Culture

There are many people who are writing things these days, be it in the halting and truncated thoughts of Twitter or the flow of status updates on other social networks such as Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn. There was a world before where this was not possible, where one could not share as much as one can now, where one could not read so much of others thoughts.

It was a much quieter world. There were books, magazines, encyclopedias, and those literate would often spend at least a month for a continuation of some journal or the other we subscribed to. Within that space, we had time to do more thinking on our own. In the case of the computing magazines, such as ‘Compute!’, we might have to debug typos in code that kept it from working as it was supposed to. In the case of other things, we had time to reflect or act – to reflect on and perhaps even accept views from these pieces of paper bound together with glue and a need to transmit information across distance and time. Radio and television, too, allowed culture to seep to parts far removed from their origins.

There’s no need to say that the world before mass media, too, was quieter. In all, we consider our change as progress because we cannot turn back the clock; we must accept that it is progress and move forward. Good and bad ideas float around our sphere of influence in an almost quantum state – almost devoid of the prior limitations of distance and time. Once a message could take months or even years to reach a destination on this planet - we now complain when we have microseconds of latency with a server. We wish to know what is going on all the time; we wish to share what is going on all the time.

But why do we wish to share this information so readily, why do we wish to stay on top of what is going on in the world with so much abandon? We are descendants of people that tore their lives from a world not as we see it now, who shaped it to birth further generations. Values were different; geography was more important in that the distances meant a need for being able to depend on those around you. The ever diminishing world we have created has robbed us of the geography that instilled many of the values we still hold dear – things such as family, such as supporting a local economy over entities that exist in our minds and propagate themselves through our world on servers we created. In our efforts, we create a new identity for ourselves by our actions and inactions.

We have traded our time of reflection and thought for more information, faster and faster. We multitask more and more as we focus on one thing at a time less and less. Laws exist now for people who would type on a nefariously small keyboard while driving – and the thought that this is a bad thing seems to miss the newer generations entirely as they strive to constantly stay in communication with their own digital tribes.

We plunge forward, hoping that things like technology can better connect us and allow us to come to solutions to problems. We bat around terms like ‘collective intelligence’ and ‘smart mobs’ as if there is no downside to the problem – and when those problems become apparent, we downplay their effects. This is what mankind has done with every leap and bound in communication – some make the case that it’s the end of the world and others make the case that it’s the beginning of the world. Few recognize that both sides are correct; that the end of one thing is itself a beginning of another.

Yet with every leap and bound of technology, we seem to deluge ourselves with more information even as we sometimes do not communicate effectively. To combat this, governments and organizations that lobby governments try to protect people from themselves, creating intricate bureaucracies that – perhaps necessarily – hamper the flow of information to assure we do ourselves less harm, but these bureaucracies inherit from the prejudices of previous generations more readily because bureaucracy is not designed to change readily. Thus those prejudices of latter generations conspire against the future generations and in turn, the future generations conspire against the bureaucracies implemented and inherited from previous generations.

And to what end? Where once we had bureaucracies that staunched the flow of information into encyclopedias, we now have an online Wikipedia that anyone can edit but now where the new bureaucracies delete or edit as they see fit. We recreate what we destroy at every turn, attempting progress but almost always falling back to what we know.

Meanwhile, we talk about popularity as an analog for democracy and collective intelligence when de Tocqueville's observation was that the most important part of American democracy was discussion. By measuring popularity before discussion, we put the cart before the horse - truncating our ability much more severely than trying to communicate effectively important ideas and thoughts 140 characters at a time. The concepts of democracy and collective intelligence mean nothing if people don't bring value to the conversations, and that value is not to be found in following the crowd - it's to be found in reflection, thought and individuality and challenging the status quo.

Some write to be popular, few of those actually become popular, and when they do become popular they all too often become a slave to their popularity. Why? Self-preservation by sacrificing the self to popularity?

To better use social media, we need to step away from it more so that we can put more back into it, daring to be ourselves. I wonder sometimes whether we have the capacity to do this; maybe humanity is no more than a trampling herd of creatures that follow the popular wherever they go.

That's what I think, anyway. It's no wonder I'm not quite that popular. :-)

Every culture, clique, group, etc., lives in their own version of Plato's Cave (Allegory of the Cave ). When caves collide, some cultures insist that there must be a winner or loser. The trouble with one side losing is that the winners don't know what they lost.

The implicit premise of any self formed government, grown from society itself, is that there are people that can be trusted that create systems that can be trusted. And for the generation that creates such a government, assuring that this is true is paramount. Generations later, society is lulled into a sense of security - be it false or otherwise - and eventually there are those who would turn government toward their own private gain. And then, eventually, people learn to distrust the government and should society care enough about itself, they will create a new government. This used to be violent but with democracy it is not as violent. In fact, one would hope it isn't violent at all. I see this in the United States. It can be made more complicated, I suppose, but at the end of the day it falls down to people being able to trust the government to protect their interests. And those interests - those common interests - are a commons.

And then there are governments that are imposed on people.

These last few weeks have been interesting and have me more untethered than usual.

There's a side of me that has been immersed in Trinidad and Tobago, where aspiring to be a gentleman farmer seems to have reached the glass ceiling created by an integrity not shared by politicians and people past and present. This is the culmination of about 9 years of effort, trying to do things not as they are done but as they should be done. And, damn me, it hasn't worked.¹

Then there is my overgrown 'save the world' gland that got me to be a participant in CARDICIS3 - regarding the enabling of rebuilding of Haiti by Haitians after the earthquake of January 12th, 2010. But the problems are deeper than that of an earthquake and the system failures preceded the actual disaster. 'Continuance', a phrase often associated with mankind's adaptation to disasters (and the misnomer 'disaster management'), is really not an option since the preceding conditions that, while endemic to the entire world, demonstrate their untenability in the extremes of Haiti. And there I am again, trying to do things not as they are done but as they should be done. And, damn me, I don't think I'll see progress there either.² The focus on treating the symptoms by creating systems that do so simply makes treating the disease more complicated, in my opinion.

In both of the above, I do not feel I can have an effect. I have weathered much in the first and that makes me leery of expending time and energy in the second, especially in a context that is so complicated by design. Bureaucracy shows disdain for change, by its very conceptual definition, and because of that the necessary simplifications for solution of problems are defied on cultural grounds.