Cut Through the Bullsh*t in Your Feed and Keep Things In Context.
How to navigate our tech-saturated existence by using your SHAPE Map and CARE Compass.
. . . in Utopia, where every person has a right to everything, they all know that if care is taken to keep the public stores full, no private person can want anything . . .
— Thomas More, Utopia
Summary
Here's the short version for those of you with little time or short attention spans. ;)
Problem:
Humans feel more isolated, anxious, and deceived today than ever before with high digital media interactions, despite having more access to opportunities (Igor, 2014). We are bombarded with extremely high volumes of less reliable content, and our paleo-lithic brains struggle to keep things accurate (Wilding, et. el., 2018). More of the 188 cognitive biases are engaged at an unprecedented rate in history from digital engagement, making it difficult to keep objective truths in context and build a rounded, rational perspective of our environment and its condition (Pennycook & Rand, 2021).
Having a clear understanding of the context at various scales about a topic contributes to a more rounded perspective of the world around us, making us less susceptible to misinformation, false statements, and propaganda. However, it is near impossible to gain enough context if we are not equipped to navigate the complexity of systems that now touch our everyday lives.
Proposal:
Examining knowledge in context at various scales and having a method to determine the value of what comes across my digital feed has become critical and increasingly difficult to help keep things in perspective.
Ripple Detection is a two-part framework comprising the mental models of the SHAPE Map (Spheres of Human Activity, Proximity, and Engagement) and the CARE Compass (Complete, Aligned, Reputable, Ethical).
The SHAPE Map is a cognitive framework that allows us to understand the context surrounding information by extrapolating beyond what is directly presented. It encompasses seven concentric sphere domains: Self, Society, Civilization, Humanity, Earth, the Universe, and Existence. Each event, topic, or idea creates ripples of varying magnitude that extend across these domains, often undetected or disconnected.
The CARE Compass is a method to examine a source and its content to determine its value by asking if this is the Complete story, does it Align with what I know to be objectively true, if it is a Reputable source, and if the source is acting Ethically.
By regularly detecting and examining how systems and events intersect, impacting one another, each of us can maintain a grounded perspective of our hypercomplex world. This understanding empowers us to make more informed decisions about our interactions, beliefs, and overall conduct, giving us a better chance at uniting toward a more positive, resilient, and humane future.
Intro
Digital product developement is incentivized to address the pain points and benefits of the individual “user.” However, it has a larger impact across populations of indivuals which is often neglected.
In digital product development, we often design for the individual. A persona, or a small set of personas, that represents the ideal individual(s) with a problem we can solve. We think a lot about the individual user of our product and develop toward the maximum benefit for that individual (and the business). But how often do we think about society using our products?
What about its impact on civilization, humanity, or the Earth? Does it have the power to impact our perception of the universe or how we perceive existence itself? What role does our digital feed play in our interpretation of everything now that it is ubiquitous, messy, and so prevalent in our daily activities? Why do I have a complicated relationship with my most beloved technology?
These thought exercises have led me down many rabbit holes of investigation, conversation, and contemplation, and I have come to wonder about something even deeper and more disturbing. How do I know that I know something?
Furthermore, how far out do I need to know about something and its implications to gain a meaningful perspective on that thing? My investigation to unpack these questions begins with a couple of issues I see with global digital content consumption today that are not helping us as a species.
The Problem with Your Digital Feed & Why you should care
The world is getting more difficult to navigate. Journalism, the act of bringing people meaningful stories about current events, is disintegrating into a widely distributed field of contributors to your daily feed, and not all content can be trusted.
The Technosapien Condition
First, we’ve evolved the human condition into what I’m calling the techno-sapien condition. Our lives have moved beyond our brains’ capability, or possibly even its desire, to fully process the massive volumes of information we are bombarded with daily, as discussed in “How the online world is affecting the human brain.” Technological advances and the advent of modern digital products largely impact our daily onslaught of news, content, suggestion, persuasion, and propaganda. Our always-on culture triggers a chain reaction of cognitive biases pitting us against each other and slowly overwhelming our ability to comprehend the entirety of things we regularly interact with fully. I think of these conditions as my ripple and the system of ripples that impede on it.
Second, the content we consume is less reliable, more widely spread, and consumed at an unprecedented rate creating a problem at scale across our species (Pennycook & Rand, 2021). At a planetary scale of over 5 billion people online, the repercussions of misinformation and lack of context are widespread, near-immediate, and amplify our current behavioral epidemics like hate speech, crippling anxiety, and loneliness. Without clarity of direction, intent, and benefit, we struggle to unite as people. These are like ripples without care.
