Technology and the 3Vs of ideas – volume, velocity, and vector – are the hardware and software of eras.
The Industrial Age was created by the explosion in the volume of ideas enabled by movable type and powered by steam.
Charmingly, complaints about the volume of ideas are as old as papyrus:
Ecclesiastes 12:12 (“of making books there is no end,” probably from the 4th or 3d century BC). The ancient moralist Seneca complained that “the abundance of books is distraction” in the 1st century AD….1
By 1967 volume wasn’t the only problem. Electricity accelerated the velocity of ideas to light speed and the Information Era emerged.
In The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan wrote:
Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. ‘Time’ has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished. We now live in a global village…a simultaneous happening… Information pours upon us, instantaneously and continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of data classification to the mode of pattern recognition.
Together with public education, the overall effect was an upsurge in information on the vertical vector - curated information passed down from authorities like government and giant media corporations, and mislabelled “mass communication” at the time.
Only the party line telephone was a harbinger of the era to come.
Real mass communication appeared when social media tilted the vector of information 90 degrees to horizontal.
People began complaining about drinking information from a fire hose. But that misses the point. The real change is that the technology that gave us the fire hose also gave us our own adjustable news nozzles.
Horizontal information is both individualized and globalized so it can be distributed widely, unevenly, and unfiltered by accountable authorities and geography. Under true mass communication the power of the individual – whether alone or en masse in a market– waxes and the power of conventional filters like place and authorities – be they political, managerial, or social – wanes.
The gatekeepers don’t matter when the walls are down.
It has always been easier to sell fantasy than explain reality but now that individuals can broadcast and narrow receive, accountable authorities – institutions, political leaders, managers, media, and even brands – have lost their preeminence.
“Information Overload, The Early Years”, Ann Blair, Boston Globe, November 20, 2010. http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/11/28/information_overload_the_early_years/