Wednesday 22 February 2017

Together in our individuality.


I spend more of my time with creative types these days. There is something about them that makes them all identifiable as creatives. In trying to express their individuality they all look the same.

It is true for much of their output too. Though their work may be wearing cheeky coloured socks, the uniform is the same.

If this is the result of thinking outside of the box then perhaps returning inside the box would be more outside it. Their world more a Klein bottle than the free universe they perceive it to be.

It’s tribal clothing. Tribal clothing is spawned from the need to at once be both different (from other tribes) and yet the same (as the tribe).

Mr McKechnie dressed for the part. 
Architects - black round neck jumpers and Saabs, but these days it's Audi TTs. Apple adopted the architect garb for its masters as architecture is perceived to be where art meets science, the image that Apple has successfully adopted. I'm not sure if that is true but in today’s back fitting narrative world I’ll create it as a retrotruth.

Retrotruth is a term I predict will appear as the next derivative of the alternative facts. Once alt-facts have been established they can be back engineered, by the application of Determinism, to derive truths in the past that would otherwise never have been.

I was thinking about going on to talk about financial market specifics but creatives are briefed to give clear messages to influence the behaviour of the recipient. To this point, the messages have to be short and to the point. No distractions. This is why adverts tend to rely on images rather than copy. It is rare to see a full page advert that is predominantly text.

But there is a stronger driver in the desire to keep the message brief. Extra content not only clouds the message but can be the source of disagreement that alienates the reader. A single part of a published work can undermine the faith that the reader has in the whole.

The greater the number of ideas in a piece the more likely the reader will be alienated and the less likely they are to carry the message on. Heads or tails, where a 'tails' switches off the audience. A stream of flips is more likely to have a tail in it than a single flip. Stick to single flips.

The shorter the message the more likely it is to be broadcast by others, so the sound bite is born and Twitter booms.

Though an individual is built from many ideas and beliefs, sending ideas out one by one reduces the chance that the ideas pollute each other. The ideas are processed by the recipient in parallel rather than in series.

An author can produce two tweets. A tweet and an anti-tweet. Together they should combine to cancel each other out, just as virtual particles do in the world of physics. But separate them and they can live their own lives in their own tweetospheres, gaining the author followers from both universes.

From a primordial information soup of disparate amino acid statements, we build our own creatures of reality. Genes from different pools reassembled by us for our own bespoke purpose. Yet many of the genes are faulty, the basic news is corrupt or fake as there is no one to screen them. Building our vision of reality from these twisted facts we run the risk of creating Frankensteins of reality.

So it now lies to us to learn and question the very building blocks of our knowledge. If nothing else, the modern information revolution and the corruption of facts is driving us to learn more about the world in order to understand it. We can no longer rely on others.

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