Let’s imagine that the social potential movement is emerging and gathering strength. Teams are forming to act as catalysts to help bring the process into focus. Now what is needed to make the system work is the maturation of our mass media, our planetary nervous system. We must see images of social wellness if we are to have the faith and courage to heal our society and grow. Imagine what would happen if a newborn child were surrounded only by people who thought it was ugly and who noticed only its weaknesses, messes, and failures. Think how the child would be affected. We are a newly emerged planetary society, and we need to make sure we are receiving positive feedback. We need an extraordinary media outreach that can set the new template and affect all other media.
The single most important thing we could do with the media is offer a new conception of what we mean by news. Many people believe what they see on the news is the truth. For this evolutionary plan to succeed we need to cocreate a prototype: the NewNews. We have already envisioned the movement for what works spreading throughout the world via rapidly increasing networking among innovators. Now let’s build on that and imagine a television show called The NewNews: What’s Working in the World. It is real “tell-a-vision” but also available on the internet and radio, or it might even start on the internet. It is a megaphone for creative breakthroughs and successes, which invites millions of people to participate in constructive action.
The NewNews is the real-life drama of the human family’s struggle to evolve. I can imagine it taking place in a new kind of live “situation room” fed by golden innovations streaming in through all types of media that are reporting good news and good works. The feeling in such NewNews rooms is one of genuine excitement, danger, and opportunity, because the real question is, Evolution or extinction? Will we make it through this critical period or won’t we? Initiators and innovators are seen as genuine heroes and heroines, the true newsmakers of our time. The NewNews invites all of us to start on the hero’s path. It acknowledges that we are on a hero’s journey together.
Guests come on the show to report what’s working. Every innovator who speaks of a project that works is asked to share how it works and why it works — to help others achieve similar successes. Golden innovations are dramatized, especially from the personal point of view. How did you do it? How did your family respond? How did you support yourself? Where did you suffer? What did you enjoy? We learn from one another how to be innovators. Imagine our visions and our social goals in a segment on the NewNews entitled “Visions of a Positive Future.” People are invited to communicate their visions of the emerging world so that tell-a-vision can collect them and continually report to viewers the future they are choosing to create. Remember conscious evolution means evolution by choice, not chance.
The NewNews also addresses the challenges we are facing. It tells the stories of the breakdowns and disasters in terms of the vital question of what people can do to help. Each breakdown is seen in its dramatic context, as a problem that is an evolutionary driver, pressing us toward something better and more creative. The real drama of life in the twenty-first century is the heroic effort of millions of people to avoid disaster and foster emergence and innovation.
We use techniques similar to those David Ellis offered in his book, Creating Your Future, urging people to project into the long-range future to overcome self-imposed limitations.1 We begin collectively to do what James Redfield described in The Tenth Insight and in The Celestine Vision.2 We “hold the vision” built of all our choices, potentials, and pragmatic successes. By placing our ever-expanding and enriching vision on the news, we begin to see it as real and are thereby further activated to realize it now in our lives. It is not something in the future we are waiting for, but rather a stimulus to awaken our creativity in the present. What we envision we begin to create.
The hosts of the NewNews pay particular attention to reporting on situations in which adversaries begin to agree on something, for finding common ground is one of the foundational elements of the emerging culture. For example, I remember a specially designed SYNCON, or synergistic convergence conference, produced by the Committee for the Future, which we put on for gang leaders in the inner city of Los Angeles. (The Committee for the Future produced twenty-five such synergistic conferences from 1972 to 1976.) We gathered together the leading gangs of Los Angeles: Hispanic, Asian, African American, and white. The process was designed to have people state their passions to create their goals, needs, and resources, and to seek common goals in a wheel-shaped environment divided into sectors, as in the Wheel of Cocreation. The police, welfare recipients, former convicts, shopkeepers, crime victims, corporate executives, and science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury and Gene Roddenberry were also present.
At one point we felt a sense of something new and fragile coming together. Each task force stated its goals, what it needed to accomplish the goals, and the resources it could offer to others. The police and corporate executives were paying close attention to the kids’ words. All participants met as equal members of the community trying to work out something together. One black gang leader was standing in the center of the circle in his worn leather jacket. He had been quiet and looked depressed throughout the three-day event. Suddenly he took a deep breath and spoke in a voice so soft that all of us had to lean toward him to hear. “I think it’s going to be all right, we’re going to be heard . . .” he said.
In that instant an ABC-TV camera crew arrived. They started to pull gang members aside to find out what was going on. The young black leader who had just spoken faced the TV cameras and said loudly for all to hear: “Go away! We won’t let you do this to us again. We won’t let you make us look bad. Go away!”
The mass media cameras retreated, our little handheld camera zoomed in on the young man, and we heard his story, for the first time, of how the media had distorted gangs by always communicating their worst behavior. We began to discuss important issues with the members of those gangs. It was a very powerful and moving experience as they started to communicate. My partner at the time, the late John Whiteside, created “The New World Evening News,” in which he played back the peaks of new agreements and acts of cooperation that occurred on that day. People were fascinated to see themselves as newsmakers and wanted to watch the program over and over. “The New World Evening News” format and approach can be incorporated into the NewNews.
