Every Thursday evening we come together. The #momoams team: @vangeest @panman @marcfonteijn @samwarnaars and me. I like those meetings – a lot. They’re personal, on the edge and energetic. Trends, future scenarios and the latest gadgets all are part of the conversation (and we also do some event planning in between too :-)

Last week on our mailinglist @vangeest mailed a link to an article on Edge.org from Frank Schirmacher called The Age of the Informavore.

I watched the video and I’m blown away.

Really. It’s an more than excellent talk about how technology influences people and our society. It may seem like dry stuff, but really after watching this video you might very will think different. (On of the funny things in the video, considering the topic, btw is the sound of new mail coming in every now and then at Schirrmacher’s computer :-)

I have added the video below and added paraphrases of some of my favorite parts of the interview also (I can’t take credit for any of the content, they’re all Frank Schirrmacher’s, just see them as my highlighted parts). But actually, go over to Edge.org and read the full article (including excellent links and more info)! It’s more than worth it. Thanks again to @vangeest for sharing!

• There seems to be an explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them
• When you view attention as food for information, we are now in a food crisis. That’s when dynamics of Darwinian selection kick in. Which ideas survive? Which thinking succeeds and which doesn’t?
• The human is an informavore, it’s eating information. But just as with food it has to decide what take, what not to take, whether something has good or bad calories, whether it’s healthy etcetera
• We are experiencing a cognitive revolution, much of what we are thinking is stored less in the lived life and more in systems linked to knowledge: Facebook, blogs etcetera
• In the 19th century it was talked about that muscles had to adapt to the machines, in the 20th century we see the same question but now with the brain. We face issuess with e.g. multi-tasking.
• There will be major issues with the tools developed, especially predictive search versus free will. Issues about the way we predict and the way we ARE predicted
• Three important 19th century principles return – but in a different way – regarding information and society: Darwinism (who survives in the Net), Communism (question of free), Taylorism (people see themselves not capable anymore of keeping up with the system)
• The realtime nature of the information has #iran already competing with @parishilton. You also already information cascades to influence this not only by humans, but also by bots
• Kafka and Shakespeare in their time translated reality into literature – we need to find people that can do this on the level of software. George Dyson e.g. has done this very well in the article Turings Cathedral about his visit to Google: “Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built.”
• People tend to forget heuristics, e.g. the ability to calculate as machines will do that for us.

Recently I’ve applied for a GroenLinks membership – a Dutch green left-wing political party. Why? Because they asked relevant and very to-the-point questions in parliament about the Buma/Stemra fee for embedding online content (the plan was canceled mostly by the Buma/Stemra quite soon after)

@groenlinks (their official Twitter account) twittered about their questions and I decided (together with my general idea of the party) that was a good reason to sign up. They even retweeted my decision to sign up.

But now I’m having second thoughts.

Why? Let me explain. Most of my involvement with the party is online (I follow their Twitter account and that of some of their politicians). I focus on some of their issues (free standards, green deal, better social structures), rather than the party as a whole. But it’s still a party organisation and that’s a problem.

I signed up online, because of online issues (Buma/Stemra). And what do I get? Paper. Loads of it.

I’ve gotten flyers, brochures, party programs. The lot. And I’ve never asked for any. If would want to read those I would go online and download them. But what’s more: I’m interested in specific topics: online rights, new deal, social structures – what about those?

There’s no personalization. But the paper forms do ask me for a lot of other things: help them campaign, spread flyers etctera. I feel that with signing up I seemed to have gained the status someone-we-can-use-as-free-campaigner.

I know I signed up for your organisation. But what I’m interested is in your people, your specific issues. The issues I can sympathize with. Just like with the Buma/Stemra one.

I’m an online person. I don’t like paper. Others might. I don’t. So, where is your Twitter? Facebook? Online forms? Google Docs? Live stream?

Political parties need VRM – Vendor Relationship Management. It’s not about them pushing all their party issues on to me. It’s knowing who I am and linking their issues to my person. That’s personalization – that’s the new campaigning.

I’m ditching all the papers and I’ll wait for a response that fits my way of working (I’m @mdbraber).