The printing press changed the world. It introduced new forms of expression and enabled better and faster information sharing. Print enabled individual interpretation of the bible and resulted in the questioning of the established Christian church and later the Protestant Reformation. Written manuscripts became obsolete luxury items. A new public discourse was enabled by print… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Democracy
confronting the post-truth machine
post-truth (adjective) Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. —Oxford Dictionaries On Twitter, Tim Dickinson described four different types of distributed ‘fake news’. ‘Fake news’ is lazy language. Be specific. Do you mean: A) Propaganda B) Disinformation C) Conspiracy… Read more »
beyond a binary society
Binary thinking is a lower level form of cognitive understanding, as put forward by Kieran Egan, which he calls Mythic Thinking. More complex forms of thinking are: Romantic, Philosophic, and Ironic. But binary, or mythic thinking, is an easy sell. It appeals to our emotions which we developed as children. Binary thinking blinds us. It’s… Read more »
the challenge of the network era
“There’s no room for argument about whether hate-filled internet message boards encourage real-world violence: they do, and none more so than 8chan. It normalises racism, misogyny, and extremism – and helps turn nightmarish, loud-mouthed talk of action into reality.” —Destroyer of Worlds This examination of the 8chan online community shows how anonymity can breed a… Read more »
the status quo
In understanding the shift, I wrote that as we make this transition — from a market-dominated to a network-dominated society — the confusion of post-modernism clouds our vision of a positive future. The traditional political Right wants to go back to the Pre-modern Era — dogmatic, faith, truth — while the traditional political Left wants… Read more »
“the strategic and purposeful production of ignorance”
“You will not achieve an informed public simply by making sure that high quality content is publicly available and presuming that credibility is enough while you wait for people to come find it. You have to understand the networked nature of the information war we’re in, actively be there when people are looking, and blanket… Read more »
beyond the market
“Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.” —H.L. Mencken The refugee crisis is a government failure. Climate change is a market failure. We have to create new ways to address what governments and markets are unable to do. But… Read more »
constant outrage
Many of us are getting depressed and pessimistic about the state of society, whether it be the big one — climate change — or the many smaller problems facing us — populism, extremism, anti-science movements, xenophobia, etc. One of the biggest frustrations is that the various camps just do not talk to each other with… Read more »
beyond government and markets
The key to our transformation toward a network society is citizen sensemaking. The thinking that got us into our current state of affairs will not get us out. Hierarchical leadership, even in democratic governments, is inadequate for the complexity of a networked society. Our governments seem to be completely unprepared to regulate surveillance capitalism, let… Read more »
toward a network society
Our current triform society is based on families/communities, a public sector, and a private market sector. But this form, dominated by Markets is unable to deal with the complexities we face globally — climate change, pollution, populism/fanaticism, nuclear war, etc. A quadriform society would be primarily guided by the Network form of organizing. We are… Read more »
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