What Does It Mean To Adapt?

Ali Anani wrote the buzz, The New Mirrors of Social Media, which became a catalyst for dynamic exchanges across buzzes. Dr. Ali literally sparked a process which he describes as “the fractal of synchronicity” from which its “unintended rules” leads to the emergence of new ideas. I proudly dedicate this buzz to Dr. Ali, with thanks.

Our Central Nervous System (CNS) is continuously perceiving, sorting, choosing and responding to information received through our sensory system. As the amniotic fluid is a greater sound carrier than water, our sensory environment begins in utero. As well as the auditory stimulation that occurs, the fetus experiences movement. After birth, our experiences continue to be shaped, formed and influenced by what we hear, see, smell, taste, touch, as well as experience proprioceptively and vestibularly.

Meaning is then created by the interactions between our internal and external environments and those sensory experiences. This is the ground work that is laid for choices we make in the future as we continue to interpret and associate the information we receive. Over the years, we collect and store these experiences. We construct and form memories.

We are survivors, both as individuals and as a community. We form meaning for ourselves and then seek a community of others who share a “common sense”.

When an individual is urged to “use their common sense”, there is an assumption that the meaning of the action or even judgment of the person doing the urging is understood by the individual being urged and is in sync with their own drive to survive. Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Judgment, states: "[W]e must [here] take sensus communis to mean the idea of a sense shared [by all of us], i.e., a power to judge that in reflecting takes account (a priori), in our thought, of everyone else's way of presenting [something], in order as it were to compare our own judgment with human reason in general... Now we do this as follows: we compare our judgment not so much with the actual as rather with the merely possible judgments of others, and [thus] put ourselves in the position of everyone else..."

And herein lays the paradox: human beings are individuals who depend on a social construct. If we, as individuals, operate on the basis of developing strategies which are meaningful for our survival, it therefore follows that we, as a community, develop a common sense which is necessary for the survival of our community.

One way we experience the sharing of a common sense is through behavior. Behavior is communication. It is a language. And if we experience an understanding through our behaviors, we form community.

On social media, the language has changed. In order for us to survive, we must not only learn the language of our new environment but we need to form meaning to our adaptation if it were to become successful.

As we can no longer rely on behaviors for communication and no longer have access to the non-verbal communication of tones of voices, facial gestures, and body language, we must find meaning in words, images and symbols.

Image credit: OCLC

And the meaning we find cannot be made on assumptions. We cannot assume that the meaning we have is shared by the social media community. We have to realign our sense of seeing and hearing to pick up signals of how words are used and how images and symbols are used to support the text. It means starting fresh.

In our forming personal connections, it means that we may end up gravitating to what looks and sounds familiar. But as a business professional, we can’t afford to adapt in this way. We cannot attach our personal, residual meanings formed by earlier experiences on the public we are hoping to connect with, and expect to communicate in our former language about the products and services we provide.

The Gestalt point of view of how we look at how past experience impacts on the present situation to understand that “the core of the model is the notion that the manner in which a stimulus is perceived depends not only on its own physical characteristics but also on those of surrounding stimuli and of stimuli previously experienced by the observer. In other words, the perceiver is said to be perceptually adapted to past sensory stimuli; his adaptation level forms a kind of zero point against which any new stimulus is perceived." - Britannica

We begin to adapt and form new meanings by doing some detective work and by connecting the dots.

We ask questions:

• How are individuals communicating in this new environment?

This means we look at patterns of words and expressions, choices of images and symbols.

• How do my potential clients or customers experience time and place on social media?

This will influence how, where and when I approach them.

• What are their expectations of how they want to access my information?

This will influence format and style.

• What meanings have they formed about relationships?

This will influence how and what I communicate.

The challenge is always to understand the individuals we seek to engage with; to make sense of their behaviors and to understand the meaning behind their communication. In order to achieve this, as professionals, we must be constantly aware and conscience of what are our sensory needs, how we respond to sensory inputs, how we process, interpret and give meaning to those inputs. We must also be aware of what community we belong to, where we are in sync with the common sense. After all, we are human beings working in human services. In this way, we operate with the same mechanism as everyone else. As humans, we process sensory stimulation and interpret and translate this into organized experiences. This capacity of transforming physiological signals into meanings and experiences that are adaptive, forms the basis of our realities.