The News Continuum

There’s always been news. There’s always been a continuum of what’s considered news by audiences and what’s not.

But what’s been lacking has been information, wisdom, and knowledge.

The continuum of what’s news has been debated for years by those delivering the content, and is now heating up with accusations of biases, “fake” news, propaganda, and “false flags.”

Of course, with the rise of social media, it has become infinitely easier for all manner of actors without the best of intentions, to engage in the process of deciding what’s news and what’s not.

The continuum, though, breaks down like this:

“not news” – Seemingly “obvious” information that very few people find relevant, interesting, or factual, but that some find to be a resource. Information that is classified as “not news” usually is dismissed by whatever mainstream reporting outlet seeks to gain power from holding onto it.

“fake news” – What used to be classified as propaganda at the most extreme end and gossip at the least extreme end, “fake news” is a term that’s currently being thrown around with abandon, not because the information is spurious (it might well be) but because the distributor of the information is perceived as being biased.

“false news”—This is information that isn’t “obvious” but also isn’t “non-obvious.” It is the information of a cloistered group of people (or a tribe) who have insider knowledge and seek to use their access to distributors and purveyors of news to sow the information to a broader public that isn’t privy to their knowledge. “false news” exists not only in the gray areas between who’s “in” and who’s “out,” but also it exists as a weapon and a wall to keep people silent—or ignorant—of all the facts of a situation.

“news” – Is exactly that: Information that is new that provides facts to an audience unaware of the facts before. This is in the middle of the spectrum, for two reasons: One, in an information-saturated culture, it’s hard to determine what audiences know and don’t know more now than ever before. Two, as audience choice of what information they have access to, has gone up, audience attention spans have gone down.

“old news” – Is information that seems to have gained traction by audiences coming to a consensus that they are bored of hearing about it. In the modern media landscape, that which is old is determined by how few clicks it gets from the audience.

“new news” –This is the hardest to describe, identify, and attain in an information landscape dominated by Google. No information seems “new” to an audience trained on a diet of irony, sarcasm, and short attention. “new news” should inspire and delight and expose information, wisdom, and knowledge never before considered.

The drivers of all of this are the audience. And the conflict between the audience, and the people with the cameras, the audio equipment, the websites, the networks, and the bandwidth is going to get more and more divisive as audiences drain the lifeblood of attention away from what used to be universally agreed upon as news, and move on to create their own identities, outlets, and perspectives.

And they do so without asking for permission, or forgiveness.

You Were Already Angry Before the Internet Came Along

When people talked with each other across the fences in the backyard, they knew (with some certainty, though certainly not ontological certainty) which of their neighbors were angry and which were pleasant.

The bowling league, the local bar, the country club, and even the grocery store served as locations that allowed people to bump into each other in ways both random and purposeful, and to take each other’s’ temperature about the news of the day.

There were opportunities for thought leaders, opinion makers, and public intellectuals to educate the public about what they believed, and because first the Church, and then the government, and then the corporations acted as gatekeepers, democracy of thought and passion was tamped down successfully enough.

If you were an individual looking to step out from the shadow of conformity and the comfort of the crowd, there were few venues that existed for you to walk out those minority viewpoints, and the gatekeepers of the majority existed primarily to ensure that the minority was never heard from.

Or at least, rarely heard from.

Fighting for a minority belief against a seemingly overwhelming power structure became sauce for the cooking of the goose of ideas, and passions, and sometimes, those ideas broke through the dominant culture, leaped over the gatekeepers and struck a chord with millions of people.

In the 4^th great human revolution, the one being driven by a global communication channel known as the Internet, the gatekeepers have little power to police, minority voices and viewpoints can connect with each other and influence like never before, and you know how angry your neighbor is, because she tweeted out a passionate comment last week and it popped up in your feed.

Here’s the thing that we forget, in light of the technological show being put on by the Internet now:

Your neighbor was always angry and disgruntled about the way that the world fundamentally worked.

There were always minority viewpoints in the culture, looking for connection, engagement, and searching for meaning against a dominant culture that was perceived as arrogant, conformist and overbearing.

The bowling league, the local bar, the country club, and even the grocery store have been replaced first by chat rooms, and now by the “impermanent” web, and will be replaced further by whatever comes next.

Since the magnification of a problem is not the same as the problem’s ‘root cause,’ it should come as no surprise to us that people are at the root of our angry, passionate, loud discourse, on an open, democratic and connecting tool.

We all can now say, due to the overwhelming evidence and with almost ontological certainty, that if we fix the people the tool will magically change.

[Opinion] All Others Bring Emotions

Pursuing the chimera of “Big Data,” means little in the face of human irrationality and unpredictability when the impact of emotions is removed from the analysis.

