One of the common confusions of this time, like all other times, is mistaking new methods for new behaviors. This post by Douglass Rushkoff The Networked Individual is an example. [via Future Now]

Sure, we knew that people existed in their individual bodies for a long time. Even cavemen knew that hitting the guy over there meant hitting someone else. But people were so highly identified with their tribes, clans or fiefdoms, that they didn't really think of themselves as individuals. Anyone who was a true individual was pretty much an outcast -- either banished, mutant, a leper or, at best, a shaman, whose individuality was as much a curse as a blessing.

Then as now everyone exists within a society and disregards its behavior norms at risk of exclusion or worse. Nothing has changed but the names and scale of society.

The cell phone may be bringing us into a new renaissance, but it may end up differently than what we're expecting. Instead of becoming more empowered as individuals, we may give up on the notion of individuality altogether.

The Renaissance -- the great big one they taught us about in school -- is known for a lot of great inventions: perspective painting, the printing press, ships that could circumnavigate the earth, modern banking and even the sonnet. What we tend to forget about the 15th and 16th centuries, though, is that this was also when we invented the "individual."...

[Today] interactive devices, which allow for what I've come to see as a second great renaissance, give us access to one another. They break down individualism as we know it, and help us redefine it as something very different: as our ability to forge connections with one another. To cooperate instead of compete.

No, we didn't invent individualism, ever. Nor are we now just discovering cooperation and social networking. Every bit of this is false, mistaking new techniques for new behaviors when all we have done is use new tools to do old tasks. New tools can help us do tasks better or faster, they can dissolve old social structures and underpin new ones, but they don't change norms or preferences by providing alternative ways to express them.

The always-on and always-available quality of the emerging wireless universe changes what it means to be an individual. Increasingly, the power and agency of individuals is defined not by what they know -- not what's on the hard drive -- but who and what they have access to -- who is in their date book, or how readily they can find a link.... [T]hings are no longer measured in the scarcity of early Renaissance values, but are instead beginning to be understood in terms of sharing, social currency, and smart-mob-driven engagement.

Who you know has always been more important than what you know. It's that way for all pack and herd animals not just humans. The CMC mob mentality that entrances Rushkoff and others is only the newest expression of the mob mentality that has always entranced them - from mimeographs to fax machines - but is far older. They are the decoder ring set - children inventing secret languages, gang sign, secret handshakes, flags, colors, clothing fashion etc.

CMC is the current expansion of the social mind that has been fitfully increasing since humans sent the first smoke signals, since the first bull roared his readiness to fight or love, since the first bacteria emitted the first chemical message, intentionally or not.

It is far more useful to see current technologies as evolutionary continuations of ancient trends than as revolutionary heralds of a new age. We can see where mob behavior is going, how it will affect society, since it is an old malady society has lived with for eons. We can also see that network technologies - from jungle drums to wireless CMC - have constructive uses as well as the destructive uses of the mob.

No matter how much we like to talk about "freedom of the individual" here in the United States, that freedom comes down pretty much to the freedom to buy whatever we want, and to withdraw from pretty much any set of community values in order to protect or pay for our nuclear families (a value system, again, supported through distortions of democracy and religion).

Now we get to Rushkoff's point, the same tired old steam age thinking that has animated so much of the chattering class since Ned Ludd's ghost walked the land. We are free in so many ways beyond consuming that it takes great effort to ignore them, to cultivate such lush ignorance. There are flaws in our society but Rushkoff is clueless about them, still struggling with sophomoric confusions.

We have always had always on wireless communication - our ears, eyes and noses. We have always known how to use these technologies and they have always shaped our societies. Extending the range of our senses extends the scale of our societies. This has important implications since it makes some types of hierarchy redundant but since our processing capacity hasn't changed it does not eliminate hierarchy. We can know most anything but not everything, so we still make use of summaries and roll ups - abstractions and symbols that are condensed dollops of sense experience.