Something’s Happening
It occurred to me a while ago, but I couldn’t put it into conceptual form until now. Something’s happening. People used to tell me they felt this way about markets, or, The Market.
Is it a religious feeling? I don’t know. I’m feeling it about this thing we call Global Society. It took a tragedy for it to come into focus for me. The Red Sea Ferry disaster was splashed across the top of the upper fold of the Vancouver Sun. Right next to it was a story about Ferry safety in BC.
Then it hit me. We are everywhere. We are omnipresent, or at least we have built a very young, tenuous and relatively untested thing that allows us to be omnipresent when conditions are right.
Time and space have truly collapsed in important ways and for important aspects of our collective experience. We do share things of importance and substance with people across the globe. It is the beginnings of a truly global experience of human existence.
Today Lisa and I took Verity to the Montessori School across the Gorge, just to look around. And it hit me again. The kids were being taught all about the global society. There was a bunch of little flags, but the tallest one was the flag of the United Nations. And the content of the classroom was very inclusive and multicultural. But there were very solid and tangible universals aimed at fostering common things needed for later in life. Basic cognitive skills that transcended culture.
What is this thing? It is the Information Society. It is a stage we are at that allows for these kind of glimpses to emerge. It is like finding patterns in an ocean of waves that emanate from all shores. Chaotic, but it sometimes comes into focus. And when it does it becomes global knowledge.
This is what the title on the UNESCO Information Society Observatory means.
UNESCO Observatory on the Information Society
Monitoring the Development of the Information Society towards Knowledge Societies
Knowledge Societies. Not a Knowledge Society, but Knowledge Societies. Diversity rooted in common knowledge shared through the future mature information, communication and social networks we are starting to create today. Diversity supported and sustained by knowledge appropriate to unique situations and needs, but rooted in a single commonality: that it is correct. Tested and true knowledge. Not suspicion or prejudice. Not bias or ideology. Not religious dogma or totalitarian edict.
Today information flows unchecked and unharnessed. We are bowled over by it. It weighs on us and we sometimes have to shut our ears to the din. We have this capacity to broadcast, and broadcast we do. At high bandwidth and volume. But making sense of it all is the new challenge. Understanding how it can be put to use for unique societal challenges is the value proposition not yet met by the Information Society.
The Globe was once a boundless thing; a place where identity was linked to your little slice of it. Inside vs. Outside. Spinning a Globe meant some part was always out of sight. Never capturable. Even the Mercator Projection couldn’t do it for us, since Greenland couldn’t be bigger than Canada, could it? Then there was that picture of the Earth from the Moon, and all the subsequent developments that have shown us the boundaries are simply the Globe itself. Boundaries of our atmosphere, our water, our land, and all the connectivity inside those boundaries that links us all. Now we are all inside something. It is still the globe, but it no longer boundless. It is finite. It is the same. It is something that is being worked into everyone’s Identity. We are all in this together, and it has become tangible in the fleeting pattern recognition that my brain is beginning to develop in response to this new stimuli.
We are.
Earthlings.
Globe 2.0.
