The no straight lines of authentic value in the networked society

October 14th, 2009

I sit on the board of inspiration at the Dutch Think Tank Freedom Lab – the boys have been running a series of interviews within their network. And then turning these into short animated films. I have not looked at any others, just because I haven’t, however this morning doing a little research on the No Straight Lines project in advance of working with an automotive group I came across Umar Haque’s film produced by Freedom Lab. I was taken by the meme that we both share that the issues facing industry and commerce are structural – of course this perspective is shared by a growing number of academics, economists and business men and women.

Capitalism says Umar overstates benefits and understates costs

1). Social costs

2). Environmental costs

3). human costs

4). The cost of unfairness

And Gerd Leonhard describes the issues that media companies face in the networked society

However, we are right now at the barricades of a communications revolution, in which humanity is renegotiating the power relationships between; people, organisations, and even governments. As social philosopher Richard Sennett argues, we want to,

recover something of the spirit of the Enlightenment on terms appropriate to our time.

We are able to recover this spirit through networked communication technologies. I argue that, the only straight lines made in nature are made by man, a metaphor for the industrialized mass media and consumer society. But nature is not like that – nature is connected and interconnected in completely different ways. If we agree that we live in a participatory-networked society, as espoused by many across the globe, then we need a different philosophy, language and framework in which we operate.

Therefore, our imperative is to de-school ourselves in a philosophy and a way of thinking and acting that has delivered us into a cultural, ideological and economic cul-de-sac. We need to liberate ourselves from how we were once taught to think and live our lives, stemming from the ethos of industrialisation and the mass consumer society. We may need a form of dualism for a while, understanding that we are in the process of making a journey, spiritually, socially, and economically from one way of seeing and behaving in the world, to another. The source of the solution lies in finding once again the ‘being’ in human being. The fundamental need we have is for us to commune and find shared meaning, because without such collective meaning or personal sense of belonging, social isolation deprives us of both our feeling of social connection and our individual sense of purpose. On both counts, the results can be devastating, not only for the individual, but for societies as well.

Straight line thinking stops HERE.