I was inspired by this discussion over at 2blowhards.com to leave a very long comment, which I’ll repost here:

Michael B., I think that it will be a while before the mainstream press truly understands what’s going on in a way that they can write coherently about it. It’s one thing to notice that technology is creating a revolution. It’s another thing entirely to really embrace it, understand it, and use it to the fullest. Just in the last few weeks, my understanding of how to use technology has shifted dramatically. RSS, Gmail, Flickr, del.icio.us, and desktop Wikis have all caused me to rethink my options for collecting and managing information. I’ve said for years that we’re still in the dark ages when it comes to computers. I think we’re a long way from living in a mature world of computer and network technology, much less really understanding it. I’m not sure many people really can see where this is going.

For instance, I’m working on a new project. I’m attempting to create a new kind of online history book. I’m developing a wiki where the narrative and encyclopedic entries about characters and events will be developed simultaneously. I’m doing this on my own right now, but will soon open it up for others to contribute, much as Wikipedia has been built by the efforts of a large community. As I develop this project, I realize that there’s really no limit to what can be included in or linked to from this wiki. My long-term goal would be to have original source material for every aspect of the period I’m studying available online – a one-stop-shop, if you will, for people interested in this historical event.

Now, I’m not way out there on this. Others (like Michael Brooke, it seems) are working on similar “deep resource” projects. How will this impact culture? We’re going to move from the idea that knowledge is something filtered and parsed by individuals to something that is created and managed by the group. I think this core idea has always been true, yet the methods we’ve had to deliver content – books, radio, television, and so on – have mostly been filtered through the narrow perspective of one person or one organization. It hasn’t been practical in the past to develop and disseminate group-think. Once a book is printed, that’s it until the next edition, if there is one. Any mistakes remain; ideas aren’t reconsidered in the light of new evidence. Moreover, sources remain unavailable to the media consumer in many cases, so independent evaluation of an author’s conclusions are impossible.

However, group-reviewed, dynamically updatable resources are available now, the tools to create these are starting to mature, and more of these resources will come online when people start to see how powerful and useful they are. Libraries are starting to digitize content like Shakespeare’s quartos and Lewis Carroll’s scrapbook. The balance of power in cultural filtering is shifting. It’s as if gold went from being something only prospectors could locate in far-off locations to something anyone could create with their own personal alchemy machine.

(I’m also seeing a shift in the way we perceive top-down hierarchies in general. In business, for example, there are some who suggest that the wisdom of the group is more valuable and “right” in many cases than the wisdom of the manager or the CEO.)

Culture will change – back, perhaps – from something you consume to something you participate in. I’ve already seen a couple of wikis that attempt to facilitate group-created stories. More will follow.

Technologically speaking, we are in the midst of a mini-revolution in which computers move from being separate machines with discreet installations of data and programs (analogs of our personal experience) to “network appliances” connecting us to a world where applications data, and experience reside on the network and are easily shared. Everything will interconnect, and we will develop tools (like RSS readers) to help us manage the torrent of information. Experiences, expertise, and ideas will be shared freely.

Raymond: What can digital do? It can make all this possible. People won’t simply consume. Portability and interconnectivity will open humans up to a level of collaboration that was previously impossible. Wikis and social bookmark sites like del.icio.us are the tip of the iceberg. This isn’t a subtle shift. Once people start to grasp what’s possible in an interconnected world, the sky’s the limit. It’s no small thing, for instance, to consider digitizing the Library of Congress so that the information contained therein is available instantly and everywhere.

Perhaps I wax rhapsodic. I tend to believe that people will use new tools in the best, most culturally enhancing way possible. It’s just as likely, I suppose, that people won’t. However, I am optimistic that once the infrastructure and tools are built, creative people will be called upon to use them. Culture will grow, as it always has, in the proper medium and conditions, and I like to imagine that this new medium is fertile indeed.

Wow. This line from gapingvoid hit me like a ton of bricks:

The old ways are dead. And you need people around you who concur.

