Our digital technology has directly contributed to the collapse of our shared, consensual reality. Technology is doing its job when it disrupts the reality we experience. We fail to do ours when we don't adapt to the disruption or, worse, choose to ignore it.
To be fair adaptation and change demand actions that are energetically expensive and therefore hard to implement, particularly when we’re focused on seemingly more urgent tasks so ignoring things does seem easier. But I am getting head of myself here. We need to start with a definition of the problem in order to arrive at an acceptable solution and for that to happen we need to understand what it is we are actually seeing and why.
Technology Disrupts
By definition, technology is the amplification of human capabilities through innovations and inventions that make the tasks we, humans, engage in, easier. When this happens the ‘before’ changes long before the ‘after’ arrives. The spinning jenny is the perfect example here because it ushered the Industrial Revolution and transitioned western civilization and, by direct association, the global economy into more stable and efficient manufacturing processes. In short, it disrupted the status quo. Technology always does that and when it does, other things change with it because the interconnected, underlying reality that determines cause-and-effect, changes with it.
Effects and Consequences
I’ve written before on how innovation and technology are disruptive and what we can do, at a corporate level, to deal with them. I’ve also spoken about disruption in search and marketing and how to respond.
And I have even written about an inevitable, but arguably, unforeseen consequence of connectivity and speed in communication, which is context collapse and the way that changes marketing in ways that we didn’t think it would have to change.
Even as far back as 2017 I wrote about the fragmentation of search and what that meant for marketers.
All of these things presaged the current challenge we face at virtually every level of human activity. The social, political, business and personal fields are intertwined and overlap and all of them, at once, to varying degrees are experiencing what I will kindly call a collapse of consensual reality.
Everything is Fragmented
We should, of course, have seen this coming. Neuroscience shows that our brain does not record the world like a camera, but actively builds our personal reality from internal guesses, memories, and sensory signals. The perspective you experience, in other words, is unique to you because it is filtered through your own lived experience. Your brain uses that experience (and its unique bioengineered footprint in the way the substrate of your body and brain have been built as a result of it) to filter sensory input, create mental models and arrive at interpretations which then help you navigate the world you inhabit.
Consider how, to use a small and obvious example, the “first page of Google” is now different for everyone depending on device location, country they live in, device language settings, search history, browsing history, digital habits and collective, localized, search query data. I haven’t even, here, scratched the surface of signals that are used to present to each one of us a different slice of the digital reality that exists right in front of us.
This hyper-personalization of technology has led to a different, direct experience of perceived reality consumed through digital gossip, rumors, personal feeds, news streams and online communities for every person on the planet that owns a connected device.
We are Each Alone, Together
Faced with the ability to untether ourselves from the traditional gatekeepers of information like newspapers that used to give us ‘news’ that was at least 24-hours old, and TV news programs that gave us all the news fit to contain in a 30-minute long pre-watershed segment of time, we all naturally chose to each go our own way the moment we could.
Nothing wrong with that. Freedom is a double-edged sword and when we are untethered from the shared values, information, expectations, norms and connections that made us feel part of society (which comes with a whole set of restrictions and normative standards), we are then ‘free’ to make-up the world we want (or expect) to see.
The immediate risk of this behavior is that we each retreat into our respective information bubbles and from there, like mindless simians, start throwing feces at each other (which we are kinda experiencing at the moment in some parts of the web).
The longer-term risk is that this turns marketing into a personalized untruth aimed at meeting the specific reality underpinning each information bubble. Transforms search into a set of ‘fluid’ facts and morphs our digital behavior into a set of masks we inhabit depending on the platform we happen to find ourselves on.
In other words, we all start lying to each group we target secure in the belief that cross-sharing of information that might prevent this from happening isn’t going to take place, as long as are busy hating each other for being different from each other.
Solving for Consensual Reality Collapse
Obviously none of this is tenable if we want a future. Lies, untruths, half-truths, and hateful behavior, undermine the collective as well as the individual decision-making process. And, bad decisions never lead to good outcomes.
Consensual reality is created out of a shared set of beliefs, cultural norms, and assumptions that a group of people generally agrees upon to be true or real. It contains abstract notions like ‘injustice’ and ‘equality’ that we agree to treat as real and then agree to constrain their meaning until they more or less mean the same to the majority of the members in the group.
When perception creates a different reality for each of us and when we all have the potential to find a group to belong to that more-or-less shares that reality with us, it appears impossible to find any ground that is common enough to create the consensual reality of the past across social, political or ethnic divides.
I say it “appears” impossible because it clearly is not. Consensual reality and shared reality may be two definitions that are often used interchangeably but they’re not the same thing.
Consensual reality is a construct and so are justice and morality, for that matter. And as I recently, in a LinkedIn post explained, the way around that is to make justice and morality practical requirements for stability rather than “nice to have” social requirements that appeal to our sense of self. Similarly there is also a way to agree on a consensual reality that transcends ideological, political or ethnic divisions by using the shared reality of our physical presence as a springboard.
Shared reality is fundamental. Our psychological need for meaning, and acknowledgement and our physical need for safety and security is the same for every human being. Were we to start with that we can then reach the common ground that allows us to see each other again and work towards goals that unite us despite the fragmentation we experience across every facet of our world.
The formula for achieving it is so simple that it applies equally to marketing, search, politics and your personal life.
- Address real problems
- Offer real solutions
- Acknowledge every difficulty
- Explain every benefit
That’s it.