Beyond Mass Media

While the Internet enables individuals to become indistinguishable from a massive organization and cultural institutions of long standing, it’s not a good idea to do that. Actually, the reverse is a better idea -- for a large, impersonal organization, to seem as personal, personable, and as individualized as possible. That is the adaptation that many are missing in the present evolution to better information and communication standards.

The strategy of the past -- to make one seem as impressive, formidable, authoritative and intimidating as possible -- which is the epitome of mass media and mass communications, is not the ultimate of effective and productive media and communication possibilities -- and those that proceed along that path, become totally irrelevant and out of touch, which are the criticisms of mass media that those in it, seem powerless to recognize. Their adaptation was of another era -- in which being impressive, formidable, intimidating and controlling, was the ideal and objective, but the new intellectual and cultural environment favors the quick, skillful and resourceful -- rather than seemingly unlimited resources and the power and authority of venerable institutions.

In a world of bluster, more bluster is not more impressive -- as the absence of it would be -- and distinguish one from the rest. When everyone thinks the objective of the group is to push their way to the head of the class, the only one who does not succumb to that strategy, obviously is the exception, the one who stands out. Meanwhile, doing what everybody else is doing unthinkingly, is the surest road to mediocrity, obscurity and frustration, ensuring one’s extinction, or at least, lack of distinction, while craving it all the more because those objectives grow more elusive.

That is the competitive advantage of misinforming one’s competition -- thinking one is in the know rather than an outsider looking in, thinking he knows. Inevitably in such gamesmanship, there is one who comes along and sees through the fallacy of those efforts, and re-envisions the game so that all those losing efforts are transformed into capital assets for the next level of success -- and thus they go beyond, where there was only self-canceling, mutually destructive efforts before.

By and large, the strategy of mass media, which many individuals also adopted, was to create the co-dependency of the information and communication relationship, disempowering the individual while aggrandizing the nameless, faceless mass media entity. But it was not a trade-off of value for value; it was a one-way street of power flowing from the individual to the organization -- while the revolution of these times, is the ending of the need for that disempowerment.

That is, that the individual, and not the collective, is the supreme power -- of their own lives! That is the remarkable transformation in consciousness in these times -- that others, individually or collectively, are not necessarily more powerful and effective than we can be as individuals. In fact, the individual can be far more powerful and effective because they are not cancelled out by others who may have different purposes and agendas. The purity of intent and purpose, can be actualized without all the extraneous considerations of others to undermine one’s effectiveness -- reinforcing the notion that individuals are powerless and only the collective, mass organization can be powerful.

In such times and circumstances, an individual speaking for themselves, does not defer to any higher authority. That is the meaning and fulfillment of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America.