Not too loud but memorable

I heard a talk last week by Walter Isaacson that was a tour de force.  He spoke without notes - granted, the subject of Einstein is part of Isaacson's life right now, but still it seemed so graceful and communicative on his part to be looking at us instead of an index card. 

I'd like to give a talk (also without notes) that persuaded everyone listening that they are part of a story that is just as creative and visual as Einstein's mind.  Something profound is going on in the world of communication that can't be finitely explained in advance.  Talking about email and VoIP and blogs is just skimming the surface.  We're inside a phase change in communication that is hard to see - there are small avalanches of changes in the form of email and blogs, but the bigger change is more fundamental.  There's a push into novelty, into the “adjacent possible,” that is speeding along, catalyzed by global digital communications.

But starting this way, with handwaving and appeals to profundity, won't be memorable.  I'll need to tell stories.  What stories put across the thought experiment of a global brain?  Why would anyone want to be told they're a neuron?  (”No, not moron, neuron.”)  Maybe the global brain solves a universal problem, in a way that brings makes people see things differently.  Anecdotes, web pages, videos - but is that like looking down at an index card? 

The couch potato is dead, and we're in the midst of a history of surprises. 

Isaacson had it easy, in a way; he's talking about a life that has ended, and he can look back and tell stories about how it went.  I'd like to convince people listening to my talk that we have absolutely no idea how things are going to go with the internet, and that that's as it should be.  Mind-blowing diversity is actually good, because out of sufficiently dense diversity life emerges.  Whoof - hard to visualize.

June 11, 2007 | Filed Under main page 

Comments

2 Responses to “Not too loud but memorable”

  1. Anonymous on June 11th, 2007 11:22 pm

    Susan, what a thrilling post. Fifteen years ago, a tech support person told me computers were making us think like they did. Both alarming and utterly impossible, her comment turns out to be not so far from the mark. It's not that we now think like our computers, we actually think WITH our computers. The expression of the collective thought of mankind is the Internet.
    Your neuronic (not neurotic) friend,
    Jim

  2. Anonymous on June 12th, 2007 3:22 pm

    While I agree with your sentiments “Mind-blowing diversity is actually good, because out of sufficiently dense diversity life emerges” I was reminded of yesterday's “The Next Culture War” by NYT columnist David Brooks. He framed today's immigration debate / divide as between the educated and the not.

    “… What's shaping the immigration debate is something altogether deeper and more interesting. And if you want to understand what it is, start with education. Between 1960 and 1980, the share of Americans enrolled in higher education exploded. The U.S. became the first nation in history with a mass educated class. The members of this class differed from each other in a thousand ways, but they tended to share a cosmopolitan approach to the world. They celebrated cultural diversity and saw ethnocentrism as a sign of backwardness.
    Their worldview, which they don't even understand as a distinct worldview, was well summarized by Richard Rorty, who died this week. The goal of any society, he wrote, was to create “a greater diversity of individuals — larger, fuller, more imaginative and daring individuals.” Social life should widen. New cultures should be explored. And, as Rorty concluded, “Individual life will become unthinkably diverse and social life unthinkably free.”
    Liberal members of the educated class celebrated the cultural individualism of the 1960s. Conservative members celebrated the economic individualism of the 1980s. But they all celebrated individualism. They all valued diversity and embraced a sense of national identity that rested on openness and global integration.
    This cultural offensive created a silent backlash among people who were not so enamored of rampant individualism, and who were worried that all this diversity would destroy the ancient ties of community and social solidarity. Members of this class came to feel that America's identity and culture were under threat from people who didn't understand what made America united and distinct.
    The two groups clashed whenever a political issue arose that touched on America's identity or role in the world: immigration, free trade, making English the official language or intervening for humanitarian reasons in Kosovo or Darfur.
    These conflicts were and are primarily cultural clashes, not economic or ideological ones. And if you want to predict which side a person is likely to be on, look at his or her educational level. That'll be your best clue.
    As the sociologist Manuel Castells generalized, “Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local.” People with university values favor intermingling. People with neighborhood values favor assimilation.
    What's made the clashes so poisonous is that many members of the educated class don't even recognize that they are facing a rival philosophy. Many of them assume that anybody who disagrees with them on immigration and such must be driven by racism, insecurity or some primitive atavism. This smug attitude sends members of the communal, nationalistic side into fits of alienation and prickly defensiveness. It's what makes many of them, in turn, so unpleasant.
    The bottom line is that the immigration debate is part of a newer culture war that has succeeded the familiar and fading culture war. This longer culture war is not within the educated class. It's not the '60s versus the '80s. It's — to mimic Mark Lilla — between the people who have absorbed both the '60s and the '80s, and everyone else.
    It's between open, individualistic cosmopolitans and rooted nationalists. It's between those who ride the tides of the cultural mainstream and those so driven by marginalization that they're destroying the best compromise they will get. “

    If his observations are correct, we must ask if they apply to the net elite as well. If so, this is one more reason to assure that the net is a rising tide.

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