propositions of web culture before (see Rebooting, and The Rise of Web Culture and Its Enemies, for example), and I believe that the rise of web culture is perhaps the greatest hope that humanity has for a better, or at least survivable, future.
Here’s some thoughts on the emerging characteristics of web culture: the glue that holds Edglings — and through them, everything else — together:
These facets of society are arrayed in no particular order, and are strongly mutually reinforcing. They share, at the core, a strong predisposition to reject centralized authority, whether in business, government, media, or religion. The web allows us to change all the major axes of life, and to work our way onto a substantively different cultural ethos than what has preceded it, specifically the structures of life and work that have been thrown up by the industrial revolution and its aftermath.
I cannot overstate that everything is being changed by this new communication matrix. It will change our perceptions and sense of self, how we identify with others and how that affiliation takes place, what we think of as important, and what we believe needs to be done to make the world a better place to live and work.
I am no bomb-throwing revolutionary, but I do feel that much of what is wrong in the world is the outcome of outmoded forms of social interaction, and that much of that will need to be put aside. New forms of social engagement and cultural involvement will arise, and inexorably rewire the world and our minds. And those who have much to lose will struggle long and hard to stop or slow this change. [As just one example, the current trend in the US Executive branch toward consolidation of power and the unbalancing of our three-part systems of checks and balances is an almost subconscious struggle against the dissolution of the center and the coming rise of the edge.]
In media, there is no going back from what the Blogosphere has done. The Web has shaken US politics up, but it has not led to a transformation in our political systems. But that is likely to change, as more and more people grow disenchanted with a system that demands so much and is capable of doing so little. And in our personal lives, we seek a greater degree of autonomy and satisfaction in the workplace and our pursuit of happiness, where art is becoming intermixed with punching the clock.
More people are becoming more aware of a greater world, a larger world, and are starting to consider themselves as world citizens, rather than simply as inhabitants of nation states that arose through millennia of wars of conquest and domination. People are reconnecting with a local sense of place: their neighborhood, their specific locale. This glocalization of world view will shift power — slowly — away from nationalism. Consider the example of Catalonia, or the growing differences between blue and red states.
These trends will lead to a basic identification of ourselves as humans living together on Spaceship Earth, as Buckminster Fuller called it, and a rejection of ideologies that divide us based on language, religion, caste, gender, or ethnic background. As anthropologist and ethnographer Claude Levi-Strauss said, in a 1972 interview,
A well-ordered humanism does not begin with itself, but puts things back in their place. It puts the world before life, life before man, and the respect of others before love of self.
This is the lesson that the people we call “savages” teach us: a lesson of modesty, decency and discretion in the face of a world that preceded our species and that will survive it.
We need to put things back into place, although the configuration that web culture will make of all this is brand new. Much of the sensibility of our time will seem like a return to things that were put aside at the start of the industrial revolution, although much will be completely new. But at the core, Levi-Strauss’ checklist — world, life, people, the respect of others, self — seems like a pretty good starting point.
Today’s New York Times includes a piece on female bosses being occasionally more tyrannical that males (see A Tyrant Boss, Even Without the Y Chromosome - New York Times), which precipitated a chain of thought about collaboration, the future of work, and, perhaps, a return to an earlier basis for culture:
[by Benedict Carey]
In an authoritative 2003 analysis of 45 studies in a wide range of organizations, from schools to hospitals to financial companies, Alice Eagly of Northwestern University and Marloes van Engen of Tilberg University in the Netherlands found that women managers tended to be — on average — more collaborative than men, more encouraging to subordinates, more likely to include them in decisions. Men were more likely to lead by top-down command, or to be strictly hands off, distant.
“The differences are small and of course individuals vary,” Dr. Eagly said, “but women score higher on transformational leadership, modeling good behavior, working with people, letting people know when they are doing a good job.”
I have long believed that the best collaboration arises in groups where hierarchical dominance is tempered by egalitarian ideals: where the social norms favor hearing the viewpoints of the largest number of those involved in the work or subject at hand, and where the responsibilities and rewards of work are distributed. Not too surprising, those places where I have worked with the fewest number of women have been the places with the lowest degree of collaboration, trust, and happiness.
Being a natural loner, although an alpha male type, I have in general withdrawn into the hard shell of individual achievement in such situations, or, when working as a manager in these contexts, have worked to create a private world with social norms at variance with the larger context. Lamentably, both of these strategies had only limited success, or, at the worst, have failed miserably.
