The Life Metaphor

I've been doing a lot of reading, particularly James Gleick's The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, and trying to apply some of the things that flip around on my Kindle to explain the larger issues we're seeing with Social Media and Society. This lead to a rather quick post on DNA Code over on OpenDepth.com that can also be easily applied to Open Content and a patent free society. That post is more about choices that society must make toward innovation and potential innovation in the future. It follows that I started considdring life's evolution itself, about growth of life forms as we know them and many other interesting things that I've studied, read up on or simply had conversations with experts in various fields about.

And it came to me. The Life Metaphor, and how society fits into this pattern. In the context of the Life Metaphor, the species of humanity is a life form in and of itself and the Internet - and Social Media as a subset of the Internet - are akin to the Peripheral Nervous System (PNS). The state of our Central Nervous System  (CNS) is in flux with the new information it can send and receive directly, it's predisposal toward bureaucracy prior to the new PNS, which worked so well without so much ability to communicate, is now being challenged in such a manner that the CNS must now evolve.

Meanwhile, the PNS is letting our collective life form know about infections and other conditions that are working against the collective life form. That's where the issues of social media, rioting and even random violence come into play.

It strikes me as interesting, particularly since there's a period in the development of a human baby when the myelin sheaths - the insulators around the nerves - are still developing and so the electrical impulses cause some random movement.

Armed with a more solid metaphor, I will be tackling the issues I presented in Reflections on Social Media and Society as well as the boiled down version in future posts.