Climatechange
From Avoid.net
Contents |
The cooling of the media environment and the climate crisis
Flash floods, melting icecaps, accelerated species extinction: these are just a few of the realities we can expect from increased levels of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. Global warming, climate change and ecological collapse are some of the terms used to describe the current crisis facing our planet. As our earth gets hotter, another environment, our media landscape is cooling down. This webpage will analyze the state of our evolving media landscape and examine how it may help us face our current global predicament.
Why is the media environment cooling down ?
Hot and cool media is a distinction made by Marshal McLuhan to connote the level of participation and involvement of the audience in a given media. A hot medium requires little audience participation, while a cool medium demands more of its audience's involvement (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man By Marshall McLuhan pg 25). The coolest mass medium today is the Internet, which enables around one billion of our six of our billion people to access an enormous wealth of content and connect with each other in new ways.
The key differences between this new media paradigm (electronic, internet culture) and that of the old (typographic, print media) is the relationship between the producer and the audience. In the new paradigm, the two roles have become very blurred. This phenomenon is described by Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave as the rise of the prosumer, a hybrid combination of consumer and producer(interview Ken McGee and Alvin Toffler). More recently, the term web 2.0 has come to represent this new level of interaction that is evolving as the commercial internet becomes more social.
The connected audience is no longer satisfied to sit and wait for the show we want to be broadcast on cable TV. We choose the media we consume, when we consume it and whether or not we will post a response, feature it on our blog and profile, or recommend it to our friends. Expensive, industry produced spots now compete neck and neck with home made content. "Every desktop is now a printing press, a broadcasting station, a community or a market place" (Howard Reingold:Way-new collaboration ). People are connecting with strangers from around the globe to impliment projects of enormous scale and quality including the open source search engine mozilla, research cures for cancer with the world community grid or search for aliens with SETI.
SubZero Media : Web 2.0 & The Wiki
One new medium which has been facilitated by this transformation to Web 2 is the wiki, an interactive website platform first developed by Ward Cunningham. Wikis allow for rapid collaboration and organization of knowledge and information. The most popular wiki website, Wikipedia brands itself as a self-organizing, self-correcting, never-finished encyclopedia of the future which aims to provide free access to the sum total of human knowledge (Jimmy Wales @ TED).
Wikis are open systems for information, which can be updated, or edited and in real time by its' users. This level of interaction makes wikis a very interactive and cold medium to use. Wikis form communities of people who work as a group to produce and organize and debate the information they are interested in.
The results created by this media environment, have been dubbed The Wiki Way and is neatly summarized by Sunir Shah as: “a way of working that relies on trust, courage, faith, honesty, integrity, action, reflection, construction, and fun”.
This model of openness and collaboration has proven highly successful: Wikipedia is run almost exclusively by volunteers and has a total of 2 million articles in multiple languages.It receives roughly 1.4 billion page visits monthly, rivaling the New York Times website. Wikipedia has risen to such eminence with one only full time employee (wikipedia talk @ TED )
Embrace the Chaos
"Any open system has the capacity to respond to change and disorder by reorganizing itself at a higher level of organization. Disorder becomes a critical player, an ally that can provoke a system to self-organize into new forms of being ..... chaos is necessary to new creative ordering". (Margaret Wheatley; Leadership and the New Science pg 12)
This new media environment results in the embracing of chaos, the continuous evolution of information instead of a final product, and a space where the audience is allowed and encouraged to in join the action. This chaos is reflected in our global environment, which seems to be growing less and less stable as the compound forces of overpopulation, consumerism and industrialization create increasing stresses upon the biosphere. If media act as extensions of our senses, our collective perception now extends around the globe, connecting humanity through a web of undersea cables and invisible waves. We will need to collaborate on a massive scale to develop new tools, to rapidly re-imagine our way of life in order to survive in this brave new world.
The rapid destabilization of our physical environment and climate is both an environmentalist’s nightmare and the ultimate design problem. However, great minds will not innovate to their highest potential without a great crisis to overcome. What better catalyst for innovation than the rebellion of the very environment that sustains us? The effects of the wikiway upon the media landscape result in a world that is more malleable, more connected, and faster to evolve than ever before, further, it fosters a culture of collaboration and asks us to critically engage with our reality and alter it if it is unsatisfactory. These effects may prove to be exactly what we need to forge the bonds of a healthy, sustainable global civilization.