Emotions are everywhere, and all around us, driving our reactions to events, our desires to record and document those events, and our drives to connect with each other.

But there is little appreciation of the impact of emotions, as the explanations for people’s individual and corporate reactions to conflicts and strife, have been reduced to little more than economic reasoning (Marxism), or scientific surety (Darwin, et.al).

Neither of which explain the passion of emotions, the irrationality of people at mass, or the unpredictability of human reactions. We desire this predictability (or at least governments and corporations do) to control and direct desirable outcomes; not to grow and enlighten people about themselves.

Instead of gathering ever more data points, arguing ever louder about whose facts are more truthful, or dismissing ideas that we believe are irrational, maybe instead, it’s time to do a deep dive into the oldest of all drivers of conflict in human beings:

Envy
Anger
Lust
Gluttony
Greed
Sloth
Pride

They used to be called sins.

But in an era of economic causation, and fetishized data gathering, we dismiss the power of ancient drivers, psychological and otherwise, at our continued peril.

Network Leap 2

The leap from here to there has never been closer.

Sure, leaping is naturally hard.

That’s why people caution other people, before they embark on a path they can’t see, into a future they can’t understand, with outcomes that are unimaginable, to “look before you leap.”

It’s been written before that, in the context of a conflict, this is terrible advice, most often given terribly.

In the context of the idea of the primacy of the network over everything else , leaping from the Internet “in here” (the greatest communications disruption tool invented by man yet) to the network of physical relationships, textures, and moments in the world “out there” (the physical world), it’s actually great advice.

The difficulty of leaping from inside the machine to outside the machine is misunderstood and underappreciated. Google is trying it’s best to make that leap, as is Facebook, but the real players in the leap from virtual to physical, might be platform builders who understand two things:

Connectivity is not a bug, it’s a feature. Too often in the non-virtual world, connection is now shifting from being treated as something to be hoarded (though there are still those who do that) to something to be freely shared. This shift is thought of by the hoarders as a bug in the system and they do all they can to wipe it out.

Access is a responsibility. Too often in the physical world the location where the fiber optic wire ends (the last mile concept) is thought of as the place where it’s not financially worth it (a profit can’t be made) to provide access to the people living beyond that, sometimes literal, “last mile.” This mindset is shifting, because the reality is that access is gradually moving from a limited privilege to a global civic good.

Once people, businesses, and networks wrap their heads around these two philosophies, and then are self-aware enough to act on them with intentionality, “look before you leap” will return to being the terrible advice it always was.

[Advice] Conspiracy Theories

The standing rule is that people tend to most easily believe in conspiracy theories that they create; and tend to reject the conspiratorial thinking of others.

The trouble with our concerns about fake news, is that they come from a place where critical thinking has been reduced in favor of playing to (and supporting) audience attention spans that rival those of hummingbirds.

The long read, the long form content, the long movie; the challenging idea, the scientific journal, the complicated path to learning a new language; these are all in competition against TL;DR (too long; didn’t read), the 30 second cat video on YouTube, the 6 second looping Vine video, or the easily shareable click-bait article.

Audiences have been convinced by both marketers, and journalists (just marketers in another way) that their thinking and content consumption choices are sophisticated. That they are able to sift through biases consciously (without relying on assumptions and inferences from facts not in evidence), come to rational conclusions, and then act on those conclusions to co-create an orderly world.

Oh, but were that so.

When audiences can pick their own personalized access to “knowledge” and can choose their own “facts” then news that comes from sophisticated marketers (some former journalists) and content creators, becomes the coin of access to the conspiratorial realm. And social cueing, confirmation bias, and attribution activates individuals in the audience to create their own, publicly viewable, and socially shareable conspiracy theories.

Not about aliens landing at Roswell.

Not about the Illuminati running the world.

Not about a rising one-world government.

Not about a coming cashless society.

But conspiracies about stolen votes, illegal voting (and voters), racialism, economic injustice, Big Pharmaceutical companies poisoning vaccines, Big Agricultural companies poisoning seeds, Big Banks ceasing to be allowed to failed, Big Governments seeking to curb natural rights, Big Faith seeking to curb libertine tendencies, and on, and on, and on.

This type of conspiracy theory mongering is particularly subtle and insidious, because it plays on the mistrust and biases audiences already have built in to their world-view and thinking, but it does the play at scale, and one-to-one. This creates a feeling of community (we’re in the know) while also creating a feeling of persecution (we’re on the outside of everyone else).

