Orbit Change Conversations

This is another post off the beaten track (and I can hear Arun thinking that it’s first Africa, now mass culture; what will it take to get this man back to his blog theme) but I couldn’t resist talking about this.

Tim O’Reilly writes about the advent of short and modular form of content and links it up with the growth of participation. Amazon book reviews, YouTube clips, crib notes that pass for books, shorter legal commentaries in place of treatises, Wikipedia pages, etc. are examples of this trend.

Nick Carr chimes in with a beautifully written post. He agrees with Tim that the short, modular form is more suitable for “social production” where “lot of people contribute a lot of chunks to create a big pile of chunks”. But he also laments this change…

The new medium doesn’t just promote the proliferation of small pieces; it devalues the long form. In fact, it doesn’t even make room for big, extended works. It’s actively biased against them, technologically and economically. More than that, though, it both reflects and reinforces our own increasing bias against anything that requires sustained attention or contemplation.

Both are valuable perspectives. However, I also worry about the long-term cultural consequences of all this.

The improved accessibility for consumption and production of content is not only changing content, it is also changing the people who consume it. Some changes are easy to see. We can now read Beirut Times as easily as Jerusalem Post or listen to Beatles as easily as Zulu music. While this allows us to sample all cultures easily, what it’s doing is to make it easy for us to stay ensconced in our own cultural world at all times (even when we travel.) I think this is making us more insular as people.

When we start living in echo chambers on the web and interact largely with our online friends, there is really no incentive to understand and appreciate other cultures. Could this be giving radicalism a boost? I see some evidence that this is happening. The recent trials in UK have shown how radical worldviews can easily thrive among small groups of people living in open societies like Britain. Micro-cultures have become easier to create because of modern technology.

So insularity and radicalism are one set of possibilities. Could a different outcome also be possible? I would like think so.

My sense is that micro-cultures are also creating a sense of rooted-ness for many people. Alvin Toffler said that your ability to change is a function of your unchanging core. I find this to be a profound statement. If we have to make people comfortable with the change that surrounds them, we have to let them become rooted to an unchanging core. For some people, this “unchanging core” can be a place that they love staying in. For others, it can be a house. It can be an ideology. Or it can be a micro-culture that they are immersed in. The optimistic part of me would like to believe that micro-cultures may actually allow people to deal with change better in areas outside of music, religion and politics. The domain that might benefit most could be the workplace.

I would like to hear back from you. Which side are you on? Do you think we are sliding towards more radicalized micro-communities or are we creating more ‘anchored’ individuals that are comfortable with diversity and change?