Pass the popcorn and a PDA, please, I’m watching a revolution of Gutenbergian proportions. And Minggl is raising its fist in support.
Around 1440 C.E., Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the mechanical movable type printing press introduced scalability of one-to-many (written) communications by lowering the barrier of entry to mass publication. No longer did content publication require the enormous resources of ecclesiastical or government-funded scriptoriums with scores of hand scribe labor. Mass publication was now within relative reach for secular and non-governmental interests at only the considerable price of a printing press. [Publishing, however, remained somewhat centralized, contingent upon significant commercial resources and geographic proximity to a sizable and weighty press, as well as specialized and difficult to acquire expertise in operation and maintenance of the press device.]
This technological shift made citizen journalism feasible, enabling distributed (and, so, difficult to censor) publication of diverse and counter-cultural opinions, data, and narratives. Smaller organizations now wielded the power to communicate ideas beyond earshot. The printing press thus fertilized the broadly egalitarian political and commercial impulses of democracy, labor organization, and the free market. Freedom of (written) speech became possible, popular, and defensible. Human social interaction and the world map changed considerably upon this threshold. We owe much of what I reckon is best of our modern cultures to the printing press.
Now, at the burgeoning intersection of portable computing, wireless broadband, simplified (and social) web publication, and easy creation of multi-media content, the barrier of entry to mass and multi-media publication is now largely eliminated. This brave new distributed printing press, it turns out, fits (easily) in the palm of your hands and requires only widely available resources and common skills. The publishing platforms for opinion, fact and story are numerous, simple, and accessible. And once published, they are easy to find.
This is where Minggl fits in. It wraps these many potent platforms up, and keeps it portably accessible within your browser, wherever you browse. It facilitates simple use and meta-mastery of the whole exciting thing, not just a slice. Tweet that, yo.
Install Minggl and join the revolution.
The theory hypothesizes that for a given community to have a high chance of survival in a dangerous environment, the members of that group need to possess an accurate working sense of the trustworthiness, competence and social history of the other members. This number is essentially a measure of when “social cohesion” begins to break down, and Dunbar tells us that the majority of humans lose the ability to do well beyond about 150 relationships.
Or we could all become rock-stars and hire secretaries, managers, coaches and handlers. Finally, we could develop tools that can (implicitly and explicitly) learn who’s important in our lives, and then use that knowledge to promote some information, and filter out all the rest. This is what Minggl is doing behind the scenes, and a future version of Minggl will begin to bring this functionality to life.