I believe that the best setting for collaboration — whether in the workplace, or in society as a whole — is one in which these principles of inclusion and egalitarianism are afforded the greatest importance. This is the primary motivation for my evangelism for Web culture, since it lacks any hierarchies except those based on respect, influence, and the inexorable power laws of reputation and emergent individual authority.
It is worth saying that the nature of collaboration is such that it flourishes in situations where the so-called “feminine” — which could be translated as egalitarian — approach to social interaction are expected and applied. This means that we need to move actively away from authoritarian — “masculine” — and hierarchical approaches to sense making, organization, and decision making, that is, if we wish to live in a world based on collaboration and inclusion.
Of course, the alternative is right in front of us. We can instead aspire to hold onto a world based on exclusion, divisiveness, and caste, where unilateral power politics dominate the world stage, and the parochial interests of the powerful few control the destinies of all.
And in business, we will watch as those who best learn how to collaborate will come to dominate the land-rush into the 21st century economy, and those who tried to control their markets — instead of building deep collaboration into their business models, as John Seely Brown styles it — will fail. It may well be that this will be the fulcrum upon which human culture turns, pried away from industrial era models of command-and-control, in business, in politics, and in society as a whole.
I sense that the Web stands as a strange attractor, where the relatively stable state of our world system can be rapidly transformed into a radically different but equally stable state.
On a personal level, I think that the rise of a new world culture, colored strongly by the Web and its subversion of all the pillars of culture, namely arts, entertainment, media, politics, and religion, will change people’s aspirations and role models. Bill Gates will seem less an icon than Pierre Omidyar or Jason Fried, in the coming years. Gates, the last great industrial tycoon, and the information era the final chapter in the industrial epoch.
And it occured to me that this egalitarianism — including the near parity of men and women in social systems — is a major characteristic of hunter/gatherer societies. I wondered what other aspects of hunter/gatherer life might be worthwhile to reintroduce into today’s world, or which are likely to reemerge as we move into the new epoch?
Communitarianism — Early paleolithic hunter/gatherers have been generally depicted, as Hobbes stated, “living lives nasty, brutish, and short,” but current anthropology suggests that they may have lived much better that later pastorialists, agricutural serfs, or industrial factory workers. They certainly worked less, perhaps only a few hours a day, spending the rest of their time socializing, sleeping, and playing. Most interesting, it seems that in general, hunter/gatherers distribute their food in a communitarian manner, relying on a “gift economy” of obligation and favors to make sense of who should get how much of what is caught or gathered everyday.
I am not advocating a grasshopper lifesyle, with no food storage or planning for the future, but only suggesting that the current social norms fail to include the poor and disenfranchised adequately in our rapid movement into a brave new world. We need to adopt an “all for all” attitude, and distribute the benefits of our collective resources in such a way that all have a place at the cookpot. Any other philosophy — especially based on the arguments of centralized authority in the hands of ruling elites — will fail to find any resonance in the emerging Web culture.
Marshall Sahlins refers to a “Zen affluence” where
human material wants are finite and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate. Adopting the Zen strategy, a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty - with a low standard of living. That, I think, describes the hunters. And it helps explain some of their more curious economic behaviour: their “prodigality” for example- the inclination to consume at once all stocks on hand, as if they had it made. Free from market obsessions of scarcity, hunters’ economic propensities may be more consistently predicated on abundance than our own.
I am not actually advocating returning to actually hunting and gathering itself — spearing fish from streams, or eating bark from trees — only the reapplication of the social models of hunter/gathers now that we have moved beyond a time in which most of us are working the land or laboring in factories. This Zen abundance is one example of how we might think, if we only wanted to.
Nomadism — A few thousand years ago, humanity stopped wandering around, and became tied to the land based on agriculture, and then moved from agriculural areas into the cities with the rise of industrialism. In a time when corporate agriculture employs only a few percent of the population, and a minority are involved in manufacturing, huge cities and sedentary populations are an artifact of outmoded economics. (As are, perhaps, all notions that derive from living in fixed places, which is too large a thought to pursue here, suggesting the inutility of things like nations.)
While New York seems the pinnacle of all that is metropolitan, parking 8 to 15 million people into a giant hive on some relatively low-lying islands and pennisulas sticking out in the increasingly restive Atlantic in a time of global warming is simply hubris, as the Katrina disaster should prove to anyone willing to connect the dots. A multi-trillion dollar disaster is just waiting to happen, and it really is not limited to just big catastrophes. Ditto Hong Kong and dozens of other locations.
