Monday, December 8, 2008

Raising the Level of Discourse (Revisited)

This is the piece I submitted to 3QD. This was originally posted as http://wolven.livejournal.com/1288823.html It has since been edited, reformatted, etc.

Raising the Level of Discourse
by Damien Williams


I’ve been thinking a lot, these past few years, about the positions in which we as human beings find ourselves. I think that humans have a tendency to seek the path of least resistance, like electricity, and to seek to fill a shape, like liquids or gasses, and the most visible evidence of this is in our societies. We have societies which, for the vast majority of situations, reinforce and reward not making things different. If we change anything, at all, we make things easier for everyone, and provide clearer instructions for doing exactly as much as it takes, to get through the day. When we find that there are a lot of us who aren’t doing as good as we could be, we lower the bar, and appeal to what has ever been known as the “lowest common denominator.” But for many of us, you see, the goal is not to find the lowest common denominator, and then appeal to it; and we think it ought not to be the goal for anyone. We generally feel that the goal ought to be to find the highest conglomerate bar, and seek to raise everyone to it.

As I discussed with some colleagues back in September of 2007—alternately defending and attacking, shielding and enfolding the arguments of two other people, because I rock, like that—if what a group has, as a society, is a Line of Best Fit model, with various social outliers and extremes—such as incest and cannibalism—then there will be a very few people for whom the line is perfect, and the rest of the populace will, in fact, make do. It seems that the change that comes to a model such as this will necessarily be a slow change, in that an individual ideal must have time to propagate, disperse into the societal ideal, bounce around, taking root in various places, and then bounce back. If we were able to watch the line, as this happened, we would see a representation of a lot of people slowly shuffling in a new direction in the changing of the line, but it would be as a result of everyone constantly looking around to make sure they aren't the new outliers. This means that when the line changes, at all, it's because everyone is reasonably sure that they're not going to be the "weird" one" or the "wrong" one or the one who looked at something verboten, on the internet at work.


It was also posited that the time a change in the line takes is a necessary function of the level of connectivity and the economic pressures that entails. Dennis LoRusso of Emory University notes that people have to work to juggle jobs, home, family, friends, etc, and that all of that uses up a certain amount of human processing power. If attention is a commodity, then there are only so many things that we can deem “important,” as individuals, and only so many things about which a society will collectively decide the same. And so I believe the solution to both of these very large concerns rests in one specific, unbearably slow shift in our societal line: Value sets. The things that we, as societies, believe are important must shift in subtle but crucial directions. In the United States of America, for instance, if we can change the value sets of people to focus less on monetary advancement and the "stuff" that they want, which they feel are registered signs of abstracts like "success," or "wealth," or "happiness," or "freedom," then we can focus on what those abstracts actually are and what they mean.

If we have a societal system where the advancement and success of an individual is based not simply on work-for-pay, but on truly doing what you love, what you can, not for survival, not for pay, but to contribute something to the growth of a society, then our model of economics would change, drastically. It would have to, because “Value” would have a whole new meaning. We would need to change our description of what people do and why they do it, because new variables of input would have become relevant. But, in order to do it, we must use the economic pressures, as they currently exist, and bring about a value change. Use the values to change the values. This is generally referred to as “Bootstrapping.”

The modes and methods of these changes, as well as certain other considerations that we will shortly visit, can be found in various iterations of popular culture. For example: People like "American Idol," for whatever reason? This is fine. Give them competition-based shows for things like Music Composition, classical piano, painting, poetry; anything other than pop music, being a fashion model, and choreographed dancing. Top Chef, while I don't watch it, is an example of this expanded discourse, to an extent. More clearly, “The Chef Jeff Project” displays competition-based “reality television” programming as a force for social change. We slowly move the line, so that we can achieve, eventually, the ability to take in new information, and adjust the line to the input on a faster scale. This change in input ratio will, itself, require the use of the very technology that keeps us connected to each other, in the first place—the technology that keeps us connected to our jobs so that the boss can say "I need you to work, this Saturday," or "Oh goodness, it's 4 am and the server hath exploded, could you please come in and fix it?" It will need this because it is that connectivity that allows our constant input.