Yeah. You know, I don’t think this is something that is just true today. Rather, I think this is always true, has always been true, and the successful people are those who understand and accept this fact. Maybe in part this is because the people who think the world is changing and surround themselves with people who think the world is changing… these people change the world.

Hugh continues:

That means hanging out more with the creative people, the freaks, the real visionaries, than you’re already doing. Thinking more about what their needs are, and responding accordingly. It doesn’t matter what industry we’re talking about- architecture, advertising, petrochemicals- they’re around, they’re easy enough to find if you make the effort, if you’ve got something worthwhile to offer in return. Avoid the dullards; avoid the folk who play it safe. They can’t help you any more. Their stability model no longer offers that much stability. They are extinct, they are extinction.

Yeah. Wow. Good stuff. Remember this.

Okay, so commenter Robotech_Master made a fair point about Salon.com’s ad policy and prompted me to go back and read the Alan Moore interview I mentioned yesterday. I was a little annoyed by the distracting ads flashing and jumping while I was reading the article, but it was worth the effort, and I’m looking forward to picking up some of Moore’s work.

Here are just a couple of random things that jumped out at me:

And I do tend to think that, given the upsurge of the religious right over the last couple of decades, these are the last spasms of those dinosaur organisms.

Why do you think that?

Because they are standing in the way of history, trying to turn everything, politically and spiritually, back to a medieval vision of the world. Whereas they’re perfectly entitled to have whatever worldview they like, I would suggest that humanity is moving in a forward direction. And that any attempt to turn the clock back to a mythical, simpler, or better age would probably be about as effective as Britain’s ancient King Canute, who famously sat on his throne along the tide line and ordered the waves to go back.

I’d like to believe this, but I’m not sure I buy it. I do think it’s weird that, on the one hand, technology is moving society into an unprecedented level of connectivity and collaboration, of a type that will probably make the religious right increasingly foolish. However, on the other hand, the power base in this country is moving further to the right, and in al Qaeda and other groups we see the global rise of radical fundamentalism, so there’s a rather complex fault line forming and it’s anyone’s guess as to what the landscape will look like after the earthquake.
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bq. If we look back a few generations to perhaps our great-grandparents, we’ve got a very different world in terms of its information content. You have a world where the people’s heads were more than likely filled with the details of their own lives. I know that sounds completely unlikely from our cultural standpoint, where our heads are filled with the doings of Joey, Chandler, Ross, Fabian, whoever the other ones are, I can’t remember.

Sacrilege!

How quickly we forget! [Laughs.] But, yeah, people’s heads are stuffed with a fantastic amount of information, and I think all too often they cannot assimilate, digest or connect up that incredible amount of data into a coherent worldview.

Yeah. This is something Joseph Campbell pointed to; our culture has developed so rapidly that our the old mythology doesn’t apply and the new myth hasn’t been created yet that will help us assimilate. It’ll happen, but we have to go through this unsettling flux first.
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bq. I feel that we may be approaching a cultural boiling point. I’m not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing; I really don’t know because I can’t imagine it, quite frankly. But I think we may be approaching the point at which the amount of information we are taking becomes exponential, and I’m not entirely certain what kind of human culture will exist beyond that point. Except it will happen sooner than we expect, and the difference between us and the kind of people that will exist after such an event will be vastly different than the difference between us and the hunter-gatherer society we’ve evolved from.

You’re saying we might not be able to recognize human beings of the future that well.

Yeah, it could be a quantum leap, a sudden, massive and unprecedented leap. Boiling point is a good analogy, because what you have before that stage is water. What you have after it is something that does not behave at all like water; it’s a completely different substance altogether. And that’s what I see looming for society—and it’s probably necessary, probably inevitable, probably scary.

This is the concept of the Singularity that I’ve been hearing so much about lately. I think we’re already in the midst of this, we just haven’t quite reached that boiling point yet.

Really interesting, stimulating article. Thanks for nudging me back over there.

