The Revelation of Relevance
“From now on,” the State Department’s Alec Ross said last week in the Washington Post, “any and all dissent movements will have technology as a core component.” Of course, by technology he meant ubiquitous, reliable, and inexpensive access to the Internet, so that like-minded people can connect with one another by short text or voice. Like water permeating seemingly imperious rock and freezing, rigid control as a governance model is doomed: isolation barely works in a world that is warm and wet, and fails miserably in the cooler climes of cyber. In fact, rigid control of anything is about to face the sunset.
In our previous essay, the Revolution of Relevance, we described the scientific and societal case for the sustained and, we believe, permanent benefits of an Internet connected global society. From the physiology of mirror neurons to the detection of weak signals, or voices, we explained how the mobile Internet has literally expanded our world view from static words and color photographs to billions of smart phones that can post videos to Facebook in real time. The sensational, salacious and unsettled now compete head on with professional pundits and credentialed reports, their low-res “production values” are plenty sufficient to connect the hundreds of millions of eyes, and brains, they reach quickly, effectively, and essentially cost free.