Surviving
Future Shock
by Ken
Freed.
.
An
understanding of interactive communication
reveals why deep literacy makes global sense.
We are entering a bold
new world of media wonders, and most of us feel scared
silly by the prospects. The future looks dark and
menancing. We beg for salvation.
The numbing sense of being overwhelmed by too much
change happening way too fast to handle is called
future shock, a term from Alvin Toffler. The
initially disabling effects of massive social change can
endure for generations. Some parts of our world have not
yet entered the industrial age, for instance, let alone
the information age, and look at the social upheavals in
these lands. Once a change is naturalized, the new order
of life is naturalized in us from birth. Stability by
social balance works best, responsibility balancing
freedom endures the longest, nurtures human creativity
and prosperity.
Future shock is being induced, among other cultural
forces, by the "information overload" from emerging media
technologies that confound the mind. Given the billions
being spent to buld a global network of communication
networks, by design or default, as Matt Taylor would say,
we are betting the future of humanity and life on earth
upon a global Internet of interactive media becoming a
blessing instead of a curse.
Will globale networks liberate or ensare us? While
it's far too soon to tell how things will turn out, I'm
on safe ground in saying that which way things go depends
on each one of us, upon our own personal sensibilities,
upon the values system that daily guides how we choose to
consciously interact everymement in our interactive
world.
Thge problem is that we fear the responsibility of
intelligent consciousness. A valuable solution for future
shock is deep literacy. Please permit me to prove my
case.
Kindly take the long view of new media. Engage your
imagination with me for a moment. Kindly appreciate the
scope and depth, the beauty and miracle of what is
happening on the planet right now. Human enterprise today
and for the next few generations is constructing a
broadband, integrated, interactive global communication
infrastructure that touches almost every point on earth
at the same time. We've progressed from single-strand
copper wires carrying telegraphs in Morse code to twisted
pairs of copper wires carrying voices, faxes, data and
video. Telecommunication advances into coaxial cables and
now optical fibers are offering a range of interactive
services never before possible, such as true interactive
TV. Two-way terrestrial and satellite broadcasting
service are two or three years away. We're witnessing a
worldwide convergence of the television, telephone and
computer into one interactive ecosystem linking us
together, forever altering all the ways we live, love,
learn, work, play and vote. Nothing like this has ever
existed on earth before, so this notion of "global
thinking" is new and scary to most of us. Don't dispair.
The core idea is easy.
Since
before the advent of speaking and then writing in our
childhood and then adolescence as an intelligent species
on earth, humanity has been yearning to enter adulthood.
Our road to deeper literacy has not always been easy. We
all bear scars.
Let's think back to our own childhoods and recall the
very first time our minds attached meaning to faces and
sounds and gestures, when our mother's warm smile meant
food, security and love. Now let's recreate the time, if
we will, when our minds first made the leap of assigning
meaning to abstract signs and symbols, the magical
instant when sounds were linked to letters and then
words. Almost in an eyeblink, our minds opened wide to
the magic of reading, the breathless discovery that all
the words in all the books in all the world are doorways
into thoughts and feelings we never before imagined were
possible. The best children's tales of any culture touch
the joyous child in us all. As adolescents, we could see
what sort of books and ideas are acceptable in our
communities. Yet how can the perpetual curiosity of youth
stand silent as vibrant life is exploding around us and
within us? Young minds thirst for truth like the
lifeforce in a sapling tree extends roots and branches
for water and light to make food for growth.The awakening
of deeper literacy within us, if we wish, can guide us
toward an understanding of our world and ourselves in it
that tends to induce responsible self rule, the
communication habits that I like to call personal
democracy.
A literate mind can spot solutions during a crisis
that would be missed by an uneducated mind. If we're
fortunate as children, our parents and teachers instilled
in us the habits of lifelong learning. If we've
cultivated the patience and diligence for gathering raw
facts and organizing them into information that we can
distill into knowledge, we might one day be blessed with
refined wisdom. We then would know from within ourselves
that literacy is a deeply powerful tool that's changing
us as individuals and as a species, just as much as the
mastery of fire or the invention of the wheel. Linguists
explain how the languages we use to describe "reality"
defines how we perceive the world, which choices we can
discern for changing our reality. Ask yourself, how would
history have been different if Sumaria had never composed
cuneiform? The invention of writing, whatever the
alphabet, has altered human civilization ever since. The
invention and construction of a global Internet could
have at least as much impact. Whether the influence is
for good or ill will be up to us.