The world is warming, and while we should do everything we can to decrease the rate of the rise, it is likely to rise for some time, no matter what we do. Our relationship to the earth has to change on many levels, and in one obvious one: we need to think about moving large populations away from the coastlines, where most people on earth live.
We could adopt the paleolithic ideal, which involves thinking of ourselves as nomads, and moving away from the “American Dream” which involves a relatively large home, surrounded by other similar, disconnected homes, in neighborhood unserved or underserved by public transportation, that require the entire energy apparatus of Western civilization to support it: commuting, cars, large road systems, strip malls, gas stations, the petroleum economy, wars in West Asia, and the growing carbon crisis.
Instead, we need to envision a time when we rely principally on non-personal transportation, using renewable energy sources, and a gradual decommissioning of all the elements of the current “Dream” — including the fixed tie to the land that a home implies.
I am not self-universalizing, suggesting that others should become jetsetters just because I am bouncing from place to place like a shuttlecock. But moving our aspirations away from a house in the suburbs, a job with a short commute, and a summer place on the Cape is a good starting point.
Why can’t people in service jobs work nearly anywhere? You can, as the Web shows. And even folks in more prosaic jobs — the barrista at the neighborhood Starbucks — could just as well work in Tucson, as in Fairfax County, so long as people begin dispersing from the coasts and large cities into other locales.
This is a condemnation of the current mileau — politicians, governments, media, and other organized gorups — who refuse to mobilize toward a sustainable future. We will have to — no surprise — take it on ourselves to accomplish this transformation of human life on earlth, and most likely jettison those power structures along the way.
And my prediction is that people will begin moving into locales conducive to this sort of life style. [I better hurry to sell my suburban DC home before this trend surfaces.] But it is likely to require a permanent increase in energy costs and a few more coastal disasters before the notion becomes a movement.
Inclusiveness — Buckminster Fuller’s Spaceship Earth notions are basically forgotten, but the idea is simple: we are on Earth together, and if we think of it as a vessel carrying us into the future, with limited resources and a growing number of passengers it will change our response to the problems that beset us. And good collaborative solutions will require us to adopt inclusionary and egalitarian approaches to work toward reasonable solutions: we will need to become more feminine in our style and society.
You can take this as the Sunday morning ramblings of a bleary-eyed, over-zealous student of technology and society, if you’d like. Some moony-headed geek hoping that technology will outpace the ills of our dysfunctional world. Maybe so.
I hope that instead I am simply advocating a return to our wiring, a resurgence of trust in ourselves and how we have come into being on this green, small, and fragile watering hole, this third rock from the Sun. We need to move past the fractious adolesence of a troubled humanity and take on the tasks of adulthood, which means caring for all of us, not just our friends and families, and putting aside childish cliques and games.
Its time to learn to hunt, and forage, and memorize the old, old songs that tell the paths to the summer fishing grounds and where the nuts are sweetest. Fables that teach us that humor trumps evil, and that the wisest of us all might be an old crone full of tales. Stories that warn us against the short and hard promises of war, and argue against the cold logic of hatred.
We need to move to the edge, and leave the center behind. We have so much to do, so much to lose, so much to regain.
Showing a typical lack of depth regarding the trend right before their eyes, the media are mistaking what the newest Comscore numbers about social networks mean:
TABLE 1 Selected Social Networking Properties by Unique Visitors
May 2006
Total U.S. - Home, Work and University Internet Users Source: comScore Media MetrixProperty………………………….. May-06 (000)
Total Internet Population……… 172,120
MYSPACE.COM………………….. 51,441
Classmates.com Sites…………. 14,792
FACEBOOK.COM………………… 14,069
YOUTUBE.COM………………….. 12,669
MSN Spaces……………………… 9,566
XANGA.COM…………………….. 7,146
FLICKR.COM…………………….. 5,163
Yahoo! 360 degrees…………… 4,936
LIVEJOURNAL.COM……………. 3,904
MYYEARBOOK.COM……………. 3,048
This is just tip of the iceburg of Web culture. People are turning the Web into Ted Oldenburg’s Third Place, or maybe Third Space is better. The place that is not our home or our work, but where we interact in a larger, and more diverse social milieu. Where we are more likely to hear a dirty joke, or experience insights into others’ lives. Where we are more likely to find a source for artistic expression, new ideas, and ultimately, a broader and more open perspective on what makes the world spin around.