This connectivity is already changing the face of various governments. President-elect Barack Obama has announced the establishment of five-day-long periods of open commenting on any non-emergency legislation, prior to his signing it into law. Whether his administration actually takes those comments into consideration remains to be seen, but it is, if nothing else, a step in the right direction.

There are problems. For one, we might well ask, “Won't this just be one big argument? Won’t we have so much argument and interaction, so quickly, that nothing will ever get done?” While it may be true that people have a tendency to argue, in such a way that it may continue to take forever to get anything done, debate and discernment are capabilities that we have now, and traits that we display, and will continue to have and display for as long as people have different ideas. So, hopefully, forever. Introducing the right concepts at the right times generally allows the majority of people to push past the petty differences, toward a better, greater whole. All I'm proposing is that we make that push happen faster, relative to the rest of our endeavours.

For another thing, many of you may be concerned about the meaning of privacy, in a situation like the above. When people are connected such that their new ideas are transmitted on a near instantaneous basis, won't there be a fundamental lack of individual privacy? Will it even be practical to expect that things not be known about us, in the arena of public knowledge? Well, while it may not be immediately seen that this would be a practical thing, simply having the option to withhold a certain amount and/or type of information would be a step toward accommodating those who may be uncertain about the levels of connectivity necessary to change our societal landscape. To that end, I would propose a set amount of things held as "private knowledge;" these things are yours, and can be shared with as many or as few people as you choose, and when a threshold limit is reached (say, you've told 15 or 20 people), your information is no longer private, anyway, so it is removed from the cache. New things get to go in.

This is obviously an imperfect solution. Shirow Masamune’s Ghost in the Shell universe provides a landscape for these types of concerns, and I would like to offer that it is a landscape we should explore if we decide to go further, in this direction. To those who would say that we would need to become “post privacy,” however, I would offer this question: Do you really want to know every thing about every one, all at once? Or would a gradual process of exchanges in trust and accessibility be preferable?

Thirdly, what about people who don't want to come in to the new system? Do we force them to participate? Is the negation of choice, in the interest of making all choice more free, a valid or acceptable move? If I were to reprogram your brain in only one respect, against your will, and that respect was to want to be a part of this system, would that make it okay to make you a part of the system? What about if it was your choice, all along, and I merely allowed you to see the benefits of it on a compressed timescale? These are things to think about, certainly, because many would say that it is never acceptable to remove the choice of the individual, no matter the greater good. On the other hand, most people have a pragmatic line where they will concede that it becomes necessary. Additionally, epistemic questions arise, regarding the foundation of our choices, and whether they are truly “ours.”

These are only three of the many questions that arise, but I think they are major ones. Their proper handling and consideration are vital to the continuance of our societies, in a technologically dependent age. Additionally, many of my references have come from Japanese comic books, American animation, and reality television programming, and this should be noted. In our attempt to find solutions to these problems and systems which may be useful in moving forward, certain aspects of oft-maligned popular culture may provide a rich and intellectually fertile field in which to test ideas of a philosophical and theoretical nature. As more and more materials of a serious nature are approached in popular culture, we will find more and more academics whose interests are addressed therein. And the door opens both ways, with famous academics and serious minds such as Stephen Hawking appearing in and giving weight to pop-culture media. We should not be afraid to appear “puerile” or “immature” through our investigation of these avenues, as any serious examination of the material will show that they are often the most mature. Not to mention, we should be willing to investigate any available schema which looks as thought it may allow us to beneficially change the structure of our societies.


Though we cannot account for any and all potential hindrances, we can make an attempt to plan for contingencies, and strive for a collective effort to make the world in which we live a better place. If we seek to raise the level of discourse—assuming not that every person who hears us is incapable of understanding us, but rather that they are possessed of the basic potential to integrate and apply new types and tokens of information—then we may finally come to see a shift in what is represented by “the majority.” People have a basic capacity for learning; it’s time we started treating them, as such.

©Damien Williams. All Rights Reserved.