Developing a sense of place used to occur more within local physical communities. Still, the world beyond our neighborhood is taking over and is starting to decouple our local relationships through rage about our differences. We can all agree that the last decade or two more events feel closer to anarchy than a utopia. Likewise, the communities we now find ourselves in are malleable and can be redefined through echo chambers reinforcing a particular narrative (Brown, et. el., 2022). In some cases, we can find enough people who agree with us that traditional thinking reinforces our beliefs through a strong confirmation bias. A dangerous scenario of a singular self-reinforced ripple with intentional blindness to any other ripples that challenge it.
Lastly, the globalization of our everyday lives has developed into larger, hypercomplex systems that I, as an individual, am more dependent on for daily participation in modern society and less able to navigate well. Meaning I have more access but less autonomy (Benedikter, 2015). Navigating large hypercomplex systems requires understanding complexity in terms of interoperability because interoperable systems of globalization impact your daily life. It refers to the intricacy, interconnectedness, and non-linear dynamics that arise from multiple components, relationships, and interactions within a system or phenomenon. — The nearly undefinable landscape of information with intersections of large and small ripples as they cross into each other, defining the shape of the world in our minds.
Now, we all must know how to decipher complexity
It’s not easy, taught enough, nor is it natural for everyday people to know how to unpack large, highly complex things. However, understanding complexity is essential for comprehending the behavior and functioning of complex systems in various domains, like the events or posts in our digital feed.
Furthermore, how can I know that I know something when I’m slowly given bits and pieces of a highly complex system or phenomenon over time and unable to piece it together well? Worse, what if the picture I piece together is nothing close to the objectively true picture those pieces are supposed to form?
These things keep me up at night, so I’ve been contemplating how I might know when the whole story isn’t being told and how I might put things into context with my own research. I’m digging into this because I believe we need new mental tools to navigate our tech-infused world. As AI ramps up, it will catalyze our current techno-sapien condition. I find it even more important to start unpacking what new mental tools might be effective in building our resilience and retaining our humanity.
The Proposition
The map and compass help us navigate our physical world. Either one is useful, but together they collaborate to help you navigate the environment with clarity and precision. We need something similar for interoperable systems we now interact with daily.
Find your map and compass
Have you ever played the video game, Zelda? I’m a huge Zelda fan. It’s an adventure game where you, as the main character, Link, venture across the kingdom of Hyrule, battling monsters and bosses throughout different lands and dungeons. Inside each dungeon are tools to help Link with his adventures. Two of those are a MAP and a COMPASS. If you have one, you can see the dungeon's layout or the direction Link is going; valuable but not revelationary. However, if you have both, you gain clarity about what rooms are available even to enter and how to get to them, helping defeat increasingly harder bosses!
Along this journey of sense-making, it quickly became evident that I needed a map to understand the digital landscape of various domains and scales of context around topics and a compass as a way to read this map and help me navigate it better. I couldn’t find a comprehensive model, so I created one.
Introducing Ripple Detection — a two-part framework comprising mental models of the SHAPE Map and CARE Compass.
Equipped with Ripple Detection, I can build a comprehensive SHAPE Map (Spheres of Human Activity, Proximity, and Engagement) of our world across 7 distinct spheres of human interaction that act like a coordinate map of everything. The spheres are domains human activity, proximity, and engagement that begin with the Self at the center and concentrically expand outward across thresholds of Society, Civilization, Humanity, Earth, the Universe, and Existence as a whole.
Our brains already do this but struggle to articulate very large or very complex things. The closer things are to our personal experiences within Self, the more intimate we are with their details and how to relate to them. The further out you go, like Earth scale issues of climate or biological ecosystems, the less intimate we are with how those systems work, making it difficult to know how they may relate to our personal lives or how I affect them.
The CARE Compass (Complete, Aligned, Reputable, Ethical) helps me examine the content in my feed and translate its value across these spheres, so I know how to care about it as a source (see what I did there ;). It poses four cardinal questions about what you’re consuming.
- Is this the Complete story?
- Does it Align with what I know is objectively true?
- Is it a Reputable source with a history and values I can trust?
- Does the author or narrator present things Ethically?
Asking these questions to yourself about any information you are considering for your wealth of knowledge about the world will help guardrail against misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda.
With these tools, I aim to simplify how the everyday person can understand the hypercomplex, specifically to give the hyperobjects and complex systems of our hyper-connected modern world a simplified form easier for people to comprehend.
Together, the SHAPE Map and CARE Compass are collaborative tools supporting the exercise of Ripple Detection, which is the act of detecting the intersection, impact, and influence of an event, idea, or headline on the various systems around you. It equips you to cut through the bullsh*t in your feed, keep things in context, and more clearly know what to care about and how much to care about it. So how does it work?
