At some point, someone told their neighbor, “Guess what, the world is round, not flat.”
Here is what didn’t happen: People didn’t say, “Cool, let me write that down,” and then rearrange their lives around this new information. Instead, a lot of people got mad. They called people names. They decided burning people at the stake was a good idea, while others were like, “I knew it all along.”
People debated, shouted and worse until they reached a consensus that the world was, in fact, round.
I read a book over the holiday season that gets into this. “Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today” by Naomi Alderman makes a strong case that society is in a major information transformation epoch akin to when the Gutenberg press was invented, making books and other information more available. When people have more information, they use it to reinterpret what they think they know. And sometimes that leads to the golden age of science, and sometimes it leads to the inquisition (and as “Monty Python” fans know, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition).
We can’t go back. The genie is out of the bottle. People are inundated with information every second of every day. That means it’s peak meaning-making time. The question for all of us is: “How do we support meaning-making and meaning-makers who will help build the future we believe in?”
Because this meaning-making is already happening, if we aren’t smart, we’ll leave it up to meaning-makers who seek to confuse and divide us rather than those who foster hope, progress and freedom for all.
Here are some questions we should consider to help us get there:
- Is more information available to more people a good thing? We have more information in our back pockets than most people have had access to anywhere at any time in history. This can be overwhelming. As a species, we do meaning-making. We can’t turn it off. We are wired to do it. We will use this available information; feel overloaded by the amount of it; and seek out the big question, “What does it all mean?” to tell us what we desperately want to know. People are sense-makers. We create sense from the endless stream — including the information shouting to us from our pockets. This can lead to enlightenment, and it can lead to a rush of bad judgments. We have the ability to choose which one, but citizens must get really good at meaning-making in a rapidly changing world if we want to go the enlightenment route and not the Spanish Inquisition route.
- Who are the meaning-makers, and how are they making meaning? In the past, this group may have included experts (and associations that decided who these experts were); journalists at major networks with significant reach, like Walter Cronkite; gossipmongers like people at the church picnic, a friend at your favorite watering hole or anyone who said, “Have you heard the rumor that the world is round?” And then we made a judgment that we considered valid and might adopt. This was not a perfect system, and it is now an outdated one. Today, meaning-makers might include all those people, plus online influencers, podcasters and other self-appointed “let me tell you what’s up” folks. These are church picnic gossips and barstool sages with unprecedented reach. Social media and search algorithms help them steer us to conclusions about what we should think about, feel and do, and artificial intelligence (AI) agents tell us what they think based on what they think everyone else thinks. Some are motivated to make things up and lie. All of this happens in the blink of an eye. We need to decide how to field meaning-makers who use the reach and scale available to do helpful meaning-making and not burn the world down. Do we need to get more in the field, gaining the trust and credibility to get the job done?
- Who or what are the arbiters of the meaning-makers? With trust at an all-time low for most institutions, what do we need to create so people know when to trust what they are hearing and learning? The Food and Drug Administration has rules so that companies can’t make claims about drugs that aren’t based in evidence. And associations of experts have processes for peer review to boost credibility. Some people are talking about labeling AI content. What else is needed? What isn’t working, lacks trust and credibility, and needs to be replaced? Every epoch invents new things to navigate disorientation and confusion, and this time is no different. What do we need to invent?
- What is the pace of meaning-making? When humans go fast, it doesn’t always go well. When we look back at this epoch, we may decide that “move fast and break things” was one of the dumbest ideas ever. Sorry, Silicon Valley. I have heard the saying: “Move fast and make things,” and that sounds like a better path to me. The point is that those two paths are meaning-making. And which one you ascribe to matters. The prevalent philosophies that guide human behavior, set societal norms and drive decisions have enormous impact. And these can now happen at a pace and scale previously unavailable. Damaging meaning-making can become government policy in a matter of weeks (insert DOGE joke here). Meaning-making that keeps us honest, like citizen videos and on-the-scene accounts of the recent U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement shooting of a U.S. citizen in Minnesota, can disrupt corrupt meaning-making. But we have to make it happen.
- What direction is the meaning-making going, and is that good or problematic? When meaning-making is encouraging us to humanize people, value nature and the planet, and reduce inequality, we want to give that all the air we can so it can become the social consensus we need to make progress. When it does the opposite, we need to disrupt it and redirect it before warehousing people, greenlighting corruption at massive scale and wrecking the environment become “conventional wisdom.”
- How can we decide whom to listen to and listen well? In the end, it isn’t just meaning-makers we need to focus on but the everyday people who listen to them. There have always been misinformed mobs. There have always been those sowing discontent and disinformation. And people have managed to come around to important consensus — like that Earth is round. What literacy efforts need to ramp up to make this the case again?
These are the questions to wrestle with. To help explore all of this, Spitfire has teamed up with Trabian Shorters and BMe Community to gather meaning-makers from different perches, from mainstream journalists to influencers to tech founders to faith leaders to cultural zeitgeists and more. We are going to consider what it means to navigate an information epoch well and will share what we are discovering. We welcome people to share resources, experts, fellow travelers and ideas by emailing me here.
All of us are in the middle of this epoch. We have time to get it mostly right. But we have to remember we control this. We are creating this information and making it available. Let’s spend as much time as we can making sense of it so that information leads to common sense and not nonsense.
Want to dive deeper into meaning-making? Check out my recent meaning-making conversation with the Eric Brown of “Let’s Hear It.” In this episode, we discuss the once-in-a-generation opportunity we’re in to build shared understanding — and what that means for how nonprofits, foundations and changemakers engage communities and create change.