The great synthesis

A New media brings about a new culture.

Not only does It opens it, but It shapes it.

A new Media is like a new type of canvas from which anything can be painted upon. More than just it being a physical support. It is more like a technology of the mind. And so a new media provokes new ways of thinking.

But It’s not the arrival of a new media that spreads up culture.

It is its propagation means.

Yesterday

Now, there hasn’t been a scaling of media as potent as the printing press in its time. It wasn’t an innovation in form, but in literacy scale.

This new potency allowed for ideas to spread from one head to an other in much more widespread manner than It did previously.

Ideas cross-pollinate and enrich each others through collective lenses, and so this rapid evolution of the mind of a small literate segment of the population allowed the ‘Enlightenment’ and the revolutions that occurred from it.

Revolutions start in the mind.

New Medias

Moving on to audio and video.

Those mediums are radical changes over written words. Qualitatively.

Spoken words and music can really carry over one’s soul. Would Hitler had been as successful in conjugating the masses if he wasn’t able to use the power of his voice to convince?

A new media can change the game of power.

And visions that ought to speak for themselves can actually be used to tell any tale. Video can provide a soft illusion for our minds. If there’s a media that can distort one’s perspective on reality like no other It is the one of video. Paradoxically. It can also informs us. It like anything. Doubled-edged.

Now to our new favourite media scale revolution:

The internet.

Which started its life modestly with only written words, then enriched itself with images, videos, sounds, and for the first time mass-scale interactivity.

And so, Much of today’s world can be comprehended through the lens of a mass-scale free broadcasting. Anyone can tell any tale. Where before, only a very small controlling minority could tell the tale they wanted.

So The so called “Post-Truth era” really is a misnomer.

There has never really been a “Truth Era”.

But now at least we start to understand it. Our minds are always under the influence of the media we consume.

Why do North Koreans believe what they believe, for instance that Kim Jong Il didn’t need to defecate, is that because they’re less cognitively able, or simply that their capacity for information were limited to what fit the narrative in place?

In the same manner that we notice that phenomenon occur in neighbours, we have to recognise it in our own. Our traditional medias have been designed to fit the narrative in place. They’ve co-evolved to fit the grander agenda. If they served it well, they survived, if not they died.

And so, the old media is dying. And I shall know, I was there. I worked as a Creative Technologist in Time Inc. UK’s innovation lab to aim to save them from massive job losses with new products.

The new replaces the old… That’s life. Has the grander agenda has changed? Yes, It is always changing. But instead of trying to find a particular culprit, a president or captain of industry It’s fair to say that no one in particular is in charge of the ‘grander agenda’ that We’re collectively on. And perhaps It’s liberating, so there’s probably no giant conspiracy out there, perhaps it’s frightening, well no one’s really in charge.

What is scarier to you?

That someone would be in charge of it all, or that no one is really in charge at all?

What if we considered a hypothetical character who’s in charge of the overall narrative as the ‘genie’. He’s like the main storyteller of our time hidden from sight. You don’t get to see on screen, the screenwriter. Yet his work pervade every frame of a movie. In much the same way that your identity is a collection of different forces (neurons, bacterias, emotions, drives, thoughts, ideas, whichever frame fits you best), We could consider the ‘Genie’ as a collection of our subconscious forces.

Where is the Genie taking us?

It seems as if we’re changing chapters. It seems as if we’re going towards a very different kind of narrative than we’ve been accustomed to.

So what is the next great chapter?

I believe that the old narrative will continue while a new one will arise, and is already arising in the mind of a small minority. In much the same way that the seeds of enlightenment started in the minds of a well connected minority. But this time, this is different. The minority is much larger, even more well connected, have more information at hand, and It can grow very rapidly. The walls that prevented information to flow have been stripped away. Like small ideas, big ones like cultures and ideologies have sex that can produce offsprings stronger than their parents. But of course the metaphor stops there. Because a new ideology can have more than one parent. We could say that the more parents they have, the better they are. Christianity had as parent ideologies Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Manicheism, and Egyptian alchemy.

Perhaps what we will be seeing next is an orgy of ideologies leading to a great many different synthesis of all ideologies. And perhaps we will see a few at first. But then, like any ideology, the one that will succeed is the one that finds the most fitness in the mind of its beholders.

What if not the one that will be the best-of-all ideologies based on the most up to date knowledge?

Perhaps It would be that one, or perhaps It would be an other one that taps into our most up to date manipulation techniques? Because It has often been not the most truthful ideology that wins but the one who’s most able to insert itself in the minds of individuals susceptible to emotional biases.

Will that ideology be an emotionally biased masterpiece? Or one that is able to transcend all our emotional biases once and for all?

Perhaps, then we are not in a “Post-truth era”, but a “Pre-truth Era”.

We have simply acknowledged the fallacy that any ideology has any monopoly on truth. We are waking up from that idea. And so only now, are we starting to learn the discipline of considering as many different perspective in order to output a better approximation of the underlying truth. We notice the importance of reliability of information, and beliefs, and our human biases. And so, perhaps, the media innovation of the future would be one of how we re-orgonise our sense-making and information giving apparatus?

All that’s happening now is that We’re seeing things for what they always have been, yet we’ve been blinded to for so long… No one really truly know what’s really going on… But we’re getting better and better at it.

And perhaps soon enough, we’ll be able to collect all our chips together, and call our living era the “Truth Era” .