A
Glimpse Ahead
To gain a glimpse of what is ahead for humanity as we
build a world wide web of data, voice and video networks,
look at what's happened on earth since Gutenberg created
movable type and modern printing began. We can argue the
literary or moral merits of various authors, but our
civil discourse would not be the same without the
existence of mass-produced books, transporting ideas
across time and space. Book publishing and marketing is a
robust international industry, and perhaps your own
livelihood, as mine, is bound to the rule of publish or
perish. Have you personally seen how the Internet is
transforming every workplace? Consider the education
profession. Where Web access is unrestricted, learning
materials from around the globe are available to any
learner with a computer and a basic keyword search
engine. The implications are staggering.
The public Internet today is less than a decade old,
and already our curiosity about any subject, elevating or
degrading, can be satisfied online -- not always for
free, of course. The Web can be a dangerous place. There
are predators out there who prowl the Internet looking
for prey the same way villains have always prowled public
markets with an eye for the unwary. But there is more
worrying us here than e-crime. We wonder if the nature of
"cyberculture" might somehow damage our societies, or
worse, may somehow harm our families or ourselves. There
are too many unknowns, too many variables. We fear what
we do not understand. The deeper our uncertainty and
confusion about the world, the deeper our sense of
dread.
To feel secure enough to lead balanced lives, we need
to understand the world in ways that reasonably define
ourselves and our position in the greater scheme of
things. Speech communication researchers labeled this
process as the "sense-making" or socialization function
of verbal and nonverbal languages. Pause to note here the
fundamental social contract in all forms of speech. When
our primitive ancestors first assigned meaning to their
vocalizations by common agreement, they gave birth to
human languages. Our community-driven tribes have been
busy ever since creating better and faster ways to talk
among ourselves and to other tribes, the strangers who
are "not us." Walls were erected to separate warring
peoples. Today these walls are being breached by the
Internet, which stirs up primal fears and old
resentments. Meanwhile, the pace of technological
innovation in the world is accelerating so rapidly that
too many of us are rendered speechless. We stare agape
into a mysterious future that looks very different from
anything we have ever known or even imagined.
As if trying to make sense of the Internet was not
hard enough, now in Europe, the United States and Japan
is this brand-new thing called "interactive television."
It's all so confusing. A lot of us half-wish we could
sleep for 500 years and wake up at a time after humanity
has adjusted to a global communication system, after the
chaos subsides, when scholars can discuss the "culture
shock" from the emergence of the Internet as
dispassionately as today we might lean back to enjoy a
colloquy on the medieval adoption of italics as a ploy
for packing more words on the page to lower costs. Sadly,
we do not enjoy the privileges of the time traveler
conceived by H.G. Wells. No, we are stuck in the present,
and we must do what we can from here. Face facts.
Advanced communication technologies are driving humanity
into the most sudden cultural and social transformation
in history.
How can we survive? The prospects are as frightening
as they are exciting. We are like some mythical character
on the hero's journey who now stands at the sacred
fountain of Truth and must select from dozens of cups and
goblets the one true vessel of Enlightenment. The wrong
choice could mean utter destruction. Will we choose
wisely?
Understanding
McLuhan
We're entering a new age of global interactive
networks predicted in the 20th Century by the "old
masters" of mass communication and social theory. Let's
single out Marshall McLuhan, Alvin Toffler, John
Naisbitt, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Buckminster
Fuller. Let's see what their minds can teach us
today.
In his classics, Understanding Media and The
Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan showed how
the medium massages the messages messing with our minds.
He articulated how mass media influences us. His type of
media literacy helps offset media mind control.
To understand McLuhan, we need to understand the main
elements in the communication process. Below is my model
of the basic cycle:
A sender with something to communicate encodes a
message into any verbal or nonverbal message channel that
the intended receiver may decode effectively. The
communication cycle is not complete until the sender
replies, encodes feedback into some verbal or nonverbal
form that the receiver, in turn, can decode effectively.
There is no point in slowly articulating English words
for someone who only speaks Parsi, yet some hand gestures
and facial expressions may be cross-cultural. All acts of
communication, by the way, occur against the distractions
of background noise. In fact, it's a wonder we
communicate at all.
Most communication problems can be traced back to
encoding and decoding errors, such as misinterpretations,
or hearing only what we want to hear. I like the old
quip, "I do know that you believe that you think you
understand what you heard me say, but I'm not sure if you
realize that what I said is not what I meant." So, how
many romances have gone down in flames through a
misspoken word or glance? How many wars have been started
or made worse by core communication failures, accidental
or not? On the flip side, how many times has a soft word
or a gentle hand on a shoulder redeemed a desperate
situation?
