All Voices Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others

Technology has given each of us the opportunity to share our thoughts and feelings with a potential audience of millions, without the inconvenience of having to convince publishers or editors of the worth of our words. Our wise and witty screeds may be ignored, but at least we are expressing ourselves. Isn’t getting into our own grove what it has all come down to online? Mid flickr and blog, I will vodcast my barbaric yawp across the YouTubes of the world.

Whether on blog or social networking page, by user-generated text or image, our view, our take, our opinion is what moves us. Text in. Tweet. Phone in. Email. What do you think? Tell us your story. It may be that you tried a new recipe for shepherd’s pie for dinner last night that involved actual shepherds, or that you recently escaped, under gunfire, from a violent corner of the Maghreb. No matter. Each tale is equal, each teller equally equipped with the means to tell it.

What a load of Simon Cowell. Being witness to a drama doesn’t necessarily mean that we possess an ability to stage it. We each have a story to tell, of course, but it doesn’t automatically follow that we have an ability to tell it. Don’t get stuck with my grandmother whatever you do.

The idea of collective creative parity online is a romantic one, which fools us into believing that we are being listened to, that we matter now more than we ever have before. But the world remains a place in which some have and some have not, some will and some won’t, some can and some can’t. It is not flat, whatever Thomas Friedman and other professional exaggerators would have us believe. We are babbling away like never before, but some voices are more equal than others. The authorities, social, political, economic and cultural, still exist, and these authorities are being influenced by the new priestly caste, the evangelists for the democratic possibilities of technology. Power isn't being challenged. It is simply learning to pretend that it is just like you.

Too Much Information

Norbert Wiener

There was a time when the phrase "too much information" referred to a friend's unusual propensity to reveal a superabundance of intimate detail regarding recent amorous encounters. However, at the beginning of the second decade of the third millennium the cliché has been restored to its primary meaning. But the mere act of expressing the fact that there is too much information now puts us all in something of a fix. In order to make the point that there is too much information we only add to the information. It is surely time to return the words 'knowledge' and 'wisdom' to a central place in our culture. And time is what both of those words require.

The father of modern cybernetics, Norbert Wiener, whose work on the study of feedback helped popularise the idea of the information loop, and hence that most fashionable of notions of being 'in the loop', believed, in the way that only a scientist truly can, in the improvement of the species. This story, as told in James Harkin's compelling book Cyburbia, needs to be read. We would adjust and adapt in response to a continuing stream of information Wiener suggested, improve our direction, evade capture or destruction, move ever onwards with an improved sense of momentum and purpose.

However, in our age of global information witness, when we are all looking at, commenting upon and sharing the same information, the space for the radical, the surprise that refashions a conception of where we are going, unsettles our conviction as to why we are going there and challenges our assumptions as to what we will find if ever we are to arrive at our destination, is shrinking. Perhaps it is now only to be found offline.

According to the OED 'cybernetics' comes from the Greek word kubernetes meaning 'steersman,' 'helmsman' or 'pilot'. The internet, in its current form, encourages us to pilot ourselves in the same direction, towards one another, in a carnival of communality. In the glorious rush of digital feedback, the automatic input and output, who is keeping a look out to check that we are not steering ourselves into an abyss? '

The Conformity of Crowds

In our social networking playgrounds we are fearful to be different least we offend or contravene the rules. The new heresy is not only to have an alternative perspective, but to communicate that perspective. Dispute an online fashion or a beloved digital authority and you are labelled a hater. Where is the love of argument? Why the rush to consensus? Why sign up to the utopian celebration of social media's endless updating of its possibilities without questioning our need for the service provided?

Social networking supports the contemporary myth that we each have voice a worth attending to, while simultaneously seeking to deny the uniqueness and originality of all our voices by trapping us within systems, databases and pre-ordained templates. We are free only to be the same as everyone else.

Were Descartes alive and fiddling with the ends of his moustache in the second decade of the twenty-first century, he might be tempted into a new metaphysical formulation: Others are therefore I am. What’s thinking got to do with it René?