Our global society faces the challenge of moving from an industrial-growth society to a life-sustaining society. This shift is often referred to as “The Great Turning.”

We spent some of our New Year’s holiday collaborating on this videoblog to create a positive vision for the New Year. We used Creative Commons-licensed material detailed below.

Here are some resources that we find useful in describing some optimistic social change approaches for the future:

COMMUNICATION
Non-Violent Communication is an approach to communicating that focuses on creating deep connection and satisfying relationships based on mutual respect, compassion and cooperation. Kent summarizes a weekend workshop of NVC here.

COMMUNITY
Joanna Macey wrote the book “Coming Back to Life,” which teaches community practices for facing despair and how to prevent from going psychically numb in the face of global challenges. Macey says, “When we deny or repress pain or treat it a private pathology we miss out. When we acknowledge and willing accepting the pain of larger world we open a path for a sense of interconnectedness.”

HEALTH
“The New Medicine” website by PBS is an excellent resource for understanding mind-body medicine and finding therapies that treat specific conditions with a integrative approach.

CONSCIOUSNESS
The Institute of Noetic Science’s ShiftInAction.com hosted an Essential Shifts Series consisting of interviews with some of the world’s best visionary thinkers talking about the current global situation and what we can do about it.

GREEN TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS
We bought the book “Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century,” which describes some of the latest and greatest solutions for a bright green future. It is packed with sustainable technologies that provide a lot of hope for what is already possible.

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VIDEO CREDITS

Creative Commons Music:
“Mind Field” by DJBLUE from ccmixter.org

Interview Audio:
Angeles Arrien from ShiftInAction.com

Creative Commons Video
Arin Crumley’s “Humanity Lobotomy”
freakypups’ “Free Hugs for Phoenix”
And the following Stock Footage from WGBH Labs Sandbox:
Clock, La Plaza Newspaper, New Yorkers 1939, Journey into DNA, This Information, Blood Flow, Splashes of Sparks, Of Human Bondage, Nubian Fisherman on the Nile, Crops in the Mist, Ocean Waves at the Shore, Baby Naming Ceremony, King Montgomery, Waikiki Counterclockwise, Nautilus Animation, Time Lapse Nature, Slow Motion Track

Creative Commons Flickr Photos
monkeyc, blumsy, neoncoil, kevint, benjamin_ellis, blogumentary, joyrex, ousby, tjt195, hawkey, sigman, hawkey, paulbence, hawkey, vithassan, hawkey, weston, lapidim, scatti_frullati, thomashawk, willpate, hawkey, scatti_frullati, cyberscorpion, scatti_frullati, hawkey, docman, k-girl, willemvelthoven, alfredoneto, hawkey, istanbulmike, sigman, tasteful_tn, jamesxv7

Falstad.com Physics Applets:
Ripple Tank (2-D Waves) Applet
2-D Circular Square Well Applet

Want to Share this Video? More information under the share link here.

I made it to the second round of the Knight Brother's News Challenge grant for The Echo Chamber Project, and I was wondering some folks in the Integral blogosphere would be willing to help brainstorm and explore a couple of questions:

* How would you describe Integral Truth in the context of journalism?

* So if you were to redesign the journalistic process in an integral fashion, then what might that look like?

I've thought a lot about this for The Echo Chamber Project, and have written a number of thoughts about it over the last couple of years, which I'll share below.  I was hoping to get some feedback and to hear other perspectives on this as I write the second round grant application.

I think that there are new ways of attaining individual and collective truths in order to exist in our relative society.  Wilber's Integral Quadrant Map offers a great framework for conceptualizing a holistic ontological truth, but there have been a number of epistemological  barriers towards actually combining the silos in an integral way.

There has been a tension between subjectivity and objectivity in journalism stemming from reductionistic science.  There is a clear righthand/lefthand split with through separating newspaper sections between "Just-the-Facts-Ma'am" News and opinionated Op-eds and editorials.  The News and Editorial divisions even operate as autonomous entities with different bosses who don't even talk to each other in their daily production of a newspaper. 

In reality, these objective and subjective divisions are artificial since they can't really be separated. But yet journalists constrain themselves in a number of ways to these artificial barriers.  And this mindset may be contributing to the declining credibility of what they're trying to accomplish, which is to be a watchdog of power and to be providing us with maps of reality so that we can govern ourselves.
 
So I conceptualized another way to bridge the subjective and objective in a “New Media Ecosystem Flowchart” that was laid out according to the Integral quadrants.  It is shown in the picture above, and in more detail here.

UR = Objective Facts
UL = Subjective Hypotheses (The Narrative to connect facts)
LL = Aggregated Wisdom of the Crowd via tags, ratings, playlists
LR = Hypertext-linked Network of Facts (or something else entirely)

The bridge that connects the UR facts with UL hypotheses is the technique of Analysis of Competing Hypotheses, which is a matrix of UR objective facts on the X-axis, and list of UL subjective hypotheses to explain those facts on the Y-axis.  This is a methodology that the CIA uses for its analysis, and I've written about it in more detail in these two places:
* Analytical Techniques for Coordinating Decentralized Journalism
* Echo Chamber Project's Path for Integrating Intelligence Analysis Techniques

Briefly, ACH is a process of weighing the most relevant facts, and trying to disprove hypotheses until the most likely hypothesis emerges.  This could also also be informed by LL aggregated collective wisdom and presented in some sort of system LR interconnected network that would then be distilled into a linear news story.

Anyway, I'd love to hear any feedback on some of this or any other thoughts about an Integral Approach to Journalism, and an Integral Approach to "Truth".

UPDATE: Daniel from For the Turnstiles gives a preliminary reponse here, and I left a few comments which I'll crosspost in the comment thread here as well.

UPDATE: Another brief response from Daniel from For the Turnstiles  here, and my comment is crossposted in the comment thread below...

UPDATE: Joe Perez over at Until gives a detailed reponse  here.