How Is Our Era Unique?
I often find myself arguing that for all the change we’re seeing in the world at the moment, most of it is really just incremental. Communication speed, for instance, has been increasing at a pretty rapid clip for awhile now and the rise of self-publishing of the last five years is an extension of the camcorder (YouTube is the internet’s America’s Funniest Home Videos).
Anyway, over at Overcoming Bias, economist Robin Hanson outlines three changes he finds significant enough to dub “unique”: “We are entering an era where most anyone can quickly talk to most anyone else who can talk” (he talks about not just the spread of English but also translation tools), we don’t have contact with “strange cultures” (“Our distant ancestors heard rumors from travelers about distant strange cultures.”) and how rich we are (“each thinking-talking person having a median income so far above his or her subsistence level”).
Whether or not you accept Hanson’s three examples or not, it’s an interesting thought exercise. What would you add?
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This is a great topic. I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit as well. I’d argue, like you, that we’re not seeing disruptive product/service innovation on the scale we’d like to think. Instead, perhaps we’re seeing the beginning of innovation at higher orders with management/business models. There aren’t too many examples of that either but there are some glimmers that are decidedly non-Jack Welchian.
This AM, I was blogging about something similar (www.hellodelight.com): I think a lot of the craze about mass collaboration is being undertaken without fully considering the downsize implications. I equated some of it with financial models, which isn’t totally fair, but it’s a perspective. The point is that it’s easy to be led by beauty and eloquence in spite of an absence of facts.
Perhaps, that’s the unique aspect of our era. I wrote about that recently too when I thought about reading “books about other books”. It’s a really distorted, and potentially damning, way to learn things.
Maybe our intellectual polygamy is new?
re Matt’s thoughts: “intellectual polygamy” is a really interesting construct. Historians would certainly support the ‘primary source’ approach to learning, but is it really practical, or even optimal, in this time of exponential growth in the availability of information? Perhaps more important, wouldn’t ‘intellectual monogamy’ limit the possibilities of associative learning? Sometimes things just click when you see or hear someone else’s take on a subject, and sometimes the tangential learning — the review of information surrounding a topic that may or may not be directly related — really enriches understanding by building bridges between seemingly disparate areas of knowledge. As a student of educational systems, I think we may be on the cusp of less didactic teaching and more widespread collaborative learning. Would that qualify as unique to our era? Probably, as Noah suggested, only in scope. When you think about it, the concept of shared learning predated written communication. Still, I find the phrase ‘intellectual polygamy’ really engaging … I just think it’s a good thing.