The Mating of Two Voices | The Urban Times
Posted by admin on 08/01/2010
In the daily web-surf for knowledge or entertainment, I always know when I have come across that special nugget. It’s the warm jolt that emanates from somewhere within the gut. These two lectures by British author Matt Ridley, and technologist Ethan Zuckerman provided such a jolt. And it was magnified – compounded somewhat – by the relevance they seemed to have to one another. Of course, picking two lectures from the range TED conferences, and placing them together to drum home some sort of didactic message is actually a very easy thing to do. This reason is obvious. Firstly, there is such huge variety of choice. But mostly; a creative mind can unite apparently tangential and unrelated topics and mix them delicately into a complex and enticing concoction. But here, no strenuous leaps are necessary. We begin with a look at the very nature of trading of ideas, and then we look at strategies to optimize this process in a modern world. So read the article and watch the lectures and perhaps a new idea will form in your mind that you can voice!
Ridley expatiates on the nature of Idea Sharing. He views it as an organic process analogous to sexual reproduction. Unlike the repetitious nature of asexual reproduction, one idea and another idea “mate”, and out of that an entirely new and unique product or idea is birthed. He describes how Homo Sapiens are the only example in history, of living things, which have developed a system of trade beyond mere survival-based mutualism. Even the Neanderthals (very successful for a time) did not seem to uphold trade. Both males and females, for example, shared the same roles as hunter gatherer. Ridley gives examples to reflect how this aspect of our nature has led to an accelerated rate of advancement, which stands as a shining light amidst the flaws of our world, and indicates to the potential for a better future. Apparently the average person must work half a second to provide themseleves with one hour of light in comparison with six hours in the early 19th century. The average person also has levels of luxury in their life, and the same number of people working for them day to day (when we look at it from the right angle) – as King Louis XIV!
The ideas exchange has become so complex that even the most everyday things; a computer mouse for example, are impossibly complex for one man to understand. This is because they are the product of multi-layered trade across the globe, and the amalgamation of multiple skill-sets which all seem to feed into one another. As we undergo a brief lesson on the history of trade, we eventually conclude that it is not the single clever, or even extremely clever individual which matters, but rather the collective brain of our species. This may seem obvious, but the purest truths so often are.
When you’ve watched the Ridley lecture, and you’ve accepted the importance of perfecting an ideas exchange, you may wonder how this is possible in the modern world. Afterall, there are virtually seven billion of us, spread far apart and split into 195 nationalities with as many languages and cultural nuances. Technological advance has been the major accelerating factor in the ideas exchange, as improvements in education, travel, media and communication have opened new gateways. This is obvious too. The internet then, is surely today’s quintessential tool by which information is trafficked, ideas exchanged and new potential relationships established. A means to unite the global voices of Earth: this is what the internet was envisioned to be.
The trappings of hubris may have us believing this had been achieved several times over in recent years, through such achievements as social networking mainframes. But Zuckerman has no delusions about global unity. He claims the ideal has proven to be a mythical thing of fantasy. Discounting the fact that large percentages of the world’s population are not only excluded from the luxury of the internet, but lack proper food and running water, segregation seems to percolate all the world’s media. Shockingly, 12% of US TV media is made up of international coverage; a decrease from 35% in 1970′s. This echos an inherent bias that acts as a blockade to greater idea-sharing. Things should be better online, but when we look solely at that percentage which uses the internet, we can note a great deal of online exclusion and segregation that is rather surprising.
via The Mating of Two Voices | The Urban Times.
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