This is an implicit rejection of the controlled media depiction of purpose and meaning in our lives, a turning away from centralized organizations telling us what is important or how to live our lives. These social sites are not merely some way for venture capitalists to make money, or for faddish cliques to indulge in marginal lifestyles. This is the start of a new global culture, defining its own principles and mores, hiding in plain sight.
Sure, the news services and talking heads are quick to focus on the emergence of global Web culture when China jails some journalist or dissident who has resorted to the Web as a podium, but when it’s Westerners who are flocking to the pleasures of online society, it is spun as entertainment, leisure time activities, or the gross immorality of the lunatic fringe.
I am actually happy that the rise of Web culture can continue to be a surreptitious revolution, happening out in plain sight, because otherwise there would be hearings in Congress, and a hue-and-cry in the press. There is already a smattering of cautionary stories, like in today’s New York Times, warning members of the social networking sites that posting licentious or blatantly sexual materials on your MySpace could lead to “losing that dream job,” because after all, we are supposed to be soulless drones if we want to work for the man:
[ from Online Party Crashers]
All good things must come to an end, including the chance to post lascivious photographs and diary entries on the Internet without repercussions. A generation that has come of age with blogging, Webcams and social networking sites is waking up to the fact that would-be employers are looking over their shoulders — and adjusting their job offers.
So the subtle repressive powers of conservatism inherent in corporate life are being quietly heralded by the inherently conservative media — even a hypothetically left-leaning pub like the NY Times — where it is taken as a given that individuals should jettison any hope for a private life if they wish to work for corporate America. Give up open self-expression, conceal any sexual tendencies that stray from normalcy, and do not be too strident in your protests against idiocy in government, business, or religion. The message is clear: if you want the benefits of a working career, put aside any personal expression.
And the message that is being sent at a deeper level — one that the senders may not even know they are sending — is that they reject the openness, freedom, and self-expression that Web culture is founded on. And, once they realize what is going on, they will try to counter this quiet, bottom-up, and diffused revolution. The repressive regimes use direct controls to silence or jail those who attempt to undo centralized control of media and the state. But the societal controls within theoretically more open societies in the West will come to bear, and it is the gentle coercions — like the mocking, “father-knows-best” tone of the NY Times editorial — that may be the most difficult to blunt.
We have institutionalized the messages of the media, we are the ones who accept the powers that the corporations and media use to hold us in line. Why can’t I protest the war in Iraq on my blog if I work for some multinational? Do I have no forum for political advocacy? Should I be fired if my opinions upset my boss, or some client? If I am living a sexual lifestyle via some social networking site — one that is legal, but unsavory to the conservatives — should we accept the fact that I might be denied a job that I am capable of performing? Should we chuckle along with the editors of the Times, who imply that “of course such indiscretions will nix your career.”
And the last line will be the patronizing, and smarmy tone that they adopt. After all, serious and well-adjusted people don’t spend time on the Internet, except to gather information necessary to do their jobs. It is only the maladjusted fringe or immature that spend time in chat rooms, on MySpace, or blogging away.
I suggest that we need to explicitly expose them when they say these things, and argue the not-so-obvious at every turn:
So, the Comscore figures hide as much as they reveal, and the smartalecky attitude of the NY Times editorial says less than it means. The revolution is coming and it will be socialized, and the powers whose authority and control are threatened will try very hard indeed to subvert any movements, especially global ones, that reject the current state of affairs.
I know you think that your 20 plus hours a week on the Internet is merely a sideline to a busy life, the curious stretching of your mind to understand the world from a slightly broader perspective. You may have no desire to be a part of some radical restructuring of human society. Or, at least no conscious desire to do so.
But, at least for people like me, the vanguard who live most of their business and personal life online (or at least mediated largely online), we have really already turned that corner. We have seen what’s over the horizon, and we know it’s worth fighting for. And we know who we are fighting against, too.
[Pointer Steve Rubel]
The Reboot conference in Copenhagen last week was a redefining experience for me. Even at the superficial level, the conference was hypnotically involving: the city is beautiful, the citizens helpful and attractive, and the conference setting was great. At a somewhat deeper level, the conference attendees and presentations were top-notch, as I detailed in that earlier post. But, although in general I think myself to be immune from such legerdemain, the premise that we, the attendees, had all come to Reboot to reboot ourselves, to gain some new sense of direction and purpose… well, it actually worked on me.
