1968 and all that

In my speeches that I give, I often refer to how societies values change as the economy of that society develops.

1968 was a big year – the Paris Riots, Berlin, Prague, Chicago, Rome, Mexico City and even London.

I refer to this as a significant moment in history when individuals started to question their relationship with authority. One might want to add the explosion in the creative counter-culture the Black Panther movement and a thorough investigation into spirituality via experiments in religion and drugs.

I also talk about how we get caught up in the technology web/mobile 2.0 being one of them, however, its understanding how society, the media and culture remodel themselves also as part of that process.

As Wassily Kandinsky said

Every work of art is a child of its time

I raise the issue as there was an article in the Observer on Sunday looking at the momentous events of 1968

Sean O’Hagan writes

On New Year’s Eve 1967, Charles De Gaulle, the 78-year-old president of France, broadcast his annual message to the nation. ‘I greet the year 1968 with serenity,’ he announced, brimming with self-satisfaction. ‘It is impossible to see how France today could be paralysed by crisis as she has been in the past.’ Little did he know. Six months later, De Gaulle was fighting for his political life and the French capital was paralysed after weeks of student riots followed by a sudden general strike. France’s journey from ‘serenity’ to near revolution in the first few weeks of May is the defining event of ’1968′, a year in which mass protest erupted across the globe, from Paris to Prague, Mexico City to Madrid, Chicago to London.

Societies relationship with authority is an interesting one. And I believe that we are today re-considering our relationship again with authority. Just look at the recent Paris Riots.

Back to Paris

These rebellions were not planned in advance, nor did the rebels share an ideology or goal. The one cause many had in common was opposition to America’s war in Vietnam but they were driven above all by a youthful desire to rebel against all that was outmoded, rigid and authoritarian. At times, they gained a momentum that took even the protagonists by surprise. Such was the case in Paris, which is still regarded as the most mythic near-revolutionary moment of that tumultuous year

Today we challenge the authority of the media via a whole set of activities that can be networked and grassroots. It is done via co-creation, the forming of a new media ecology, that affects al aspects of society right down to how we teach our kids in school.

The common spirit of rebellion is

a distrust of all forms of established authority including parents, police, college administrations and government

However I am fearful of where we go in this wonderland of networks, engagement and a new sense of self, community and possibility.

Will it be so as the old media infrastructure breaks down more curbs and regulations by vested interests are put in place to coerce and control these self organising networks? In Britain we see actually the reverse of a new an open society perhaps? One more akin to state control than liberty and the rights of the individual. For a 1000 year old democracy this has deep implications.

Which then begs the question – who is in the best position to decide policy, centralised government or a network of organised and motivated communities, who understand the needs of its communities better than any government could. The end game is far from clear however. Yochai Benkler argues in his book The Wealth of Networks that individuals in a interconnected and network society can and do play a more significant role in culture, society and the economy. And I believe him. But, at what point does that movement end when the incumbent authority realises all this openess, sharing etc., mitigates and dilutes its own purpose and power?

And was TV in ’68 the internet in a perverse sort of way? broadcast then was more naive, unregulated, ignorant of what it could unleash? So are we naive today, will be regulated tomorrow.

Vietnam became the first war beamed into the living rooms of America, and the images were as raw and visceral as today’s are diluted and controlled. ‘In the Sixties, television turned up the intensity of what was going on in the world,’ says Sandbrook. ‘We had all seen war footage but this was the first time we had seen it almost as it happened. People had a sense of the sheer disproportionate force involved. The carpet bombing, the Napalm, the scale of the American operation shocked viewers and then angered them. Vietnam was the first TV war, and, as a direct result of that, it spawned the first global anti-war movement.’

We talk a great deal about engagement on this blog and what it means. TV as a mass media to a mass audience engaged society in 1968 by sharing information with a vast audience that was not available elsewhere – it was uncensored, visceral and in your face.

So what is the endgame of the networked economic-society?

Do I worry unnecessarily? Or, are we beginning to live in a world that is unprecedented?

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Posted in: Culture, Generation C, Government & Politics, Law, Media, Participation, Philosophy, Social Networks, Society, Television, Trends

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