<div style=”width: “100%”; height: 300; border: 1px solid blue; padding: 5px;”>
</div>
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):
- Whiten's paper on cultural evolution
- Social Darwinism Science and Myth
- The Theory of Demographic Cycles and Social Evolution of Ancient and Medieval Oriental Societies