And people should have expected it. As more knowledge, has become more accessible to the common individual (if you have a smartphone in your pocket with Internet access, you have a supercomputer) we have been encouraged to embrace the conspiracies we like, share them with our friend circle, and then sit back and wait passively for reality to match our frames and worldviews. And when that doesn’t happen, we go back, double-down, and start the conflict cycle.

Mass media (led by the collapsing and panicking journalism field) is complicit in this as well, seeking to drive audience attention to ideas and concepts that are spurious, but that also generate clicks. This is because mass media content production can’t figure out (at scale) how to get audiences to pay for something they can get anywhere for free, but it’s also driven by the ego-based desire to be seen, be acknowledged as an expert, and to grow the network and personal brand of the content creator at the expense of the market, and the audience, gaining new knowledge, or being challenged in any meaningful way.

Fake news—and the environment that allows conspiracy theories to metastasize—is not going to go away. The echo chambers of social platforms are too powerful, with too many voices, too many passive audience members, and too many exclusively self-interested actors.

What is going to have to change is, as always, the hardest piece: Individuals are going to have to decide what they will absorb, what ideas they will believe, and they critically reject other ideas, based on objective evidence and proof.

But if individuals (and audiences) could do that effectively, the placebo effect long-ago would have ceased to be effective.

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Four, Episode # 8 – Jaimee Dorris, Web Personality, Creative, Entrepreneur

[Podcast] Earbud_U, Season Four, Episode # 8 – Jaimee Dorris, Web Personality, Creative, Entrepreneur

[powerpress]

Living out loud in the American South.

Incongruity. Building for the future. Making a plan and executing. Pivoting into something else. Building a brand that lasts.

Our guest today, Jaimee Dorris, wants everybody on the Mississippi Gulf Coast to know her name. And she’ll get there. By building a stage, one audience member at a time.

The idea of “build it and they will come” is as old as—well—advertising itself. But it doesn’t happen overnight. And that’s where the personality of an entrepreneur really has to kick in. To double-down, not on failure, but on success. And to turn seeming “dead-ends” into profitable streets that link engaged audience members to a much larger story.

This is not a political podcast, and you all don’t really care about what my personal political positions are, but…

In light of recent electoral events in United States, this interview stands as both a beacon of hope for those who are looking for hope and it stands as a refutation of realities for others.

And in a political world where it appears that the fundamentals under girding the process were changed…well…fundamentally this year, our interview is a reminder that all has not quite changed just yet.

What has happened is that, as my grandmother would say, things have become sharpened— that is, further revealed—and in that process of revelation, we must all look at ourselves closer than we ever have before.

We must examine our motives, our thoughts, our inner drives, and our outer limits, in order to build the best, most worthy, selves that we can in this challenging—and changing—new world.

That revelation should bring us all the hope we need.

Alright. Well that’s it…. Let’s get into it!

Connect with Jaimee in all the ways you can below:

Website (Home of the MS Congeniality Show!): http://www.jaimeedorris.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mrsjaimeed

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHxKWvXbQeWaTyKMZjHBbKw

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaimee-dorris-63064914

Twitter: https://twitter.com/mrsjaimeed

[Opinion] Live with the Outcome of the Vote

Tomorrow in the United States, is election day.

There is, during local, state, and national elections, the usual appeals to get people to engage in phone calling for candidates, rallies, polling, and all the other “get out the vote” parts of an election campaign.

The appeals come from the idea that it is easy to convince people not to vote; thus, by getting in their face with constant appeals to participate in all aspects of the voting process (from planting a yard sign to actually voting) the candidates hope to ensure that people are persuaded to vote.

This is all well and good. But towards the end of an elections cycle, such appeals can rise to the level of farce.

What’s far more important is how candidates, and their supporters, live with the outcome of an election.

Candidates and supporters don’t need to be told how to get out the vote.

Candidates and supporters need to be told how to live with outcomes they might not like.

Or that they might have voted against.

This ability to deal with outcomes that are not voted for, without engaging in disruptive revolution, is a fixture of the United States electoral process, because of how the electoral process is designed via the Constitution: A candidate and their ideas may be popular, but if there isn’t enough support from populations in states with a high number of electoral votes, then the candidate loses.

Being a popular loser is something that past candidates have some experience with at the national level in the United States, and because of this two-tiered system, the electoral process has always been relatively free from the chicanery and corruption that sometimes rules in plurality, or parliamentary based systems.

The thing that drives the difficulty in living with the outcome is partially the media. We get the media system that we have built, and in the United States, it is a system based on short attention spans, emotional hijacking, and spreading of rumor as fact.

But we allowed that system to be built.

