Self-Organizing Systems of Selves

There’s an interesting distinction between the media a generation relies on and what it can do without. Older generations can function fine without TV and social media, but can’t function without the internet. All generations can’t survive without live broadcast of important information, which was always available through free radio broadcasts and print. In the early web, the idea that media could be a "pull" phenomenon was liberating--that you could curate your own news, and even make it by "pushing" it into cyberspace without a gatekeeper. It is ironic that people actually want things pushed at them and made easy to masticate and digest. The early web instilled the idea that we would be mindful sentinels of Truth. Web 2.0 circa 2005 (Social Media) instilled the idea that our individual curated Truths would have flocking properties, and so we invented things like Twitter, which uses flocking as a metaphor as if the group consciousness of a flock of starlings would operate in the same way as a flock of server farms. The Net is a self-organizing system like nature, but we control it by what we put into it as opposed to what is naturally supplied by nature. As Rupert Sheldrake said in one of his lectures: "If a computer was self-organizing you'd be able to grow them in computer farms rather than make them in computer factories." Twitter is not a self-organizing system in the purest sense. What is self-organizing are memes, and we invented networks where they could flock. https://youtu.be/SFhsObpja8A?t=1412