Do we seek the comfort of Gutenberg's ghost? | SMLXL - Business and Communication Innovation from Alan Moore

Do we seek the comfort of Gutenberg’s ghost?

January 26th, 2009

Simon Jenkins argues that in today’s world of great economic uncertainty we are turning back to the past, for some hand holding. And to a degree he is right.

On Tuesday 2 million Americans decided not to watch their hero on the screen, though they could have done so at home, in close-up and in the warm. They braved a freezing night and a freezing day to be in Washington, despite there being no hope of actually seeing the inauguration ceremony. They wanted just to be in the same city as the great man. They longed to repeat the Selma march and the Martin Luther King rally. The huddled masses were back.

Andrew Keen however takes issue with Jenkins assumptions, and I am, to a point prepared to agree. However, what everyone has missed is that people genuinely feel part of the Obama campaign, created and forged in the white heat of hot media (hot media = heat in motion). The organising and participation, via all media platforms, the ability for people to feel engaged and involved was what was transformational. The collective need was to create new meaning together.

People turned up in great numbers because they wanted to share that historic moment together. And I disagree with Keen’s rather depressing summary,

That’s the great irony of the 21st century digital revolution. In this world of ubiquitous free content, the only thing of value is the analogue. Live is more than real. It is our new reality.

E.M Foster’s dictum was “only connect”. And technologies do not come out of nowhere, as they are indeed human inventions in the first place. There is no online and offline no digital and analogue there is only blended reality in which we have discovered the means to better connect.

What has been missing in action for some time was ‘community’ and a shared sense of community. Have a read of Communities Dominate Brands or Profession without Community. As Goethe argued festival is not something given to the people but something they give to themselves. That is what 2 million people gave themselves last Tuesday.

Yochai Benkler wrote on the world we inhabit today,

We need not declare the end of economics as we know it. We merely need to see that the material conditions of production in the networked information economy have changed in ways that increase the relative salience of social sharing and exchange as a modality of economic production. That is, behaviours and motivation patterns familiar to us from social relations generally continue to cohere their own patterns. what has changed is that now these patterns of behaviour have become effective beyond the domains of building social relations of mutual interest and fulfilling our emotional and psychological needs of companionship amd mutual recognition. They have come to play a substantial role as modes of motivating, informing, and organising productive behaviour at the very core of the information economy.

But I think it is more than that too. Enlightenment in a word is mankind’s exit from self-incurred immaturity, argued Kant in 1784. None of this stuff is new. And I would say that is where we are right now staring at a new Enlightenment. Sennett argues that we want to,

recover something of the spirit of the Enlightenment on terms appropriate to our time. We want the shared ability for work to teach us how to govern ourselves and to connect to other citizens on common ground.

There is no going back Mr Jenkins, there is only forward momentum, and we are the people we have been waiting for. Pico della Mirandola in his Oration on the Dignity of Man 1486 was based upon the notion that as the force for custom and tradition wanes (as we have witnessed spectacuarly in recent times) people have to “make experience” for themselves, in fact they need to make meaning for themselves. Or we become very noisy ghosts in the machine called life.

This is why we are creating and proscribing technologies of cooperation, that meet fundamental human needs, that is why we are designing for a support economy, and that is why we are all entitled to be craftsmen and women (“The craftsman represents the special human condition of being engaged” – writes Richard Sennett), its why we are living in a networked society and its why we like to dance in the streets together, its why the unity of knowledge can be so powerful if we can harness that via collective action and collective intelligence.

The primacy of human agency in any form is what is on our agendas, these are the drivers to the consequence of the demise of mass media and mass consumption, the rise of the craftsman and convergence culture.

Yes, identity and community are fundametal building blocks yes they are old.

E.O. Wilson wrote,

People must belong to a tribe, they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves.

John Cacioppo and Patrick Williams argued that without such meaning or belonging social isolation deprives us of both our feeling of tribal connection and our sense of purpose. On both counts, they say, the results can be devastating, not only for the individual, but for societies as well.

As John Milton wrote,

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n

Human beings are meaning-making creatures. That is what this is all about; our personal and collective reclamation of meaning, purpose and identity. As the first human societies were formed, human beings were binding themselves together, with social information such as kinship, friendship, as evolutionary biologist Martin Novak observed, that

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of evolution is its ability to generate cooperation in a competitive world

Simon Jenkins writes,

The early media guru Marshall McLuhan thought that electronics would usher in an age of global villages and virtual friendships. It would render true community obsolete. He was wrong. He understood technology, but not humanity.

Now that I completely agree with that, although I might add that McLuhan is not the only one not to really understand the intmate and complex relationship between; people, communication, technology, media and society. I think there is a desire, a palpable desire to get back some things that are really important to us, to reconnect those things that makes us living beings that enable us to find true meaning and happiness in our lives.

Old is not the new, we are midwives to a world that is evolving from the straight lines that were representative of an industrial era, to a world that in its networked beauty is more like nature, that is more like us.

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