Global Human Eco-systems and Information Ecology

The challenge of future development of human systems is forging a new global human meta-system that is ecologically efficient and efficacious in the structure of the long run and the large. The point is, we can afford to leave natural systems alone. They can take care of themselves. We cannot afford to leave our own human systems alone, because we obviously don't know how or are ultimately incapable of taking care of ourselves. 

Paying greater attention to our own ecology, and our sense of human ecology, is something we can all afford to do, for many reasons that may appear on the surface unrelated but in the larger sense all interconnect to a common problem and solution set. 

It is consonant with the Information revolution that we should be "doing more with less" rather than "doing less with more." Of course, with limited fossil-fuel reserves, oil-dependency and rising oil-prices, "doing more with less" becomes an impossibility.

Let us understand what is possible and what is at stake in this process. I recently submitted an article to an International journal--normal submission required express post, double hard-copy, to Europe. This would have been expensive and time consuming.  Fortunately the editors, in both Europe and the land down under, where cool enough to accept postings via the Internet. How much was saved in the process? 

Junk mail is a thing of the past--Spam is the tidal wave of the future. The suggestion of this is that the Internet and the Internet economy is fostering a new form of global human ecology, and new possibilities for human adaptation that are ecologically revolutionary. We might call this process "cybernetic greening" or digital environmentalism.

The outcomes in this regard are entirely debatable of course. If transportation should come to match communication, and the requirements of a fast-paced, globally mobile human population are to be met and matched to the possibilities of the Internet, then we had better come up with better and greener energy solutions that we have come to depend upon. Otherwise, I think, our global ecology will be fore-doomed to a kind of Malthusian disaster.

The alternative, then, instead of people going to the global theater, is bringing the global theater home so that the most transportation the individual should need, hypothetically, to worry about, is the walk in a neighborhood woods or a bicycle ride to the local cyber-cafe, in between running their prospering home-based business and taking virtual vacations.

The other side of the coin of Buddhist economics, in doing more with less, is really just doing with less overall. We can say in the manner of a Zen koan: Less is More. This is consonant with the digital information revolution in which more information is packed into smaller and smaller spaces.

I think we have yet to fully explore the possibilities opened up for a global information ecology--surely it is a kind of "ecology of mind" that Gregory Bateson alluded to in his classic works in anthropology.

The Media Construction of Everyday Reality

In teaching a senior level Journalism course at a teacher's university in China, I based my instruction upon a functional definition of the media from the perspective of its role in the social construction of everyday reality. I have been of the opinion, and remain of the opinion, that communications media in general, and mass news media especially, serves an important function in the horizontal transmission, integration, organization, mobilization and reform of human systems, especially in modern state-organized contexts. This function is in part super-organic and can be seen in a cybernetic manner connecting to human behavior and worldview. Media operates upon several levels in influencing and shaping both worldview and cultural and psychological patterning of human behavioral response.

The function of the media occurs at both levels in the construction of human reality, in terms of the objectification of reality, by the reporting of "factual" details and information, and the subjectification of reality, by the persuasive use of language and information to foster and reinforce subjective states, feelings and attitudes that are desired or considered appropriate to an occasion.

We may even speak of a kind of "media dependency" of people, to regularly receive updates, to keep their own internal maps adjusted to a larger map of the world, a world that is beyond their actual lived and everyday experiences. This form of dependency I think can reach what must be called neurotic states, to say the least, and may be especially inviting to people who are predisposed for one reason or another to this form of dependency. It is noticed during stressful times, for instance during the First Gulf War, when there was a national level crises, as for instance the 9/11 event, or the flooding in China in 1998, when the media played a critical role both in fostering and precipitating what can be called "hysterical" response patterns, on one hand, and on the other hand of providing a constructive channel and mode of expression for more constructive response and "rehabilitation." 

When one traverses cultures and national boundaries, the relativities of the media, and the analogies and similarities of pattern between different media, becomes more apparent. The degree to which the media is used and depended upon, by the government, and by corporations and other institutional entities, to manipulate and manage worldview as well as human behavioral response, is remarkable. Separate worldviews can be fostered and maintained indefinitely by different nations primarily by means of controlling and managing communications media in a consistent manner. Even values and worldviews can be thus manipulated, constructed and limited in deliberate ways. The media has become in fact the primary source of the transmission of information today, and is even effectively outdoing formal educational systems in the amount, quality, breadth, variety and effect of the information that is being transmitted.

One should not underestimate the importance of television and the movie industry, for instance, in the fostering and escalation of social violence, as people not only model and emulate stars as role models, but are more directly and subliminally influenced by graphic displays of repeated violence such that their threshold for the tolerance and acceptance of such violence is elevated and culturally "normalized." Social psychologists long ago recognized the strong positive correlation between media violence on one hand and the increased prevalence of actual social violence, especially among certain social groups.

But in our brief survey, we do not have to stop there. National sporting events are similar forums that have similar kinds of mass effects, as do certain anti-structural musical concerts or assemblies. Hitler was said to be a master at crowd manipulation and speech giving that resulted in the mass mesmerization of the German audience.

In modern reality, in state systems, communications media figures critically in the social construction of everyday life. If people were blocked off from the media for only a short period of time, there would soon be chaos and pandemonium as a consequence. Increasingly, we can expect that the Internet and digital information would become increasingly a central part in this process. It is beginning to have this effect as more and more people are turn to the web first and last to get the low-down on recent events in the world.

I find large forums for search, like Google, and e-marketing frameworks like E-bay and Amazon.com, but I have yet to see a site that becomes a major media player in the sense that we can ascribe to movies and to television overall.