Wisdom Revisited, Part 3: From Segmented Population to Reality Segments (via the Segmentation of Audience Membership)

If you haven’t read part 1 or part 2 yet, you’ll need to catch up!

IMO, the foundation for this world view is now beginning to take on a farm — such that some people might actually be be able to call “heads or tails” on it. Heads I win, tails you lose — so here comes part 3.

In another recent article (“How Markets are configured by Language“), I described how communities have over time moved continually from being small and localized (i.e., a multitude of diverse populations, segmented this way or that) to becoming larger and more generalized (i.e., a universal online network — the so-called global village). As i have sought to indicate in my previous two installments, a wide array of technological developments related to the storage and retrieval of information have in the meantime created a world in which our “universe of knowledge” appears to have vastly expanded in a relatively short period of time. However: Even if this were indeed the case, we ought not to let ourselves be “blinded by the light” (so to speak ). The universe has not grown significantly in our lifetimes — instead, it is primarily our thinking about the universe that is changing… and perhaps not even so much our thinking as our view (or bias) of it.

Nobody is unbiased. Those who think biases are “old fashioned” and no longer exist are primarily laying bare their own bias of naivet�.

Instead, what technology “has done for us” lately is to make it easier for us to see more perspectives — more different views of the same reality. Previously, reality had been condensed into the front page headlines. Today, there are billions of front pages — each front page having its own perspective, its own point of view. The task before the edicuated user — the user with “online literacy” — is not first of all to select information from the universe of knowledge, but rather to select points of views (perspectives) from the universe of portals to knowledge. Today, the user can choose — and must choose (even if they are ignorant of their choice) — not only his/her own bias, but also the bias of the portals (which are the instruments they use to observe reality). If we were to view the entire universe of perspectives on reality, then we might say that users self-select the reality segments they wish to observe.

Needless to say, segmentation is no longer a matter of localization or demographics in the more traditional sense of such terms. Today, the way a user chooses to participate in communities is more particularized — community has become more peculiar to the whims and sentiments of each individual user … and user communities (for each particular perspective) can be best visualized as individual specks distrubuted across a wide universe of empty space.

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