Our gift of thought, and the desire to share our thoughts with others, form the essence of our humanity. This fundamental need to communicate crosses all cultures, as it has in all eras, among all nations. From hieroglyphs to social media, we naturally and continually seek to impart, to connect, to understand.
Today, much of our communication is shaped by technology, with unintended effects that have no precedent in our human experience. The mechanisms that “personalize” what we see, hear and read have served to divide us into echoing groups and polarization. Complex thoughts and feelings can’t be reduced to a tweet; simplistic declarations serve instead. Our reactions follow suit, becoming terse and reductive. Images speed past us, often without context or knowable provenance. What are they really communicating? a picture may be worth a thousand words, but which ones? and whose?
As we seek to live together in a more peaceful world, we must re-assert our ability to hear each other with respect. We must reclaim the ability to absorb and respond to different viewpoints with civility, free from the distortions imposed by media technology. We must re-invigorate our uniquely human qualities of openness and curiosity, which can never be duplicated by the algorithms, memes and hashtags that have put them at risk. Simply put, we must re-take our own discourse, and restore the primacy of authentic human expression that leads to mutual understanding. In today’s information age, the medium can no longer be the message. The message must be re-framed and unfettered.
Such is the mission for get to know me. We are committed to creating a platform through which differing voices and views from around the globe, representing a broad spectrum of issues pertinent to each region, are provided by the indigenous people that live there. We seek to build a new medium for respectful communication, and a new context for dialogue that will inspire greater respect between us.
We humans organically tend to process information comparatively. We understand when something is newer or older, faster or slower, further or closer. In the absence of more information, our default response to a complex issue is to align ourselves with viewpoints that seem most attuned to those we already hold. Media technology amplifies this bias. The resulting reverberations not only leave us susceptible to propaganda, but deprive us of the opportunity to learn alternative viewpoints. This impedes the compromise that is core to democracy and sustainable progress.
What if we were able to see the forest and the trees? What if we could easily compare and thereby appreciate the opposing points of view regarding any topic, issue, circumstance or point of geographic interest? What if we were in a position to study, learn and thereby respect alternative perspectives, by hearing from the people that know them best — the indigenous populations?
Get to know me provides a multi-faceted system through which indigenous populations can freely describe their feelings, sentiments and opinions. Get to know me invites an audience that is interested, but otherwise not directly involved, to select a region of the world, access a topic relevant to that part of the world, and by filtering location, time and cohort, be exposed to differing points of view on the same subject. By giving them a voice, indigenous populations are given hope that they have a voice. By instilling hope, we are providing a foundation for the meaningful dialogue that is a precondition of progress.
Get to know me does not have an agenda beyond promoting respectful communication. We serve everyone who is interested in a topic of conflicting perspectives, regardless of geography or population. By providing context and authentic voices to situation awareness, our platform will be of value to the social sciences, diplomacy, travel, and administrators.