Ripple Detection in Practice
Who, When, Why, What, and How exist to help communicate experiences. Any one alone is valuable, but only when they act together do they complete the whole story. We can apply similar logic to our SHAPE map of the world around us.
SHAPE everything across Seven Domains
A SHAPE Map is a mental model that organizes your understanding of entire systems related to you and each other. It’s a go-to framework to help trace how one event, idea, or headline impacts the system of things around you. Putting it to work is the act of gathering information at various scales as it comes across your digital feed to more easily understand complex systems & their dimensions.
It’s a bit like how good infographics take highly complex systems and visualize the most important parts and how they relate to each to describe how the system works. Similar to how storytelling leverages interrogation pronouns of why, who, what, where, when, and how, Ripple Detection proposes a set of interrogation nouns in the 7 sphere domains that define our hypercomplex interactive systems to tell us more of the story of everything.
The 7 shape domains (Self, Society, Civilization, Humanity, Earth, the Universe, and Existence) encompass the majority of human activity, proximity, and engagement. Each domain is a complex interoperable system that affects us more with each new digital product or technological advancement.
The easiest example is the Self since it is the internal part of each of us and the closest proximity of events as it is our personal experiences. We know and trust what we experienced ourselves, even with cognitive biases. As a domain of interaction, it deals with psychological and individual behaviors. Self-help books, health & fitness, mental health, faith, behavior, etc., are complex systems operating within this domain.
The closer things are to us, the simpler it is for us to know what they are and where things belong, so it's easy for me to know their value to me. The further out, the more difficult it is to know how a thing relates to me or me to it.
Our communities are SHAPE-shifting
As we interact across all domains, we develop relationships with things inside each sphere that, in turn, create our sense of community. It might resemble an amorphous blob if we visualize pieces within concentric spheres and wrap only those pieces that pertain to my community. Maybe that’s an exercise for a later time.
The critical thing here is that our communities are undergoing a forced evolution causing widespread interruptions to modern living. The conditions of our community are shifting dramatically away from in-person spatially defined parameters (limited & hardened) to ever-expanding digital parameters (unlimited & malleable), challenging our perceptions & ideals of what we value most, overwhelming our cognitive capacity.
Social products and other media are attempting to bring you closer to your neighbors and the world. Still, if we do not take CARE of the content we consume, we can more easily believe false things to be true, leading entire groups of people into very dangerous territory. By filling in missing information to fill out the fuller SHAPE of our world, we can track the ripple effect individual events have across these domains and start to visualize a fuller, more objective picture of the environment around a particular topic and how it relates to me and other systems.
To address these challenges, developing new mental tools that allow us to understand and navigate our tech-infused world is crucial to our well-being and potentially critical to our future resilience. Ripple Detection offers a promising framework for considering the interconnectedness and impact of events on broader interdependent systems and how that ties back to the individual. By expanding our perspective beyond the individual and considering the ripple effects across various domains, from the Self to the Universe, we can gain valuable insights, make more informed decisions, and uncover greater value to offer others.
Final Thoughts
As we evolve and expand our tools, so too should we evolve and expand our minds.
The current focus on designing digital products for the individual user tends to cause us to overlook our creations' broader societal and global impacts. The techno-sapien condition we find ourselves in, with an overwhelming influx of information and reliance on digital content, has strained our cognitive abilities and perpetuated behavioral epidemics such as hate speech, anxiety, and loneliness. The globalization of our lives has introduced hypercomplex systems that we are increasingly dependent on but struggle to navigate effectively.
As AI continues to advance, it becomes even more imperative to cultivate these mental tools. AI technologies will further amplify our techno-sapien condition, making it vital to understand the implications and context of the information we encounter. By embracing Ripple Detection and its emphasis on context and scale, individuals can strive for a more comprehensive understanding of the complex systems we engage with today and evolve alongside tomorrow. Find your SHAPE Map, and use your CARE compass.
To my technology colleagues, in the ever-evolving landscape of digital products, expanding our focus from individual-centric design to a broader, holistic approach that considers societal, global, and existential implications is essential for developing sustainable and resilient solutions. Embracing this broader perspective can facilitate the creation of digital products that truly serve the needs of individuals while also promoting the well-being of society, civilization, and humanity as a whole.
I will be writing more on the inner workings within each of these domains and pulling on the thread of how we can know that we know something, expounding on the techno-sapien condition, and examining the implications of technology on people and places in future articles. Please let me know if you found this useful or interesting, and follow me for similar conversations.
Thank you for your time! I hope you got as much out of this as I have. If so, let me know with a comment, and we can figure this thing out together.
Cheers!
Learn more about the author at jonathan-essary.com, who is always down for coffee and staying connected.
