We, as a global organism, are experiencing the greatest rate of change this world has ever seen. Ever since the industrial revolution, we have seen everything from humans taking flight, man landing on the Moon, creation of quantum mechanics, and the invention of the Internet. All this within about a hundred years of time. That amount of extrinsic evolution would have normally taken hundreds, if not thousands of years. The incredible rate of environmental (non-natural) change we are experiencing has a profound affect on how we function as a global and local community, but what are the consequences?

Let’s use basic organisms as an analogy. Any organism, no matter the size or complexity, has to be able to adapt to its environment to survive. Whether it’s climate change, food change, geographic change or anything else, it has to be able to adapt that change into its DNA to guarantee its ability to continue to thrive. That is how moths ended up looking like the bark of a tree and how the Aye-Aye has that narrow middle finger (see this article for images and video). Now, if this change happens too quickly, we will end up wiping out the species. Hence our involvement with the ecosystem and the endangering of many organisms.

The reason for this is quite simple. When reproduction of any organism occurs, you get accidental and random mutations of DNA once in a while. These mutations can create anomalies that strengthen an organism’s ability to survive, or the mutation will die off. When the environment changes, the organisms that carry the DNA that may allow for the change survives reproducing with others that survive as well continuing the species. The organisms that were missing this essential DNA mutation will die off. But, if the environmental change is less than the amount of generations it takes to adapt, it will not allow enough time for the organisms that may have mutated to reproduce and create a viable colony to support its survival. Then the species will die out.

This is why I bring up the speed in which these environmental changes occur. We as humans can only evolve so fast. Take the invention or creation of the spoken word. It took us tens of thousands of years to develop the incredible ability to communicate verbally. But, this is face to face communication that contains thousands of “units” of non-verbal communication. As we speak to someone, we are unconsciously aware of all these units, and they assist us in interpreting what the other is saying. This is all intrinsic and is not necessarily voluntary. But, the technology, like IMing, online chatting or Texting, revolution has stripped away all those essential units, and left us with a cold, dry, string of letters or symbols such as [:)].




These strings of letters that are mostly misspelled and abbreviated have left us with very little to process. We are slowly removing these units of communication from the way we, well, communicate. We start to become unaware of the true intention of the message. The missing units are like food to the brain, and when food (units) become scarce, the organism needs to adapt to survive. The problem with this is we are not left with enough time to allow our minds/DNA to intrinsically adapt to these ‘environmental’ changes. With the rate of change that is now existing, there is no way for our thousand year old communicative brain to adapt to the scarce units to process since all of this is happening within one generation.

So, we are then left in a quandary. We are in the age of efficiency, so we start to prefer texting, chatting, IMing because of its incredible efficiency, but at the cost of losing the essential units. And because of the missing units, we are left with an unknown intention; our fears and insecurities begin to run wild as we regress from real human relationships and physical encounters.

This allows us to never face our demons or fears, and it exacerbates our aloneness. When people were forced to talk to each other in person, there would be times when the other would disagree, and the two of them would have to work it out in a respectful and honorable way or real consequences would ignite. This is where human development and growth comes from. But when people are given the chance to just ignore or hide from any contrarian thought and if a confrontation takes place, there is no accountability for actions made; these people will never be forced to develop and grow. We as a populace will regress from the physical community as we become more entangled in the online version, and as the world becomes smaller, the walls between each other will grow taller.

So what is the answer to this ‘catch 22′? Well, we need to do away with communities that do not have any kind of regulation, and have no accountability for acts of negativity and disrespect (like digg, myspace…). We need to create online networks that simulate real physical networks of physical people and positively reward people for honorable behavior and create consequences for negative behavior (Newsvine). In doing this, we will strengthen and mimic real world scenarios. We need to constantly keep ourselves in check and not allow our fears and insecurities to get the best of us, forever pushing ourselves to engage in discussions of opposing thought, but not allowing ourselves to be negative or disrespectful.

We need to continue to remind ourselves that there is a human being on the receiving end of our message, and that global good will always outweigh any egotistical, shallow reward by being disrespectful, rude or teaching someone a lesson with f*#k off, your stupid, or what a waste of…, etc.

And, by all means, do not allow the art of language to die off to be replaced with “stfu n00b u sukc ih8u gfy”! or WTF. Sorry, but being expressive with the art of language will always translate better than a string of acronyms that are as sterile and generic as “I like long walks on the beach, I listen to all kinds of music, I don’t know, where do you wanna eat?”. In the end, we need to always look ahead and think of all these consequences that might follow with the next release of Whatever Version 2.X.X…