“Access to the internet was supposed to be this great, liberating force. “You can’t stop the signal!” (Obscure cultural reference. Apologies if you don’t get it. Google it.)
Gatekeepers” were going to be swept aside. “Sources go direct!” Formerly, gatekeepers were the people who controlled access to mass media; publishers, editors, producers. With the internet, my little blog could theoretically reach as large an audience as any form of conventional media.
The capacity to disseminate information exploded exponentially. The capacity of individuals to receive and process information changed not one whit.
With the “gatekeepers” swept away, people were left to their own devices to decide where to give their attention.”
Dave Rogers
The Internet and the Age of Ignorance
The cloud metaphor that we’ve settled on to describe where the world of the internet resides seems quite apt. I know the sky is real, but it’s out of reach and its contents so attenuated that it can never be directly experienced anyway. It is the sky and clouds from the ground.
In such an unreal place, reality loses its weight. In the world, we try hard to be our authentic selves, embarrassed when we act in ways inconsistent with who we believe we are. Actions have real consequences, so we’re careful about what we say and how we say it. Or at least we try.
In this attenuated, unreal world online we seem freed from those constraints. Things are said on the internet, in public, that one would not say in a public place even if said anonymously. Because in the real world, words have consequences.
It seems to me that some of this is spilling over into our real world, so that belief is no longer of any consequence. What if we start adopting a mental model that there is no true, no right or wrong statements? I can choose to believe in climate change or believe it’s a plot to increase government power over the citizenry. Out and out lying, distortions of fact, become acceptable techniques of persuasion. as we become used to the past disappearing down the news feed within minutes. Repeat anything that supports a chosen belief, since it all flies away into to the wind. In a perpetual now of frayed and fractured attention.
Isn’t the problem just that we’ve allowed ourselves to become suckers for the new monopolists of the attention economy? I believe that there is a growing realization that those who don’t seize control of the technology will be washed away in the ease of it all. Either use these remarkable tools or watch. It may be that modernity is ending with the end of cheap oil and start of climate change; tougher times are likely coming. And that calls for revised mental models that fit the new reality. Not the reality we see in the shapes of clouds or even the old reality of cheap energy and the US as the world’s greatest industrial and military power.
“We’ll need, chief among all things, to get smaller and less centralized, focus not on growth but on maintenance, on a controlled decline from the perilous heights to which we’ve climbed”
**Bill McKibben**
*Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet*
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