Humanity does not follow the straight line rule

Jane Young has put together a very easy to understand set of thoughts that go to the very heart of of my current work. The communications revolution driven by a fundamental human need to connect and collaborate, and what that means to marketing and business and general, but also the wider ramifications for society. (A story about shared collective joy)

Jane writes

traditional economics glossed over networks because they didn’t fit neatly into the equilibrium paradigm, whereby the economy was likened to an equilibrium system, i.e. behaving like a ball dropped into a bowl, rolling around until finally settling in a predictable place, until something external disrupts it. More recently the perfect sums have been ditched in favour of the idea that the economy is a complex adaptive system, i.e. a system of dynamically interacting parts in which micro-level interactions lead to the emergence of macro-level behaviour patterns. A single ant or water molecule is boring on its own, but naturally becomes an army or whirlpool as a byproduct of complex interactions. People are the same – the internet is the same. If a system reaches a state of equilibrium, it’s essentially dead.

And

Our brains are made to deal with complexity, but we don’t make decisions by logically churning through every available piece of information. Instead we satisfice, taking the information we have and doing the best we can. Cognitive science has grown to recognise that we’re much better at inductive than deductive reasoning. We spot patterns and weave stories around metaphors and analogies.

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Posted in: Convergence, Culture, Engagement Civil Society, Engagement Education, Engagement Organisations, Engagement Politics, Engagement Research, Ethics, Generation C, Government & Politics, Identity, Media, Participation, Philosophy, Society

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