For all of the history up until this point, our communication structures have for the
most part, especially mass media systems, have been very top down and they've been controlled
by a few people that had distribution control.
If you look back the church was really the first broadcast network.
The church built out a very defined architecture of communication that was coming from a centralized
place where very few people could have the word of God come down to them and they had
the ability to transcribe – this was at a point when literacy was very rare and so
you had only a few people that were illiterate that could transcribe this holy word – and
then they would distribute it out to a local market where you had a big impressive building
that had lots of iconography and lots of beautiful images inside of it and the tallest building
usually in the town and they would ring with the steeple at 8:00 a.m. and we would all
congregate for mass and we would listen to one message from one incontrovertible truth,
from one source.
And that's not too dissimilar from television architecture.
You have a group of people in suits in New York or in Los Angeles and they're deciding
what's going to be on television and then they distribute it to those towers.
And at 7:00 p.m. prime time we aggregate around a television that's been brought into our
home and we watch this one incontrovertible truth and this signal from a top down approach.
And when the Internet started enabling people first with this underlying network architecture
of TCP/IP that allowed us to transcend time and distance, that allowed any node on the
network to contribute to the system, and then we started seeing things like video sharing
and a photo sharing that allowed us all to become publishers.
And then we had this kind of this layer of social that is redefining everything where
every single person is now a contributing node on the network, and every person that
is part of that uses emotions and memes and content to distributor things in a horizontal
fashion.
And so what that's doing is destroying the ability to discern what is authentic; what
is not, what's real; what's fake, what's commercial; what's non-commercial, what's sponsored; what's
non-sponsored, what's a good idea versus a bad idea.
And so when we exist in this freeform society where every node on the network can contribute
something to the network, and it has no checks and balances if you will, there is no top
down authority that's editing it or deciding what's real or not – then suddenly it becomes
every node on the network's responsibility.
We’re all having to learn a pattern of behavior that we're all responsible for the propagation
of this content.
Because the one interesting rule is it's very difficult to make a mass media statement in
a cellular holonic structure nodal network because you have to get a bunch of people
to agree to share it and agreed to propagate it.
No big media company can buy their way into the system anymore.
But at the same time if everybody is on a balanced playing field then people that are
hackers or people that scam the system or people that kind of arbitrage the new ad features
that emerge or decided to take this path, have an advantage over some of the tried-and-true
institutions, you know, especially in things like the context of fake news that's been
happening a lot.
The idea that a bunch of Macedonian teenagers that are arbitraging ad dollars on Facebook's
system can put hundreds of stories into a network that people believe, these fake news
stories, when a New York Times or a Wall Street Journal refuses to pay for play in a system
like Facebook.
And so you have this great imbalance because we haven't learned yet how to - we haven't
taught ourselves yet how to discern what's real and what's fake and how to look at sources
and how to see them for what they are.
And that's also because of a lack of transparency.
We're living in these systems now that are controlling our ability to disseminate information
and we have no transparency whatsoever when it comes to algorithms.
Why this does content behaved this way, why one day when I post something to 500 people
does it reach and the next they only five people reaches?
And so until we have visibility into that system and into these algorithms we're going
to be at a bit of a loss and a bit of a grabbing in the dark trying to make sense of this new
communication architecture.
I quote Aldous Huxley, paraphrase him basically says: The only part of the universe you can
possibly control is yourself.
And now more than ever that kind of social responsibility is upon each one of us.
Because now we're in a holonic system, a cellular holonic system that we are all responsible
with the propagation of the right information, positive information, negative information,
fake information.
We're all responsible for it because we're all part of a metabolic factor inside of the
system.
The sharing of these memes is propelled by emotions.
So human emotions are the metabolism of this system.
And you can tap into human curiosity and the whole range of emotions from anger to laughter
to desire and so we're seeing that played out in real time right now.