conversation – 2018
the incompleteness of being
Somewhere along the way, in all this cloud and mobile madness, we have been carrying time machines around in our pockets.
Now they are making us anticipative. Will it happen now? What will happen next?
It’s happening because dots are being joined and patterns identified and we are now used to these connections providing us useful information at ever faster rates.
So now, there’s an anxiety you feel even though often you don’t know it.
It’s the feeling you get when you have sent a message and you are waiting for a reply. The feeling you get when you are waiting for those three dots or “is typing…” to turn into a reply you can analyse and process.
Happiness turns on the outcome. There’s banter so a companionable evening is on the cards, someone’s getting married so there’s slack to be taken up, the pug’s on the run again, the new gadget is on the way!
Knowledge dawns on the outcome – and suddenly it’s #MeToo.
Sometimes it’s insight and you learn something.
Mostly though, it creates a shared connection. I belong. I am connected. I am not alone.
It feeds the biggest anxiety we have in our lives.
The question to the question “Come, take my hand?”
Do I trust you?
We have been talking about the effect that this digital journey has been creating on our society and our opportunities here in Africa for some time.
22 years ago immedia adopted a guiding philosophy –
that the future is converged and includes both the art AND science, the humans and tools
that digital would elevate our lives to the realtime and in doing so eliminate lag, while infusing personality blooming into a new human age.
In this new human age there would arise in the real-time
a shared context
a shared conversation
a shared choreography
fuelled by the currency of trust and the foundation of community.
With the explosion of personality and the efficiency of information processing, humans now can be a part of many more communities at the same time than in the previous analogue era, because we can now manage many more simultaneous connections. Because I can express myself at much higher fidelity now and much lower energy cost than ever before. My digital doppelgänger is my amplifier, my proxy, me.
Which is why driving those communities, as ever, will be human conversation and human opinion.
And if, in your community, organisation, business or bike club you can’t keep up with the speed of social, you are losing.
Because those three dots … rule us now. Until you reply I can’t move forward and waiting for the other end of the connection to acknowledge transmission is probably the most primal of human anxieties. I am not alone.
until those three dots resolve into data, time seems elastic, time flows around it and is defined by it.
the longest time in the world is waiting for three dots to complete so you can continue.
but an hour later it seems like you were talking for just a moment.
three dots to data
and the data needs a reply, the loop needs to be closed, a human connection needs to be made.
Colours of community
When all the world’s an algorithm, what’s the point of being human? To be more human. To build the compassionate and kind value system that allows all to apply ourselves to purpose and expression. Our collective mission now is to make better humans so we empower each other, we give dignity to each other, we give service to each other.