Every act of communication changes every participant
in the process while also changing the conditions in
which the communication takes place. The back-and-forth
or give-and-take between the senders and receivers
affects their environment -- as the stone tossed into a
pond sends out radiating ripples. Every interaction, to a
degree, changes the world. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz
wrote, "language weaves the web of culture." We daily
weave our web from every act of communication.
Now we're ready for McLuhan. The form of a media
message massages or manipulates the response to that
message, he said. We may say we never judge a book by its
cover, but we do. Style without substance is a waste of
talent, of course, but in today's increasingly
sophisticated, cosmopolitan marketplace of ideas,
competition is fierce. You have to deliver do something
to gain attention, yet quality work, unique work sustain
a career. McLuhan did what he loved, did it well. and
money did follow. His writings massaged the minds of
readers and through them he changed our world. We still
feel the cultural reverberations from his thinking about
communication.
Now consider how McLuhan is applied to the theory and
practice of media marketing today. Regardless of our
values or belief systems, to begin, each of us fits the
demographic profile for one audience or another that
right now is being targeted by a film or TV producer or a
website operator, catering to our tastes as best they
can, keeping the customer satisfied, giving the public
what they want. Talented and well-paid media marketing
econometrics wizards supply guidance on every key
decision by major media houses about the form and
substance of messages reaching consumers on screens or in
print. The best content creators can apply the techniques
of storytelling and rhetoric so their audiences become
mentally and emotionally engaged with the media content
being subtly transported into our sore brains. The amount
of money devoted to media advertising each year proves
the media industry thrives on the faith that media
messages do affect media audiences. Through mass media
audiences,, through each of us, media companies
perpetually are influencing our popular culture, and
diverse subcultures, which together we all compose. We're
discussing all forms of media -- from paperback books to
DVD players, radio to MP3, TV to the Internet, each
engages us differently. Still, the central fact remains:
Mass media does massage mass culture.
Remember the communication cycle and the crucial
importance of feedback to complete the loop. At the same
time as media affect us, we affect media. We bring to the
process of decoding any media message our own set of
filters and biases (products of enculturation mostly),
and these mitigate the influence of media content upon
our thought processes. If we hate "spam" email, no matter
how alluring the subject line, we trash the message.
Public response to a message, naturally, helps determine
whether the person creating the message, if sane, will
keep on doing what they're doing. Smart people improve
their form and content for greater effectiveness. So, the
relationship between content creators and media audiences
on the "Information Superhighway" is not one-way. Watch
for converging traffic.
So. paraphrasing McLuhan, the media massages the
message as the message massages the media. Or, media
messages media companies as media companies massage media
messages. Also, media networks massage media markets as
media markets massage media networks. Or simply, mass
media massages the masses as the masses massage mass
media.
Here's the essential formula:
. A -> B as B
-> A.
A affects B as B affects A. (Adding players adds
complexity.)
A robust broadband feedback loop is what makes the new
interactive global network so dynamic and compelling, why
the Internet now has a life of its own. "Cyberpunks" will
extol libertarian self rule, ignoring attempts at
regulation if they can see no harm from their actions.
This is why stopping Napster will not end peer-to-peer
file sharing. Public choices can and do alter media
industry decisions. This is why what I call "reply side
economics" will shape the 21st century. Our feedback will
grow more visible and more valuable as the Internet
proliferates and ties us all together. By the end of his
life, McLuhan was fascinated by a vision of communication
as a system of dynamic interactions on a planetary scale.
He coined the phrase "global village" to convey how a
worldwide communication network can create a sense of
community binding people together, the idea of unity amid
diversity.
From
Future Shock to Big Brother
About the same time as McLuhan was popular, another
author on the bestseller lists was Ivan Toffler.
Future Shock provided a vocabulary for identifying
the key symptoms of information overload, the
mind-numbing sense of being powerless against a tide too
great to fathom. Culture shock is a natural consequence
of any socio-economic system transforming from one
"paradigm" into another. In a second hit book, The
Third Wave, Toffler said that first wave or
agricultural societies have been or are being supplanted
throughout world by the second wave of industrialization.
Before society can resolve the problems of heavy
industry, we also now must cope with the additional shock
of the third wave, the advent of the "Information Age."
One profound consequence of a decentralized network of
networks intertwining local communities, he predicted,
will be a greater pro-democracy movement with zero
tolerance for despots. A tantalizing theory.
A decade after Future Shock, futurist John
Naisbitt (from my home state of Colorado) published his
blockbuster bestseller, Megatrends, Ten New Directions
Transforming our Lives. Among the tidal cultural and
social trends he identified, ranking first was the
quantum change from industrial to information societies.
