QUARTZ & THE FUTURE OF FACT

Last night, at an event organized by Quartz, Roger McNamee and Katherine Maher inspired a group of journalists, intellectuals, and changemakers to consider the present and future of journalism, social media, and “the future of fact”. Some of my thoughts on the matter, from a “metta-perspective”.

ON FACTS, JOURNALISM, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND MEDIATECH Facts can and will always be distorted by those who want power and wish to control others | Facts will always be presented far more clearly and honestly by those who love the truth. | Journalists, social media, and technology in media is vastly more important than ever before. | Good journalism is key to transforming social media into a vehicle for good in the world. | Ethics & and broad & deep values matter more than ever before in all domains — especially in journalism and technology. | We must all, across all domains and walks of life, urgently put the right frameworks in place.

ON THE CURRENT STATE OF TECHNOLOGY Every action creates a reaction: The behavior of certain media platforms is waking us all up. | Some platforms need to really improve if we want peace, democracy, and goodness to prevail. | We collectively need to build better digital platforms than those in place today. | We must rapidly evolver our change, organizational, economic, and political models ASAP. | Wikipedia & Wikimedia provide many key lessons and serve as a guiding star.

ON THE FUTURE OF FACT (peak preview): We ain’t seen nothing yet! Augmented, Mixed & Virtual Reality will really change the game… | The medium is the message — and the message can be very nasty if we let our guard down. | If you don’t know what I am talking about, time to see (or revisit) the movie “The Matrix”. | Blockchain may or may not be huge — but is it not distracting us from the real deal — AMV/R?

WEB4.0 & JOURNALISM 4.0 We are in the very early days of yet another brave new phase in the digital revolution, possibly the biggest one yet, the one for which all others have been mere groundwork. | MediaTech, and especially Social Media, are laying the foundations for a new global order. What we do with infotech, social media, content, data, data mining, is no small deal.| Innovation without ethics will lead to pain, death, and destruction — this is not a trivial issue.

ON INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION, JOURNALISM, EDUCATION & REALITY GENERATION: We are at a point in history where, more we must urgently understand, more than ever before how we as human beings actually create and co-create reality — and the role of data, information, content, and knowledge creation, consumption, and distribution in this process. High quality investments in high quality education, academia, and journalism are absolutely essential if we are to successfully navigate the near term future.

CONCLUSIONS, NEXT STEPS The power that digital technologies, media platforms (and the underlying mediatech), and social networks give to people who wish to reffirm and improve myriad aspects of our world — as well as those who wish to lie, manupulate, distort, and destroy — is increasing rapidly. | Well used, ICTs can increase our humanity — enabling truth, peace, justice, kindness, life, and all that is true and good in the world, to prevail. As with everything under the sun, or so it seems, so much is ultimately about our individual & collective choices. | Those who care for all that is safe, sane, good, true, and just must react rapidly & decisively — what are we each doing for a better, saner, safer (digital) reality / world? ON INFORMATION, COMMUNICATION, JOURNALISM, EDUCATION & REALITY GENERATION: We are at a point in history where, more we must urgently understand, more than ever before how we as human beings actually create and co-create reality — and the role of data, information, content, and knowledge creation, consumption, and distribution in this process. High quality investments in high quality education, academia, and journalism are absolutely essential if we are to successfully navigate the near term future.

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Washington D.C. 27 April, 2018