Evolution Accelerates, We’re Changing Faster

The hypothesis is that our world is accelerating it’s evolution, perhaps not physically but culturally*.

We are in the very midst of major social and cultural revolutions. How we process information, how we share our discoveries, and how we determine what’s most valuable are all undergoing rapid shifts and sweeping changes with varied merits of fitness. Societies which tend towards rigorous control and forced social replication are fracturing in the wake of frictionless information spread. In comparison, social alternatives with greater personal freedom and choice grow with improved communication.

How I process and share information

What looks like a simple blog post to you, has drastically changed the way I think about challenging issues, and I’m not alone. Now instead of speaking briefly to one or a handful of close friends or family about subject matter they may or may not be interested in, I can reach out to many minds at different times and in different places to critically review important issues. So much has changed since the commercialization of the web, but we take most of it for granted. Just fifteen years ago the ability to share ideas with large audiences was limited to a select group of people:

  • popular writers
  • news editors
  • talk show hosts
  • political and religious leaders
  • rockstars

More importantly there wasn’t an efficient way to get feedback from audiences to refine concepts. Broadcasters merely “read the crowd” to determine if what they were sharing was resonating.

Time: How we determine value

Time is the ultimate measure of our personal value. It’s not how much we are paid for our time, but how we choose to spend it that determines value. We dedicate time to what we believe is most important. Whether it’s impressing our company by putting in long work days, or maintaining closeness with family by arranging regular gatherings, or by spending time with our dearest life partners in lieu of other attention stealing activities.

Notes, References, Background Materials (admit I only scanned them briefly this morning, but they helped me frame social evolution):

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  • Leland

    Mark I agree with you somewhat. However, I believe that even though our new tools allow anyone to get their thoughts out, people still have to spend time reading these thoughts. Therefore, people of high reputation (depending on the statistics available on the social platform (twitter has followers)) will be the ones who are watched, while me and you will still be largely ignored.

    The main difference between our ability to share information now vs. fifty years ago is that if I happen to have an attention grabbing piece of information or opinion about something, the system to promote that piece of information largely exists. Where in the past, the capability made it nearly impossible, now, the barriers to that opinion or information entering the mainstream have been broken down by quite a bit.

    I think the future of our social processing and sharing will have very robust relationship and reputation tracking so that people can search through and instantly see how powerful the social “voice” of someone is. I can even see people making a living off of their social clout and ability to get messages out to large swaths of people. (is this already happening in twitter? probably.. and it has been happening in Digg for awile)