The theme of the conference was renaissance, both personal and cultural. So, I spent some of the time in Copenhagen, out in the variable sunshine at the Kettelhalle, the conference venue, reflecting on both aspects of the theme. And I have arrived at a small epiphany of sorts, regarding what it is that I am up to.
I had confirmation of my greater goals, when Hugh MacLeod was writing up some of his thoughts on the conference. Along with discussion of his time at the conference, he mentions that he had the chance to spend some time with me, and he writes “The guy wants to change the world!”
Well, I do. I confess.
In particular, I am rededicating myself to the advancement of Web culture and taking what we are learning there about the future of human interaction, and seeking to find ways to inject that into the greater world culture. This is the largest and greatest application of the principle behind /Message: the edge changing the center.
And we, those of us out here at the edge of Web culture, have a moral and social obligation to make sure that the opponents of that future don’t derail it, don’t sidetrack it, and don’t subvert it. This reaches into all sectors of life: economics, business, politics, education, religion, art, and all the other slices of human experience. A battle on all fronts, at all points.
Our first duty is to explore the dynamics of the Web to gain a better understanding of what it might all mean, and to help others do so, too. That reaches into my everyday job of looking at new technologies, new companies, and new approaches to innovation, trying to see where it all is headed, on a microcosmic and macrocosmic level. But I believe that I need to touch upon the big picture issues more than I have been in the past, especially examining the core principles of Web culture, and the tactics of its enemies.
As one aspect of this personal renaissance, I am hoping to spend more time outside the United States. I need to be in direct contact with more members of this global cultural phenomenon. I have recently spent some time in Canada, and although Americans may discount the foreignness of our close neighbor to the north, and while some of the differences are subtle, don’t be fooled: it is a profoundly different place. And of course, I just spent a week in Europe, in Hamburg and Copenhagen, and that was really mind-expanding.
At the close of the conference, Thomas Madsen-Mygdal was leading the conference in a closing exercise, asking us what we would be doing differently in the next year because of Reboot. As he walked the floor, the answers were all over the place: “To spend more time with my son”, “Learn Rails”, “Start the company I have been thinking about for years”, and so on. When my time came, I blurted, “To spend more time in Europe.” Yes, I am hoping to do that, as well as to make a trip to Asia, to find out what is happening there.
But perhaps more than the specifics, I reflected on the flight home and considered personal renaissance. Perhaps “renaissance” is a bit strong, since it suggests the entire European continent moving out of the Dark Ages. But, at the least, Reboot has tricked me into looking back at the thoughts that led me, so many years ago, to start type, type, typing about social technologies and their impacts on us, individually and collectively.
I left Reboot with a handful of email addresses, a half dozen blurry images from restaurants and train stations, and a few dozen new friends. And something more, something that has lodged beneath the skin, deeper than a glance at the program or even a thorough reading of the wiki would ever reveal.
So, I will stay at the edge, doing much the same things day-to-day: talking with start-ups, reviewing new tools, and thinking about their impact on how we do what we do. But, more and more, you will hear me talking about how this all means we can do new things, and that old ways and means can be put aside: that we can make changes for the better, and entice the world along with us, to where this is all headed.
Gandhi said “You have to be the change you want in the world,” and Reboot has brought me back to that simple defining insight. The secret to purpose in life (or happiness, or enlightenment, or meaning) is that there is no secret: its right here, in front of you, right now. And Reboot, for me at least, was in fact that kind of shining mirror, where I relearned that the key to finding my way in the world is to find myself, to rediscover what drives me to get up every morning and attack the empty white page, and to knit these observations into the skein of others’ thoughts, needs, and aspirations. By working on the small, I am made large. By focusing on here and now, I am working toward what lies beyond.
Don’t be concerned. I have not put aside the old Stowe for some prating, namby-pamby, new age fruitcake. It’s still the same old familiar raving lunatic, following the same ideas, the way I have for years, and especially since January, when I left the past behind and started this new blog. Still, at the same time, it’s great to clean out the carburetor, and to remember that it’s supposed to add up to more than a paycheck and a Technorati rank.
Expect things will be a bit different, even though my style won’t change much. So: new themes, new rants, but mostly the same old, same old.
I haven’t been converted to some new world view, after all: it’s only a Reboot!
Social anthropologist, clairvoyant, postfuturist.
My work is social tools and their impact on media, business, and society.
I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections.
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