The company of brilliantly talented artists at SXSW, many of whom (many of the brightest) will be forever hidden from the masses, has spurred a lot of thoughts about collective judgment.
Add more people to street corner, more people will stop. There are ways to take advantage of the power of imitation but the problem is, we are all so bad at seeing and hearing wrong in our own ideas. When everyone is imitating, you can't tap into knowledge anyone has. What's really going on gets blurred in the masses.
New things emerge constantly, reaching for our time and attention. We've gotta take time to pause, observe, absorb, and let things surface by design. Filtering only what 'strikes us' will eventually unveil a mystery that's tailored to our being, and worth its brewing time in milliseconds.
If only society had a suggestion box, a place for all to have equal opportunity for input. Put enough people together, and the errors fall away. So often, it's the people with less 'intelligence', using different charismas, perspectives and new ideas who make the group smarter. What they know is different, observed independently. When the boundaries are expanded, insights from others evolve the way we think, where we go, what we find, and who we become. Moving between these institutional and individual sources of wisdom and inspiration integrates our reliability, weaves together our roadmap, and develops our manifesto.
On a circular mill we attend to the familiar, measuring distance towards original goals, and outdated targets. We're too busy getting things done to strategize and define what could be done. It's as thought it's better to fail at convention than to succeed unconventionally.
I'd rather not solicit opinions, but ask people to forecast success, forgoing so many problems that are simply superficial and contextual. Oh to avoid info overload, because our target is clear, and pass by streams of info, because they do not adhere!
Someone at the Interactive session mentioned that technology isn't introducing new things, it's introducing things with new benefits. I'm no gadget but I'd like to work like that.