Other trends stem from this one. Forcing people to adapt
to machines is giving way to "high tech/ high touch"
humanism, so machines adapt to us. Short-term thinking is
being replaced by long-term thinking. Either/or thinking
is losing ground to an awareness of our multiple options,
like the popularity of "cultural diversity."
Institutional help is being supplanted by self help.
Centralization is "out" and decentralization is "in."
Hierarchies are being replaced by networks, thereby
distributing responsibilities. Representative democracies
are finally maturing into participatory democracies. Our
separatist national economies are integrating into one
"interdependent" world economy. Dominance over world
affairs by the industrial "North," mostly America and
western Europe, will keep declining as world affairs
increasingly are shaped by the needs of the "South," the
undeveloped and developing nations of our world. Naisbitt
saw the big picture. He said all this more than 20 years
ago.
McLuhan, Toffler and Naisbitt offered valid reasons
for optimism that new technology may help liberate us
from generations of drudgery, so human aspirations for
freedom and democracy can be realized, at last. Their
writings radiate hope and stand in stark contrast to two
novels earlier in the 20th Century -- Nineteen
Eighty-Four by George Orwell and Brave New
World by Aldous Huxley. Both envision a world where
communication technologies saturate every aspect of our
lives, where mass media is employed by the state as a
tool for ruling the populace. The stories differed in how
media is used. "Big Brother" in Orwell's dark tale uses
two-way "telescreens" to spy on all, to detect while
propaganda machinery keeps people in line. In Huxley's
world, the ruling elites use "Soma" to keep people
oh-so-contented and oh-so-distracted from any passing
thoughts that something might be amiss in the world, like
bread and circuses in ancient Rome, like food stamps and
football in modern America. Both novels prophesied
against allowing human inventions to become instruments
of human enslavement. Whether we surrender our freedom
under the firm hand of a father figure, or we relinquish
our freedom for the sweet seductions of media soma, warn
Orwell and Huxley, freedom hans't a chance unless and
until the people know they have a choice.
Orwell feared dictators using new media to
oppressively control the mindless masses. Huxley feared
society's masters using the media to bemuse the masses
into willing compliance, both pessimistic visions. A ray
of hope comes from writer Peter Huber. In his book,
Orwell's Revenge, he says Big Brother's
interactive network will liberate "market forces" making
autocracy impossible. Huber says that an open global
Internet will topple tyrannies like dominoes. He may be
right, but the key then becomes creating responsible
media citizens.
Practical
Idealism
Now at last we come to the author who may be the most
singular of all "renaissance men" in modern times, R.
Buckminster Fuller. After he tried and failed to
revolutionize the transportation world with a "dimaxian"
car on three wheels, he tried and failed to revolutionize
the housing industry with his dimaxian modular homes
suspended on a central pole. His investigation into
structures led him to invent the "geodesic" dome based on
sturdy triangles, and the dome he built for the 1964
Worlds Fair revived his career. He then started talking
about a global village and the need for creating a
"sustainable future" here on "spaceship earth." He
advocated producing cultural "artifacts" for later
generations to emulate and improve upon. He lectured
about "critical path" strategic planning, so massive
projects can be managed by connecting interrelated
activities (logic flow charts). He called for urgent
application of critical path planning to the critical
problems of managing a massive change into a global
community of democracies.
In the early 1980s, Fuller created "The World Game,"
played upon a dimaxian world map the size of a football
field. A very early Apple computer was programmed for
accessing a database of the earth's natural resources,
ecological systems, population trends, and details on
world shipping infrastructure, such as seaports and
airports and railroads. The object of the game was for
players walking around on the map to figure out among
themselves how best to use the planet's abundance so that
the largest number of people possible prospered while the
earth itself is not pushed beyond renewal. A few months
before the end of his long life, his eyesight nearly
gone, his speech nearly unintelligible, "Bucky" Fuller
presented the World Game in Boulder, Colorado. I was
privileged to work on the team producing the event, and
the experience forever altered my "world view." No longer
could I see myself as isolated and powerless. We're all
part of one larger, interactive whole, and everything we
do on earth makes a difference, to a degree, which means
each of us is truly powerful. By design or default, we
daily shape our world. Why not act by design?
Entering an era of narrowband telecommunication
networks is hard enough to comprehend, but constructing a
global broadband Internet staggers the imagination. Many
complex technical issues still must be resolved, such as
interface standards for displaying computer content on TV
screens, or the health risks of nonthermal microwave
radiation. Many licensing deals must be signed, like the
patents for multiplayer games, the right to upload
interactive TV programs from your home. Exhaustive market
research needs to be done, like preparing for the retail
launch of digital set-top boxes in the USA, whether
Americans without the tradition of Teletext can learn to
turn to the TV for facts they get on the PC. Before these
hurdles and others can be faced and overcome, we first
have a central issue to confront within ourselves.
