Know-it-all

Today, I want to take a big-picture look at the nature and implications of TV. We all watch TV all the time; it is our cultural nervous system, the platform that drives the real-time, universal, shared awareness and “processing” of culture. It is the engine of our ability to group-think, to imitate bees and ants and other social creatures in a kind of mass social thought process that simply did not occur 50 or 100 years ago, i.e. that has emerged during that time.

And one can observe how this has influenced us as individuals to our very core. Reading the letters and diaries of anyone from antiquity up the early part of this century, one consistently sees a certain sophistication of thinking and of communicating complex ideas which seems quaint, complicated, almost alien to us in our new, fast-paced, highly connected world. In our TV-based lifestyle, we now trade and process “idea snippets” in a way that looks to me just like ants or bees trading bits of food, or dance, or scent to communicate, or like neurons processing electrical flow – each participating unconsciously in a much larger, emergent group-thought process.

TV does 2 things:

1) It is a network that connects all of us, with easy, immediate access to a common pool of information.

2) It gives us access to a wealth of experience beyond our daily life, essentially extending the boundaries of our personal lives beyond our own skin and experiences, to include “archetypical” experiences of stories, lives, ways of perceiving and thinking, etc.; indeed, to our complete cultural repository.

This second aspect of TV has had an enormous influence on the way that people actually think and live, at the deepest level. The printing press and literacy initiated the first massive wave of this transformative revolution 500 years ago; a sea change that rewrote the human condition. Before that, most people only gained experience beyond that of their personal lives through gossip and neighborhood intrigue, the stories passed along through local and family oral tradition, and the rare public performances of classic stories. Even the educated had extremely limited access to the learning of the past, in monasteries, universities, and libraries. So the canvas of human experience available to anyone was tiny, compared to what we take completely for granted today, what is now the background and fabric of our daily lives… Of course, one can trace back prior “information revolutions” even before the printing press, through written language, agrarian life, spoken language, and the evolution of abstract concepts, each of which added an order of magnitude greater ability for humans to access the intellectual capital of their society and their history; each correspondingly increasing the overall information processing power of human society, and thus generating quantum progressive leaps.

The TV transformation (and related phenomena like movies, video games, VCRs, DVDs, etc.) has vastly expanded the set of experiences that ordinary people have in their lifetime. It is extremely easy, unfortunately, to understand why kids stay inside so much these days, absorbed in virtual experience rather than actual experience, because in important ways, they really learn and experience much more this way… in the same way that travel broadens and deepens one, so does the experience that TV and it’s satellite technologies offer. (Of course, I would anticipate and sympathize with your response that real experiences are richer, and teach more than virtual ones – I can only point with regret to the actual, indisputable facts of people’s choices, and ask if it can really be that everyone is making such an irrational choice, especially in a competitive society where greater knowledge and capability is rewarded).

And look at how limited TV really is. It offers only one-way, non-interactive access, and only to content that is being broadcast right now.

What if we could, at any time, have access to any “content” that had ever been captured, on demand, including “subversive” and alternative content like pornography, cult messages, underground conspiracy-theory material, special-interest-group knowledge, etc. that provides access to experiences that TV, because of it’s highly public, advertising-based, large-audience, broadcast nature, cannot? That would be an order of magnitude “better” – that is, more effective at processing the information content of human experience.

And that is precisely what the Internet and parallel technologies (as well as our culture at large) are evolving to deliver. We have some way to go in being effective at capturing all the data – we have a hard time, for example, capturing the deep knowledge or wisdom of our artists and our experts, let alone that of “ordinary” individuals. And we all agree that some forms/types of knowledge are harder to capture and transfer than others. But new forms are evolving rapidly that, taken together, enable better and better capture and usage of knowledge and insight: blogs, voice-to-text, image catalogues, collaboration and community-management tools, etc.

Now that the knowledge is “out there” (info-glut to the nth degree), the hardest problem we face in becoming a truly virtual social creature, in making full use of the knowledge from anywhere and anytime in “the network”, is in recognizing when and what knowledge exists which is applicable to us (the “I don’t know what I don’t know” problem).

I believe the solution to this can be found, and indeed will be found within a reasonable period of time (certainly within our lifetimes, probably within a couple of decades). As individuals, we will for the first time have complete access to the best available knowledge that has ever been known, precisely when we want or need it, in a form tailored for us.

How will this transform our experience, and shape our society? A little hard to read, I admit, but my best guess is that in fact it will destroy us. Humans are not suited to handle this much information, nor do we really care to process it optimally as individuals – we are animals, after all, not computers. I believe that “artificial” (non-human) entities will evolve that use this platform more effectively, and will become the next dominant form of life.

Perhaps I’m crazy, and things are likely to take quite different turns in reality. Still, what do you think?