Sidetracked

I found a terribly interesting essay about the way that the internet is shaping our social environment, and it’s been taking over my life for the past couple days…

Here’s a slice from the article in question:

Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.
And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.

This solitary voice was speaking my language… Someone who sees the trends in our technology and relates them to social phenomena… More and more I’m seeing the digital revolution as something on the scale of the introduction of the printing press… it seemed just a convenient invention at first, but the change that it wrought at a societal level brought down seemingly invincible power-institutions of the day. See this essay.

It seems very clear to me now that we’re seeing the beginning stages of a major transformation. Like any change, this will be very painful for lots of people, and may include some unpleasant upheavals as a result. I bet that many institutions will feel the pinch before this change is complete… newspapers and the music industry are among the first hit, and others are in process… I actually find myself wondering if Big Business and Big Government (of which I am a part, as a military member) will survive the transformation intact. It seems to me that the kind of huge, top-down, centralized organizations that came about with the Industrial Revolution may become outmoded. The next set of cultural heavyweights may well be the Googles and Microsofts and Facebooks of the world… or their next-gen equivalents.

Anyway, after reading Clay Shirky’s blog and several other spin-offs, and subscribing to several science and tech news feeds, I feel like, for the first time in a while, I’m seeing the shape of the future. My vision isn’t complete, but I feel like I’ve got the edges of it, and boy, are we in for a wild ride! For instance, I would not be at all surprised if in the next century the notion of the nation-state becomes completely outmoded. After all, why define identity by the silly matter of where you are physically placed, if all or most of your meaningful interaction happens in a virtual, international setting? I think that the boundaries that may matter more are ideological ones, religious ones, and things like that.

For instance, I remember reading an article about how a lot of Europeans are very concerned about the upcoming elections… it is disturbing to them that a person with the kind of political and international clout of the United States President is chosen by a nation of often ignorant, isolationist boors. And just recently I visited the website for petitions to the UK Prime Minister, and it struck me how it seems almost… artifical… to require that a person be a UK resident to sign a petition.

Granted, it’s going to take a while for this changeover to take place. I’m not sure what government would have to look like on a worldwide scale… it’s pretty evident that the current experiments in international governmental institutions we have can be hijacked by people with agendas that aren’t in the interests of all humanity. Power corrupts, and power on a global scale would be HIGHLY tempting to the worst sort of people. But perhaps if a good system of checks and balances was in place, a truly worldwide government could work? I have no idea… but I bet it’s coming down the pike!

I even read an article today that suggested that postmodernism is outmoded. We’re into a new era, post-postmodernism, this philosopher argued! After all, all the relevant texts of postmodernism were written decades ago, and the only place where we see postmodern thought (self-conscious irony, etc.) reliably displayed in pop culture is in irreverent cartoons aimed at the K-6 set. (And their parents.) When any movement has been that thoroughly digested by the culture at large, you know it’s not cutting-edge anymore. Just like when the women’s department at Wal-Mart starts selling a style to the masses in middle America, you know that it’s out of date!

I know I’ll always err on the side of the future. I like thinking about what’s coming next, and what might happen. I always hoped that one of the Star Trek vessels would come by someday to “beam me up” and let me explore the galaxy and the future…

Now the process of waiting for some of the things to actually happen is going to be one of teeth-gnashing and hair-pulling frustration! We still have most of the adult population who’s barely digested the notion of email, let alone social networking, wikis and the thought of collective intelligence… Getting to the next phase is going to be a combination of waiting for the old guard to retire, and the slow and torturous process of retraining people who are fairly happy to be set in their ways. But by the time that the people my age are in their 80’s, we’ll probably be seeing a fairly substantial change in world order! Of course at that point I’ll be too old and crotchety to enjoy it, but maybe I can point to stuff I wrote in the dark ages of blogging and say, “See, I KNEW it was going to happen!”

Explore posts in the same categories: Pontification, Random

Tags: change, social transformation, societal upheaval, the future, web 2.0

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