Rebooting the system | SMLXL - Engagement Marketing and Communication principles from Alan Moore

Yearning for the vast and endless sea

May 6th, 2009

I am currently working on a new publishing project – my ambition to try to find a way to look upon and think about the world we are currently living in and try to find a way of frameworking and developing a language that enables us to embrace the true possibilities of this world.

What worries me is that many in all walks of life are trying to solve difficult problems in a new paradigm with old threadbare thinking. The demise of the media industry in my opinion is as much to do with the fact that are 10 years too late in trying to deal with the simple truth that the model of interruptive communications is not failing – it has failed. Both in traditional media and in the new digital ecology. Yet advertising inventory is still bought and sold in this manner. Hence the crisis that that industry finds itself in. But it is not only the media industry in dire straits.

The consequence of such failure to act results in lost jobs and livelihoods, and a fundamental systemic breakdown – banking and farming spring to mind. But lets look to science, Joshua Coper Ramo writes,

It wasn’t just Werner Heisenberg injecting uncertainty into quantum physics. It was Alfred Tarski bringing unpredictability to mathematics, Kurt Göbel bringing incompleteness to logic, Benoit Mandelbrot doing the same for fluid dynamics and Gregory Chaitin for information theory. They all proved that once you made the leap to a new model – if it was the right model – then accepting uncertainty and indeterminacy allowed you to make sense of the parts of the world you had never understood before.

Companies and institutions are locked, from top to bottom, from young to old, and in every level of their bureaucratic life, in a vision of the world that is out of date and inflexible. We are all witnesses to the confused navigation of our leaders. Ramo suggests and I would tend to agree.

Charles Handy in the Hungry Spirit written in 1997 – touches also on a very deep meme today what does more really mean, and how much is “enough’?

In Africa, they say there are two hungers, the lesser hunger and the greater hunger. The lesser hunger is for the things that sustain life, the goods and the services, and the money to pay for them, which we all need, The greater hunger is for an answer to the question “why?”, for some some understanding of what that life is for.

It has been mightly convenient, he continues

to think that better bread, and a bit of cake to go with it, would make us all content, because governments and business together might be able to deliver on that contract. The consequence of that thinking is that money ultimately becomes the measure of all things. We can measure our lives in pound notes, deutschmarks or dollar bills and then compare our scores.

This to me is the underpining of this communications revolution. Sadly the moniker “Social Media” is a foolish misnomer, it misses the point by a country mile. The gold dust in all of this is social communication or P2P. It is the quality of the conversation that counts. we are building a “We Communications Infrastructure” because we have all become Hungry Spirits.

as Aristotle mused long ago,

Wealth obviously is not the good we seek, for the sole purpose it serves is to provide the means of getting something else. So far as that goes, the ends we have already mentioned [pleasure, virtue and honour] would have a better title to be considered the good, for they are to be desired for their own account.

The market as we call it is hungry, and we have long worshiped at its feet, and there are those that say all things should be left to the market, as the market is cruelly democratic – what does not work gets destroyed. Yet what happens when the market fails to work – it is currently in that condition. Handy writes, ‘neither Adam Smith nor is successors, with a few extreme exceptions believed that the whole of public activity should be left to the market.’

Work in its current form is destroying who we are. Can we reboot the system to enable us to see a world of work and activity that is premised on a human scale? Stress even in 1996 cost Britain 40 million working days a year and £7 billion in health care.

Frankly, its all gone a bit Pete Tong. With the net result that there is a real spiritual poverty in modern life. Sygmunt Bauman said “you judge a modern society, not by what is consumes, but by what it throws away. Quality of our day-to-day lives seems equally to be in the dustbin. At the root of this is a particular systemic way of thinking.

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.

This gets me back to thinking about the relentless discussion about social media. Of course the market is buzzing like flies trying to work out how to monetise “Social Media” – yet few are digging into and asking the really important question…

WHY?

We as a species are on a quest to simplify and add a degree of structure and control to our lives

And rediscover our role in society. Because as individuals that are part of, and belong to a bigger whole, we wonder; why?

Or in other words I+WE= WHY?

‘I’ needs ‘We’ to be truly ‘I’ Jung argued. True individualism is necessarily social, though it is not obvious, however, what ‘social’ implies or what our relations are or should be to our fellow citizens. Apparently 63% of Americans declared themselves unconcerned with others, they may be missing something says Handy.

I suggest, that rather than fiddling around in the sandbox we raise our eyes and minds upwards and yearn for the vast endless sea of possibility of what our society could be beyond the confines of Straight Line inflexible thinking – and tinkering around with a few tools that we call social media – whereas Howard Rheingold rightly described as Technologies of Cooperation. Yet no-one uses this terminology. What you call things is important if not critical. We need a new language and framework to enable to succeed as a society and put commerce in its rightful place within the fabric of that society.

We need a system reboot into a new paradigm. We need an Enlightenment for the 21st Century, Richard Sennett wrote 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.

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