Cages

Alejandro Jodorowsky said "Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness." The title of this blog is about the limits of large frames of reference (like dinosaurs) giving way to less restrictive, more creative ones, resembling birds. The dino's that are being replaced are institutional structures. Besides the written word, institutions involve meetings and discourse.

Before telecommunications beginning with the telegraph which evolved as bandwidth expanded, wireless replacing cables, digital replacing analog... we had to meet physically in one place. For millennia, we assumed reality is physical. As telecommunications became accessible for all media (beyond voice, to text, images and video) anytime, anywhere, the way we experience reality has changed. We don't have to physically go to meetings to gather and talk anymore.

This possibility should remove the necessity to have only one profession, to be chained to a desk, be physically present to work...effectively dismantling the limits of time and space. Productivity, quality of life and social progress can benefit from the resulting freedom. But like birds born in the paradigm cage of obligatory physical gathering, "virtual" meetings seem anomalous and less real; hence its name.

But the truth is that talking face-to-face does not guarantee effective communication. Walls and time-cards keep people present but do nothing about quality.

The key is HOW the relationship is managed and developed using contracts, collaborative tools, reports, project management, debate, decisions etc. which were always important. This new reality demands real human contact and condemns hiding behind rituals.

There is a lot of criticism about how screen addiction has made people zombie-like. The advice is to discard the screen for real human contact (which is face-to-face). This is only partly correct.

For reality is more than physical but psychological and philosophical, which are abstract and virtual. The screen should not be an obstacle if this is true.