We still tend to think of global media in terms of its
parts instead of as a whole interactive system. Success
hangs on widening our vision. Awareness of our deep
interactivity, of the personal or professional power that
streams from a global sensibility, gives us the clarity
of mind needed for staying sane amid the turbulence
ahead. While we build a unifying global Internet, rich
inner calm is especially critical for communication
professionals like us, for we stand on the leading edge
of the global "evolution revolution." A deep cultural and
social transformation is now being enabled and
facilitated through all the same communication
technologies we routinely operate every day.
The global Internet is awakening in humanity a sense
of our global interactivity, and life on earth will never
be the same. Interacting with people worldwide over the
narrowband Internet already is inducing this global
sensibility. Immersion into a broadband media environment
with Internet everywhere could accelerate the "paradigm
shift." Imagine a quantum leap in our cultural evolution.
Best symbolized in the historic photograph taken on our
last journey home from the moon in Apollo XVII. Our
fragile earth with its thin line of atmosphere suspended
against the blackness of space, the photograph may be
contemplated as the icon of our age.
Science is discovering that our interactivity goes
beyond anything we can imagine in our philosophies. At
the subatomic level are strings of light interacting in
dimensions unknown. To an astrophysicist, we are living
stardust. The more such an interactive sensibility
spreads, the more people will begin accepting that
actions have consequences. The communication cycle
includes feedback. What we do to others, we do to
ourselves. A global sense of our interactivity inspires
the desire to balance freedom and responsibility. We
practice personal democracy.
How odd, actually, that technologies humans developed
to rise above raw survival living now would circle back
and offer to become a vital tool for teaching us what all
the savvy sages have been patiently telling us since the
dawn of every sacred tradition, oral and written. No
matter what words we use to describe it, life itself is
interactive. Enculturating our children into such deep
media literacy, (or simply deep literacy) may help
the generations ahead mature into more creative yet
responsible adults. In time, adolescent humanity itself
could at last mature into responsible adulthood here on
earth.
I believe in practical idealism, so let me be
pragmatic with you.
What would persuade educational institutions, media
companies and governments to get behind a public drive to
promote an interactive sensibility that makes global
sense? In the report about educational TV that I wrote
for Financial Times Media & Telecoms in 1998, the
logical business case proposed was to grow world
educational media markets by developing more educated
minds in the world. Take the long view and invest
strategically. If the main goal behind economic
"globalization" is to create a self-sustaining,
self-governing system of free trade that lets us conduct
business with anybody else on earth, so Turkish village
industries may sell directly to stores in Denver, for
instance, if we want the dream to come true, we must put
our money where our vision is. We need to walk our talk
as best we can, and get on with the work at hand. In any
interactive universe, doing the best we can from where we
are at the time does yield enduring benefits.
Professionals at a communication conference like this
may be in the best position of anyone to influence
policy, so please consider what you can do from where you
are to deepen interactive literacy in the world. If more
communication/media professionals exhibit a global
sensibility, humanity might mature more quickly into the
cultural consciousness where responsible self rule makes
global sense.
My best research says that about 10 to 15 percent of
the population around the world already is feeling and
voicing a global sensibility. Look for proof to the
rising revenues of the natural food retailers, or the
subscriber counts for magazines with a global
perspective. Social psychologists and sociologists
estimate that the critical mass needed before any
cultural current goes mainstream is about 25 percent or
more. How many generations will pass on earth until
global thinking becomes common, before humanity outgrows
self-destructive ways? When will enough of us see that
deep literacy makes global sense?
If the history of the planet is calculated as a
24-hour clock, if one trusts the sciences, Homo Sapiens
emerged as the dominant species on our world barely a
minute ago. After sluggish technical progress during eons
of agrarian societies, just a few seconds ago, the
industrial revolution bega. According to this geologic
clock, the Internet emerged less than a heartbeat ago.
With so much changing so fast, no wonder so many of us
suffer from future shock.
Now we realize the cure for our fear of the future is
developing the peace of mind that comes from a global
sensibility. Our interactivity gives us power. As
creative interactive beings, we can see multiple options.
We can apply our thoughts, words and deeds to solve
problems and build that "sustainable future" we do want
for ourselves, our children and grandchildren.
The task cannot and will not be accomplished
overnight. Generations may be required. Still, if we care
to survive the turbulance ahead and prosper along the
way, the job must be done. What else can we do that will
work? Deep literacy makes global sense. 
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