I’ve been getting lost in research for The Louverture Project for a lot of the past couple of weeks. I think ‘lost’ is the appropriate word. Not having attempted anything like a historical study before, I’m feeling a bit swamped by the task. In the past I’ve written sketches, plays, that kind of thing, where it’s all come out of my own imagination. Or I’ve written corporate events, where my job was to research and synthesize material of a relatively limited scope and create a unique work. Often I’ve had stock characters to write for, but this job is completely different. Here, I’ve got a vast amount of data, an endless array of characters, far-reaching implications, and the only constraint I have to work around is a historical, verifiable time line. How do I boil this down so that it makes sense? How do I know what to capture from my research and what to leave out?

I decided that I needed some help, and lo and behold, on my bookshelf were a couple of books I had looked at but never really seen before – How to Write and Sell Historical Fiction by Persia Woolley and The Biographer’s Craft by Milton Lomask. Aside from the nice surprise of having them in my collection, the books were a comfort in that it seems like most of what I’m doing at this phase is just what the books suggest – research, organize, and write as inspiration strikes. With a few tweaks and some shifts of emphasis, I feel like I’ll be back on track.

Here are a few quick hits from today’s reading:

• eu·he·mer·ism, n. A theory attributing the origin of the gods to the deification of historical heroes.
• Two major questions to ask when considering a biography are: Who will want to read it? and What makes it unique? (Woolley)
• “Truth… makes bad fiction, but fiction should read like truth. Similarly, fiction makes bad biography, but biography should read like fiction.” (Lomask, p. 2)
• The “and” biography links two or more individuals or an individual and an event, institution, or historical period. (Lomask, p. 3)
• “There are no rules for composition,” Claude Debussy said, “but every composition makes its own rules.” (Lomask, p. 5)
• “Residue” as regards biographical subjects relates to the impact of the individual on present day or the interest which the individual holds for us. (Lomask, p. 10)
• When you send out your biographical manuscript, an editor will want you to list what books on the subject are still in print. Consult Book Review Digest for help in finding these. (Lomask, p. 11)
• “If you can’t travel, read.” (Lomask, p. 16)
• Don’t quote so much. “Good note-taking is précis writing.” You’re not a file clerk, you’re a writer! (Lomask, p. 23)
• Good reference material: Guide to Reference Books; Dictionary of American Biography, Notable American Women (both for dead persons); Current Biography , National Cyclopedia of American Biography, Who’s Who in America, Biography Index (for live persons); American Genealogical Index, Who Was Who; and especially Writings on American History and Writings on British History.
• “Man is not what we think he is,” André Malraux wrote. “Man is what he hides.”

In the PBS television series Cosmos, Carl Sagan attempted to describe how humans are trapped into the way we think about our three-plus-one-dimensional universe. He used the analogy of a two-dimensional creature, a being who exists only in height and width, and has no concept of depth. Tootie, let’s call her, lives very happily in her two dimensions, gliding gracefully along the X and Y axes, until one day a creature from a three-dimensional world picks her up about a foot above her plane of existence and lets her fall gently back.

Now, Tootie experiences this sensation, but has no mechanism to understand what is happening to her. She experiences falling through the third dimension, but once she’s back safely at home, she can’t point to where she was, she can’t describe it to her friends, and she can’t mentally process her adventure. She is built to understand the world in two dimensions only.

If Tootie’s race of two-dimensional beings is anything like our own, they’ve probably developed storytelling, myth, and philosophy to try to make sense of their existence. While someone from our world could look at a 2D world and explain it easily, Tootie and her kind can only hope to approximate such a description.

I think of this example in relation to our own attempts to make sense of the world. Heinrich Zimmer said, “The best truths cannot be spoken, and the second best are misunderstood.” And, as Joseph Campbell says, the third best are the things we talk about every day – science, sociology, history, and so on. Philosophy, mythology and storytelling try to point the way to that dimension that is beyond our reach and understanding.

Dreams

A couple of items have put me on this track this morning. For one thing, I just finished watching Richard Linklater Waking Life. Linklater’s films are often packed with philosophical musings, and Waking Life is no exception. In fact, this movie reminds me a lot of Linklater’s first film, Slacker, with its meandering style and “real people” casting. The difference in this film is the juxtaposition of objective and subjective camera styles, and the focus on existential themes.