The New Media: My Experience and More

So our next speaker certainly does not need any introduction. He is the man you cornered by his seat. He is the man you cornered in the foyer, and he is the man you cornered outside the bathroom. So please put your hands together for Dr. Peterson.

[Applause]

So I was kind of perplexed about what I was going to say today because I’m not a media expert by any stretch of the imagination. But I was speaking with Jonathan Paggio this morning, because he’s staying in the same Airbnb as my wife and I, and he suggested that I talk to you about my experiences with media over the last year. I thought, well, that’s something I know about.

So it’s always good when you’re talking to people to talk about something that you know about. That’s actually a really good tip for public speaking, right? It’s really true; you have to remember that you should know about three times as much about the topic as you need to talk about the topic. Then you have places you can go, and you know, you can wander around a little bit and be a little spontaneous.

So that’s really useful. But then I also thought that makes sense because nobody knows anything about the situation with regards to the media now, and so we’re all feeling our way. Because the technological transformations are so rapid, and you know they’re going to come one after the other in the next ten years, I don’t think we can even imagine what’s coming down the pipes. We’re all struggling to keep up, and you know, we don’t even know how much of the current state of more radical political polarization is actually a secondary consequence of technological transformations that we don’t understand.

Because I was thinking today about Facebook, about Twitter, and about YouTube, and about the idea that people are in an echo chamber. I’m not really sure that’s the right metaphor. I think we might be in an amplifier rather than an echo chamber. You know, I’ve thought for a long time that when I’m thinking about the effect of the individual, I read something that Solzhenitsyn said at one point, and I think he was citing an ancient Christian theologian who defined the universe as a place whose circumference was nowhere and whose center was everywhere.

I really like that idea. I think it’s actually relatively true from a technical perspective, like from a physical perspective. But Solzhenitsyn pointed out that each of us was to be regarded as a center of the cosmos, and that has the power that’s associated with that.

I’ve thought about that a lot because there’s something about it that’s either obviously true or it’s true enough so that we all act it out when we interact with each other. We treat each other like conscious beings who have a destiny, who have choices, and who make choices that are important and who make choices that can be good or bad, or even good and evil. We all act like that, so we act that out.

I was thinking that you can think of network models in that way. You know, you can think of human beings as like nine billion dots in a row, and there are no connections between the dots. Then you sort of feel like a dust mote in the wind, and who the hell cares what you think anyway? You don’t have any impact on things.

Or you can recognize that you’re at the center of a networked system and that you know a thousand people, or you will in your lifetime, or perhaps more than a thousand people. Then they know a thousand people, so you’re separated by one person from a million and two people from a billion. That’s a much better way to think.

We are seriously networked together, and we’re networked together more now than we ever have been. So one of the things that might mean is that the choices you make are amplified and distributed not only far faster than they ever have been but with far more impact.

You know, one of the things that Carl Jung pointed out was that he had this idea that alchemy is the root of science in some sense. It’s this d...