Feeling Arrogant: Let me tell you about the future of social media and the world
You ever have an arrogant moment? Maybe arrogant is the wrong word.. maybe its more of an ego thing? Or maybe it’s.. a recognition of your strengths. Perhaps its just my fighting with my own internal scripts: that which is programed into us in early youth. In any event.. I feel like I have something to say about social media.. a take on it, that’s a little more sophisticated, and perhaps a little more optimistic, then the conventional understanding of the subject.
My rational for the reason runs something like this: people have areas of interest which they are cultivating.. if you’re in social media as a result of profession.. the interests of the profession are defining your understanding. You are seeing it from the vantage point of those interests. The result, on a collective level, seems to be that conventional wisdom and understanding of social media is largely driven by those professions that are most engaged in social media. A further problem is.. it’s “a fish bowl.” This is to say that its really only a small part of the total population that is currently in the social media space.. which has an effect of lessoning diversity and increasing group think. I could go on, but lets leave it at this.
One of the first things to excite me about social media is: the forces that define how information propagates through social media space, is different from how information propagates through mass media space. Information in this sense could mean anything from beliefs, ideas, data, information in the usual sense, or association complexes. Perhaps it could mean other things to.
For this I’m given to thinking about psychoanalysis. In psychoanalysis there is the question of the channels thoughts have to travel before they dawn on the conscious mind. These channels have a lot to do, to put it mildly, with what thoughts are in your head (as well as there shape and form). These channels shape consciousness. The question of how information propagates through mass media versus social media.. has huge ramifications on our consciousness.. on how we think.. on our very concept of reality.
This could then lead into a very deep conversation…. about how this will change the world on a systemic level. But what I want to get to first is.. the level on which what the disruption asks of us, is different then what the world we grew up in asks of us. That to best take advantage of this emerging new world.. we need a new mode of being.
It starts, I believe, with the notion of push and pull media. Push media is what is pushed on you, pull media is what you pull towards you. In social media the world is much broader then the world of mass media.. there is of course the question of “how do we find the good stuff.”
Perhaps a good metaphor is if you go to Barns and Noble, or a really big library. There’s so many books there.. what do you want to read? In an unfragmented market place in the mass media world.. lets say old school TV with 3 main networks and UHF, there wasn’t much choice.. this is the world we were all brought up on. What we were all exposed to was content that needed to have “a mass appeal” in order to be commercially viable.. which had the effect of homogenizing the content. (we are talking about the roll of “market morality” in how information propagates)
Well the point I want to get to is that we are used to a world were we are all spoon fed information. In school, what we study is what our teachers tell us is important to study, what music we listen to is what the radio stations play.. etc, etc, etc.. Which is not say we are satisfied, which is not say we don’t go off the reservation to some sort of strange content.. or that we don’t have personal taste in this.. The point is it’s a very different landscape from one where you go “I’m interested in X, let me go find out about X.” My point being that what is motivating you is more external then internal.
This can lead us to another problem: the extroversion of western society. I suppose you think it’s ok to be an extrovert? Ok, I’m not going to argue with that, but I do want to take you into a 101 of psychology types.. and how this plays into our subject.
We each spend half our lives getting to know the world outside of our selves, and the other half getting to know the world within. Each of us, to one extent or another, tends to be more orientated to one or the other areas.. Someone more orientated to the inner world.. that’s an introvert.. more orientated to the outer world.. that’s an extrovert.
From a Jungian perspective.. the psychology of the extrovert can be understood via Freud’s psychoanalysis, the psychology of an introvert can be understood by Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology.
Basically, what this resolves down to is the the underlying drama of introverted psychology has to do with power dynamics, where as the underlying drama of extroverted psychology has to do with the dynamics of the pleasure principle.
Ok.. so again we are in some very deep waters. We can’t fully explore these waters here.. but I should advise you against prejudice: We are speaking about technical terminology that often has specific meanings that are different from how the terms sounds on the surface.. Ok, I’ll leave it at that.
So there’s specific psychological ramifications to your orientations with regards to external and internal worlds. Western society, being more orientated to the out world, to the material world..
Ok, lets lighten things up a bit, how about a music video that exemplifies this notion:
Yeah.. I didn’t like this song or video too much back in the day.. so how about an introvert’s counterpoint?
Now, (not to overly put down extroversion) do you note the superiority of what the introvert is saying, with respect to social media? We are rebelling a bit from “what we are supposed to be doing” and being driven more via our own internal needs, so to speak.
This will have to be explored more in future blog entries.. But.. the material world of business.. is driven by metrics.. Metrics, or “the numbers,” have everything to do with how business operates. The trouble with numbers is.. the question of what is difficult to quantize…. what is difficult to understand in terms of numbers: This then effects the channels by which information comes to the consciousness of business.. (seems like we have a repeating theme on our hands).
The point here is.. there are certain problems with the consciousness of business. Business’s consciousness has certain prejudices… which have now evolved so far as to be a modern “thou shalts.” You could say it is our highest idea of God, getting in the way of an actual experience of God. As Jung would say “religion is a defense against religious experience.” These prejudices have, in no small measure, become our prejudices. And my brothers and sisters, all this lays in the foundation of our concept of reality.
This prejudice, this reality concept, this consciousness, effects how we react to our own internal being. It defines what we think of as good and bad. It defines what kind of human beings we evolve into, and it defines much of how we raise our children.
Ok.. boy could I say a lot of things here!
There’s so many tangental themes swarming around our main driving thrust.. that is this blog entries narrative… that I just want to take a moment to speak of it: The swarming themes have there own narrative.. which is evolving in what you could call a subliminal way: I am speaking to you on multiple levels.. the other narratives being something like “self evolving.” Ok, enough said.
So… the matrix is about going beyond our inherited notions of reality.. we are speaking about our discontents.. we are speaking about the entropy in our metrics.. the problem of the channels.. we are speaking about something that is difficult to put a name to.. to articulate.. something beneath realities surface. It is something that modernity devalues.. and yet it still exerts an influence over us.
It’s important to understand this influence.. I hate going into this because its such a long story, but basically: those areas which we do not cultivate.. behave like children.. have an immaturity to them.. that is produced as a result of our reality concept.. There immaturity, as we pear inward at our selves, and judge them from the stand point of our reality concept, reinforces our reality concept: Hey, this part of me.. that doesn’t want to go to work today… it’s an immature childish response to the demands of life…. and if I were to stay home, what would it then do to my career?
Ahh… but what would really happen? Sure, your world will probably fall apart, but what happens after that? What would happen if that part of you that wanted to stay home grew up and matured into an adult form? What would happen if you lived your life “the way you wanted to live your life” as a posed to how you were supposed to?
Well.. you would surely escape from the Matrix, that much is certain. What would drive your forward evolution would be your own internal will.. You would cultivate, not just certain parts of your beings potential, but the whole of it.. perhaps not as finely as you could a specialized part.. but you would, indeed, have a very different conception of reality.
Well this isn’t really the point I want to drive to, more to say something about the mystery beyond where we are standing today, and to point out some of the forces at work in us. That this force is present.. that it exerts a roll… must be thought of.
I suppose it’s worth saying.. that if what is needed, as a result of the force of the disruption, is different then the world we came from.. that there is need to cultivate some of this other stuff. That there is this need, will.. like supply and demand in the market place, cause this cultivation to happen. So what I’m saying is the disruption cause this kind of transformation.
I’m not sure how well I’ve made the case.. but at least its food for thought… and good enough for one blog entry.