The other thing that increasingly drives anger, and dissatisfaction with electoral outcomes, is the fact that as the United States has become more fractured in its media consumption of facts, there has been the corresponding rise of tribal like behavior. This type of behavior, instigated by a click happy media structure, creates a perfect storm of disaffection and unrest, that goes beyond the outcomes of election days.

And it will go beyond Tuesday as well.

Network Leap

The deep revelation of the revolution called the Internet, is that it continues to demonstrate that networks are the most valuable resource that an individual, a corporation, or a government possesses in order to leverage innovation, change, and advancement.

Of course, during the height of the Industrial Revolution last century, no one understood how to measure the revenue generated by any kind of network (personal or professional), but everyone knew somebody who had gotten hired via a referral, or who had made a purchase from strong word-of-mouth.

The Internet shows the power of such networks virtually (have you bought an online course lately?) even as it erodes the networks between people in the “real” world.

This is a particularly troubling realization for organizations built at scale, i.e. “real world” companies, from old line manufacturers (Ford) to healthcare companies (name your national hospital conglomerate of choice here).

The fact that a network matters more than physical size, monetary resources, access, etc., on the Internet is the main reason why corporate mergers (i.e. AT&T + Every Other Media Company You Can Name on the Planet) won’t do much to increase the overall market share of individual eyeballs and mass audience attention. The mass approach doesn’t work (because of the network impact of the Long Tail) and such mergers are the flailing attempts of declining industries to remain relevant in the face of the only thing that scales from individual to individual.

The web of the network.

Some sectors are provincially beginning to understand the impact of the presence of the network in the physical world, with the growing talk around the Internet-of-Things. But this is just the beginning.

The fact that the presence of the network matters more than the size of the network, is why Google will eventually get out of the search business altogether (probably around the middle of this century or so) and be the first Internet based company to burst from your computer or mobile phone application, out into the physical world.

Search matters less and less when the network matters more and more to accomplishing revenue, connection and growth goals at scale. Sure, Facebook may “win” the networking wars against search in their own little walled garden, but Google is planning on escaping to larger territories in the physical world where the presence of a network generates more revenues, because of the inability and myopia of Industrial Revolution based organizations to appreciate the impact of a network at scale.

These larger territories where networks aren’t as valued (yet) include the physical connectivity infrastructure of a city (Google Fiber), the physical place where individuals spend time commuting to work (Google Car) and the place where individuals spend the time connecting with others physically AND virtually (Google A.I. projects).

The fact that the network matters more than the technology facilitating the development of the network, is why virtual reality companies (Oculus Rift) and augmented reality games (Pokemon Go!) will be on the edges of individuals’ and companies’ radars for some time to come. The real “killer” app for both virtual reality and augmented reality technology will be the one that brings connectivity and an already established network into the new technology. And then pivots to connect that network to a larger, physical world.

For companies that can’t envision the leap to network based thinking (but who have executives and others on their cell phones texting, emailing, messaging, and otherwise building their virtual network constantly) here are a few suggestions:

Build the physical network between schools, industry, and government in your local town, or municipality. There is nothing less sexy or interesting than sitting at a table talking about how things were better economically in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, but that lament must be part of a larger discussion of expanding the web and the network using the same thinking and acting that individuals are doing virtually daily.

Realize that money is no object. Money is a story. Fear of change and resistance to the present reality and the future possibility are the objects. Recently the question came up in a workshop with an organization in transition “How do ‘crack’ the Resistance?” One way is to build trust. The other way is to change the thinking of the organization around what constitutes a “revenue generating” activity, and what does not.

Realize that there isn’t power in hoarding knowledge, access, or a carefully constructed network anymore. There isn’t power in hoarding money anymore (no matter how much cash on the balance sheets the Fortune 500 is hoarding). There isn’t even power in hoarding connections to politicians, power-brokers, or personalities anymore. The power is in sharing, reciprocity and building trust across boundaries, rather than busily building moats.

Or walls.

The full power of the Internet—in its ability to shape how humans build, how humans communicate, and how humans create network value—has yet to be fully explored.

We are at the beginning of a revolution.

HIT Piece: 10.11.2016 -“For” You, or “To” You

The government (and the corporations that consort with it through lobbying efforts) can’t provide every service, fulfill every need, and relieve every want for every individual.

The government (and the corporations that consort with it through lobbying efforts) can be hampered from taking away rights and encouraging responsibility, from individuals.

One perspective is known as “positive rights” and the other perspective is known as “negative rights.”

In online interactions with corporations that are coalescing and acting like “real-world” mega-corporations (consorting with, and lobbying against or for, government policies and such) the issue in conversations around online anonymity is whether or not you believe that those mega-corporations should do for you, or should not do to you.

“For” you, or “to” you.