Holotopia: Collective mind

H O L O T O P I A:    F I V E    I N S I G H T S

Collective mind

The digital media technology, which is now in common use, was conceived to give us a completely new collective capability—to think and create together, as cells in a single mind do. By using it in the manner that suited the old technology—to merely broadcast information—we ended up breeding collective insanity, not collective intelligence as the creators of the new technology intended.

Being immersive and ever-present, the new media damage also our personal ability to comprehend and create.

Stories

The academic big question

We need to see the academia as a system. It has a vast heritage to take care of, and make use of. Selected creative people come in. They are given certain tools to work with, certain ways how to work, certain communication tools that will take their results and turn them into socially useful effect. How effective, and efficient, is the whole thing as a system? Is it taking advantage of the invaluable (especially in this time when our urgent need is creative change) resources that have been entrusted to it?</p>

Enter information technology...

The big point here is that the academia's primary responsibility or accountability is for the system as a whole, and for each of its components. The academia had an asset, let's call him Pierre Bourdieu. This person was given a format to write in—which happened to be academic books and articles. He was given a certain language to express himself in. How good are those tools? Could there be answers to this question (which the academi has, btw, not yet asked in any real way) that are incomparably, by orders of magnitude, better than what the academia of his time afforded to Bourdieu? And to everyone else, of course.

Analogy with the history of computer programming

A good way to begin might be to trace the analogy between the situation in computer programming following the advent of the computer, in response to which computer programming methodologies were developed—and the situation in our handling of information following the advent of the Internet. The point, the really big point, is that a dramatic increase in size of the thing being handled (computer programs and information) can not be effectively responded to by merely more of the same. A structural change (a different paradigm) is what the situation is calling for.

A new paradigm is needed

Edsger Dijkstra, one of the pioneers of the development of methodologies, argued that programming in the large is a completely different thing than programming in the small (for which textbook examples and the programming tools at large were created at the time):

“Any two things that differ in some respect by a factor of already a hundred or more, are utterly incomparable.”

Doug Engelbart used to make the same point (that the increase in size requires a different paradigm) by sharing his parable of a man who grew ten times in size (read it here).

The solution was found in developing structuring and abstraction concepts and methodologies, within the programming methodologies (as we summarized here).

It remains to highlight the punchline: There is also an interesting difference between computer programming and handling of information. The fact that a team of programmers can no longer understand the program they are creating is easily detected—the program won't run on the computer. But how does one detect the incomparably larger and more costly problem—that a generation of people can no longer comprehend the information they own? And hence the situation they are in?

Our collective mind is just plain insane

The Incredible History of Doug

The most wonderful story, however, is without The Incredible History of Doug (Engelbart), introduced by the story of Vannevar Bush. This story will be federated in the book "Systemic Innovation" (subtitle "The Future of Democracy"), which is the second book we are preparing as part of the tactics for launching the Holotopia project.

What more to say about the fact that Vannevar Bush, as the academic strategist par excellence, identified the problem we are talking with as the problem the scientists must focus on and resolve—already in 1945? And that Douglas Engelbart understood that (well beyond what Bush anticipated) digital computers, when equipped with interactive terminals and joined into a network, can serve as in effect a collective nervous system—and enable incomparably better ways to respond to the "complexity times urgency" issue, that underlies the humanity's contemporary challenges. See our summary here. This short video introduces The Incredible History of Doug, this one explains his vision.

It remains to highlight the main point.

A collective mind, combined with broadcasting (the process we've inherited from the printing press), spells collective madness—and not "collective intelligence" as Engelbart, and also Bush, intended.

What if

There are quite a few pieces of anecdotal evidence, and even some theoretical ones, that suggest that real or systemic or outside of the box creativity, as well as our comprehension of complex matters, depend on a slow, annealing-like process, which requires a relaxed and defocused state of mind (some of them were discussed in the blog post Tesla and the Nature of Creativity).

Have we developed a lifestyle that precludes such creativity, and comprehension?

Has comprehending and changing a paradigm become a cultural impossibility?

The cultural big question

Here we may begin from the archetypal image, of a mother by the bedside or a grandfather by a fire place, telling kids the stories of old... In focus here are cultural reproduction... and human quality... in the age of ubiquitous and pervasive digital media.

Nietzsche already warned us

Already Nietzsche warned us that the overabundance of impressions that modernity has give us keeps us dazzled, unable to digest and to act, but merely reacting... See Intuitive introduction to systemic thinking.

Neil Postman studied this issue academically, and thoroughly.

At NYU, where he chaired the Department of Culture and Communication, he created a graduate program in "media ecology"—and by naming it thus put his finger exactly at the sore spot.

Postman's best known work, his 1985 book "Amusing Ourselves to Death", is a careful argument showing... well, here is a summary by his son, Andrew Postman, in the introduction he wrote for the 20th anniversary edition:

Is it really plausible that this book about how TV is turning all public life (education, religion, politics, journalism) into entertainment; how the image is undermining other forms of communication, particularly the written word; and how our bottomless appetite for TV will make content so abundantly available, context be damned, that we'll be overwhelmed by "information glut" until what is truly meanmingful is lost and we no longer care what we've lost as long as we're being amused. ... Can such a book possibly have relevance to you and The World of 2006 and beyond?

Guy Debord saw that this issue was political

The technical keyword here is "alienation" (Debord operated within the ideological framwork of neo-Marxism), but Debord's insights are invaluable, and need to be federated. Seen within the power structure and symbolic reality framework, they will be (we anticipate) be a lot more easy to digest for a contemporary reader.

But yes, his point–it is that the addictive effect the new media have on us must be seen, and handled, as a key means of disempowerment. His "Society of the Spectacle" has lately been drawing increased attention—see this commentary in the Guardian, and this video where Debord's work is introduced as a "critique of a society which he saw as being ever more obsessed with images and appearances, over reality, truth and experience".

Is "human quality" eroded by the new media.

And what is to be done about that?

We need to look at ourselves in the mirror

The deeper underlying question is the one of academic self-identity.

Wll the academia remain "an objective observer" of all the structural changes in our cultural reproduction that are going on? Or will it take a proactive stance?