Why we need quality group conversations at scale
written by Severin Deutschmann
Our world is more connected than ever before. That is a fact. Our world is undergoing a crisis of unprecedented complexity. This is evident. To address these challenges, we need an orchestra of solutions. This is our call to action.
The promise of greater wealth spread capitalism and industrialization across the globe to create an interconnected & complex global economy.
The invention of modern-day democracy and its spread throughout the western world carried the promise of freedom and fairness for more and more people.
When finally the internet came into existence it carried the promise and potential of connecting humanity on a global scale. And accelerated all of the above.
All of the systems delivered on their promises, to a certain degree. However, as a global community, we are witnessing now, like King Midas, that everything desirable has a good chance to bring undesirable side effects.
Today, with the click of a button, we can talk to anyone on the planet. So it is easier than ever to opt out of our local peer group and connects exclusively to the people that agree with one’s worldview. We get exceedingly trapped in echo chambers of sameness. These interactions are typically mediated by algorithms that maximize profit for a few, which adds fuel to the fire: While creating more wealth and increasing the average income per household constantly, capitalism is also growing the inequality gap and splitting the world, into haves and have nots.
As our organizations and their outputs grow more, global economic activities are terraforming the earth at a pace unprecedented in the universe.
While we would hope that our democratically elected institutions would be looking out for our best interests and regulating our systems back into balance, we see a disconnect between governments and people and distrust in our institutions.
Our world is more connected than ever before. That is a fact. Our world is undergoing a crisis of unprecedented complexity. This is evident. To address these challenges, we need an orchestra of solutions. This is our call to action.
We believe that a promising solution-space to engage with, are the connections themselves:
Since the dawn of time, in any area of the stack of life, from physics and chemistry to biology, culture, and technology, increasing information density is a common thread with the evolution of higher-order systems.
And since the dawn of humanity, complex language has allowed us to build ever more elaborate connections in the cultural and later technological sphere.
The point we are attempting to make here is that communication is central to our lives. A key element of progress is communication. Communication is at the heart of our humanity. Humanity is a result of communication.
Therefore, to evolve as a species, we must evolve the way we communicate with each other.
And if we look at key events that drove progress for humanity in a major evolutionary way, it often had to do with information and communication, reducing the cost of memory and transmission.
- Writing allowed information to be persisted outside of our brains, retrievable in an asynchronous manner. Reducing the cost of transmitting information & increasing our memory capacity.
- The printing press reduced the cost of reproducing written information by orders of magnitude and thus allowed the spread of information & asynchronous information.
- The telephone increased the reach of synchronous communication and thus reduced the cost of synchronous communication.
- Computers increased the dimension of information processing & storage & opened up the digital realm.
- The Internet spread the digital realm by allowing computers to communicate with each other
- Social Media connects a vast number of people, collects & facilitates content creation, and curates this for its users
(There are many many more ways of framing the history of communication: variation 1, variation 2, variation 3)
What is essential and missing? Quality group communication at scale.
While we get more and more connected at scale, the connections themselves are not of the highest quality. Communication is dirt cheap & super-efficient. But it’s not effective and increasingly more often it becomes even counterproductive. There are no accessible tools that allow us to have quality group dialogue at scale.
Most People generally find communication in a large group ineffective and exhausting due to undesirable dynamics that arise as human group sizes increase. Digital environments amplify these effects.
Weeve provides an easy-to-use group-communication tool that leverages the structured dialogic design, which is kinda like having a virtual co-facilitator that guides the participants to get the most out of their conversations.
Using Weeve allows even the largest groups to have the most meaningful discussions online without being limited by technological or social barriers.
If you’d like to know more or join our private beta program, click here.
