If I were to quote a public figure to express a point, I would do so with the hope that those to which I wished to communicate hold a shared knowledge of the public figure and the exact context in which the quote was made. I assume my audience has enough shared knowledge to successfully intuit my personal life experiences that have lead me to quote said public figure.
I do not know the exact details of the individual lives of my audience. Moreover I do not know the exact details of the life of the public figure I quoted. The true circumstances surrounding the original delivery of the quote will never be known. I am committing to a form of communication that willfully excludes all those whose lives I cannot intuit.
Would it not be a more potent way to communicate if we could speak to each other with precise and complete knowledge of the lives of the individuals to which we speak? Sure it would, but humans aren’t capable of complete knowledge about anything. Presently, computers provide a marginal advantage in our quest for complete knowledge. We trust computers to translate our languages, but in our personal lives, are hesitant to empower them to translate anything other than spoken/written word.
Presently, popular forms of social media use a rudimentary awareness of our digital footprint to deliver ideas from persons we are more likely to trust based on shared life experiences.
Advertisers understand how and why this works. No presumption of inadequacy is made if the audience fails to respond to a poorly aimed call to action. The advertisers make note of the failure, and use applied research to understand the lives of their consumers.
Why don’t people do this; the individual? Well, for one it benefits the advertisers if their audience is incapable of using the same research and communication tools to teach each other to only consume products that will honestly and efficiently improve their quality of life.
If I was able to communicate the contents of this post to you with a 200 million dollar budget and a vast team of professionals, trained in using experiential languages you will understand but never be able to use to arm your own ideas, it would create a social ecosystem where an inordinate number of people would think I’m right about everything. They would start to do what I say because money. This hierarchy of thought propagation is bad. It is Bad. It is 200 million dollar budget BAD. And it is old.
Truthfully, I don’t think there will ever be a way for individuals to communicate in a language that is equally accessible and dynamically cognizant of all the people in the world. Human language evolved to communicate personal ideas to our immediate community. Until now, advertising agencies and ‘individual as a brand’ entities have proven better at this because they aren’t acting as individuals. They act as a business driven by financial commitments.
I think computer assisted communication and translation between individuals is the only way humanity as a whole can ever stop competing and killing us all to death.