A major twenty-four-hour-a-day “human potential television” channel may not be that far from manifestation. It would have programming focusing on such themes as living as a whole person, lifelong learning, personal growth, vocational development, spirituality, what’s working to create a better world, and personal stories of our new leaders in progress.
On December 22, 2012, I coproduced (with Stephen Dinan, CEO of The Shift Network) Birth 2012, a coordinated series of events in countries all over the world (for more on Birth 2012, see page 221). We were able to use the internet and Maestro Conference telephone technology to create a channel where, for twenty-four hours, we spread the good news of what was happening around the globe to birth our new planetary consciousness. We had videographers reporting in from many regions of the world. It was an amazing experience to see in real time the response to our announcement of the planetary birth.
This and other such efforts are favorably disposed to the NewNews idea. It is only a matter of time, energy, and focus to make it happen at a comprehensive and popular scale required to reach the general public.
Another powerful form of media is the arts. Artists are essential to the NewNews — to inspire, reveal, and illuminate what is happening. Poets, dancers, painters, and musicians weave a web of meaning and revelation throughout the NewNews show. Earl Hubbard’s statement made so long ago in the little café on the Left Bank — “we need artists to tell us our new story” — comes true on the NewNews. We find creative talent that has been blocked from expression by the limited access and negative self-image prevalent in popular culture. Our birth as universal humanity calls forth an outpouring of creativity as our new self-images, visions, and dreams are portrayed by artistic genius.
Through the technology of computer animation, we have the breathtaking ability to dramatize and make our visions real. Seeing is believing. Advanced art forms are a vital part of cocreating the future.
Through the NewNews programming, viewers will be invited to turn on their computers and place their projects, their dreams, and their visions on websites that share and link to the NewNews. These websites should develop a service for matching needs with resources through a vocational dating service spotlighted by the NewNews. Suprasex will be encouraged! Examples of social love stories abound. People finding each other are turned on. “Telerotic” partners joined by shared purpose and juicy love will be invited to share stories, to tell of the fun they are having cocreating.
This matching function will help people find their teammates, their partners, and their projects, stirring the creative energy latent in millions. Imagine that vocational arousal sweeps the nation and the world, as the NewNews goes global. Imagine that local communities create their own NewNews channels on the internet. We could find ourselves in the midst of a social uprising of wellness.
What do you suppose will happen to most modern news shows when the NewNews becomes popular? They will start to compete. Reporters will be told to find out what’s working. Muckrakers will become pearl-rakers. Yellow journalism will become silver and gold! People will start noticing what’s working in their own lives. The NewNews will be flooded with stories of what works from all around the world.
The truth is that the NewNews is not far from being realized. Back in the 1990s, Peter Jennings, the anchor for ABC’s national news, introduced into the evening news a segment called “Solutions” that highlighted innovations and breakthroughs. In the United Kingdom, Positive News has since been established to report on positive developments from around the world.
Founded in 2013 by Foundation for Conscious Evolution board member Sandra de Castro Buffington, UCLA’s Global Media Center for Social Impact (www.gmimpact.org) actively engages entertainment-industry leaders to create compelling story lines that accurately portray a wide range of socially provocative issues, including racial justice, LGBT rights, gender equality, immigration, health, climate change, prison reform, and the mind-body-spirit connection. The center harnesses the power of television, film, music, and new media so that exceptional storytelling, socially conscious songwriting, effective reporting, and interactive content on new media can move us from evidence to impact.
A truly global media is being created. But there are tremendous issues of credibility and responsibility that professional journalists, amateur journalists, bloggers, and even “accidental journalists” — people with smartphones in the right place at the right time — need to consider. How do we connect authentically? What is newsworthy? How do we cover important issues in a healthy, balanced way? How do we inspire, inform, and lead? This is where media literacy comes in. Media professional Cate Montana (www.catemontana.com) recommends two superb organizations that are creating a conversation around media literacy and all that it implies: Journalism That Matters (www.journalismthatmatters.net), and Images and Voices of Hope (www.IVOH.org). Welcome to the conversation!
Let’s imagine the NewNews as popular TV shows in a variety of forms, broadcast worldwide and locally via the internet, radio, and TV. Situation comedies, dramas, and documentaries soon follow the news, revealing the numberless stories of the frontiers of human progress. Storytelling goes well beyond the news. When stories of conscious cocreation find their way into dramas, comedies, animated series, feature films, and songs, they can transport viewers into new worlds, become part of popular culture, and cocreate our future. The stories capture the imagination, and change attitudes, knowledge, and behavior in the process.
Everywhere communities are creating their own NewNews outlets, and individuals are calling in to NewNews outlets, asking how they can learn to be cocreators, how they can become social innovators, how they can help bring into being a better future. The stage is set for a new education in conscious evolution.