This week’s Future Here Now focuses on one of the most transformative characteristics of our transition into the Fusion Era, and also one we most overlook. Digital technology — not just social media, but the full range of how we interact online — transforms each individual person into not just a consumer of information, but a creator, a curator, a shaper and a moderator of information. We’re not always very good at handling that new power yet — we end up looking like Jack Jack in The Incredibles, except not as cute.
But despite our very real problems with the impacts of bad information (and sometimes bad actors), this is a profoundly transformative power — in some ways, bigger than the printing press. And we already take it for granted far more than perhaps we should.
So how do we use this new power to help build the future that we want to live in - including in our businesses, organizations and communities?
The Big Idea
In 2015, when I was Managing Editor of the online magazine Engaging Cities, I wrote and ran an editorial called “Nous Sommes Charlie” (We are all Charlie). This was immediately after the newsroom of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was attacked by two brothers who found some of the magazine’s editorial cartoons offensive. News sources around the world declared solidarity and expressed outrage that their right to publish any content they saw fit should be censored, particularly by fringe elements of a religion.
From a post-2020 perspective, the idea that we all felt that we had to declare solidarity with this often sexist, sometimes mean-spirited publication doesn’t make quite as much sense. But at the time I felt that, even as a little niche publication, we needed to say something.
It was one of the least successful pieces I ever published, anywhere. I don’t know whether that was bad timing, exhaustion with the topic, me not writing clearly, or what. Or perhaps it was that the something that I felt I had to say was about a dimension of the issue that wasn’t being expressed by most others at that time. Maybe it was too early in the digital media transition to have tried to make that case.
But I think the point holds, and eight years later even seems self-evident:
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