Monday, December 6, 2010

THE EVOLUTION OF REVOLUTION

We don't know who invented fire, the alphabet, or agriculture. We do know who invented the printing press, gun powder, radio, television, the polio vaccine and now Facebook. However, with or without authorship, such moments in human history have been appropriately defined as "revolutions."

Revolutions mean everything after is now fundamentally different than everything was before. Which, when you think about it, also describes less heralded events such as the moment you fell in love or the day you buried your parents. Fulcrum points on the teeter-totter of existence from which you now either teeter or totter for the rest of your days.

The young scrappy gang of revolutionaries at Facebook have recently announced their revolution will become one of the most defining in human history. In some ways, it's hard to disagree. If Facebook continues to emerge as a force, and to submerge competing forces, its revolution will be prodigious. For the very first time you and I will be in convenient and continuing contact with anyone anywhere anytime. In ways that forever destroy the understood limits of time and space within which we have grown up.

America's favorite boy genius, 26-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, puts it this way to his half-billion Facebookers: "Communication 2.0 is becoming seamless, informal, immediate, personal, minimal and short." As the recent explosion of Wikileaks makes clear, Communication 2.0 is coming to mean -- for better or for worse -- there are no longer any doors, gates or secrets that can stand very much longer between you and me, between my feelings and your feelings, between my religion and your religion, between my nation and your nation.

In some ways it means we are walking the world virtually naked. Transparency or trouble...? That is the question....! A question we can refuse to answer, but soon even our refusal will be documentable. Accessible. A profile that others can choose to work with or against, massage or manipulate, embrace or destroy.

Like all great revolutions, you're the tail on the tiger. So if nothing else, it's incredibly dangerously exciting...

4 comments:

  1. Facebook is a wonderful medium Jack ... though it cannot surpass 'real' face to face communications. I am now at day 20 wihout the presence of my beloved wife and believe me a 'real' person to reach out to is still paramount in my human DNA and emotional needs. A tiger it may be ... but it is still a fleeting collection of individuals sharing what can only be understod {as I know you too know] by "a lifetime of acquired togetherness" ... I like facebook ... I love my spouse and family in a deeper manner than can be digitized. Something I'm convinced that you also share as a fellow traveller on the 'Information Super-Highway'.

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  2. Oh, yes I do share the same feeling and meaning...another long absence of Lisa, like my Joan, must be a little frightful at this stage in life when this togetherness is indeed paramount ...BTW, you never reported how your 4 month absence from Facebook affected you???

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  3. It was in fact five (5) months ... and I have to say that they were the happiest months of the year ... Though I must qualify that by mentioning that it was "Very Busy" with family & friends CONSTANTLY ... and when they were not around Lisa and I undertook some very major household renovations and miscellaneous other tasks that we both wanted to see get done (She is a fantastic 'Helpmate' and little would move ahead for me without her being at my side ...SO - that is how not being on facebook for five months went ... and we will take a bereak sometime in the new year ... I think it is a "Breather" that allows one to "recompose" ... or am I deluding myself ...

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  4. Good report...I should try it myself.

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