We particularly need to avoid getting stuck in yet another back to the future fantasy whereby it is presumed that giving traditional journalists, publishers, presenters and producers a fresh business model will ensure that they magically revert to presumed levels of pre-CNN fact checking and suddenly give the still overwhelmingly derivative blogosphere a more solid grounding for its worse than random barrow pushing.

While I can see plenty to be discomforted about in the idea, I strongly suspect that the tweens will see that Google's transitory role as the most influential corporation in history has already peaked, to be eroded by some progeny of the quicksand of social networking which will trickle the thinking of well intentioned and well informed humans into the loop as a counter to the inescapable gamability of robotic search.

One key to attacking our collective ADHD could be for those with genuinely fresh thinking to target first level responders rather than competing originators. Is another of the many things Apple has been doing better than the rest its positioning as a first level responder? Owning the best filter trumps owning the best index?

In 1997 I was confident that "she who can converse the most effectively wins" and that is pretty much how the naughties turned out, with the worst consequences due to the weaker than expected truth filtering of conversation as the disruptive power of unexamined fear was pushed ever harder, a process which had again been lead by the arts in the guise of entertainment, far surpassing the worst of the Roman Colosseum.

Despite all the noise spread from specific dysfunctionals, it still seems to be possible to canvas radical possibility in civil discourse with well-intentioned, open-minded others. So I remain optimistic for a world escaping the legacy of my generation's self-indulgence that has been driven by Hollywood's triumphalist aspirations.

Back in the eighties I developed a modus operandi of "looking through the eyes of others", knowing who to phone when I needed a quick impact assessment within their area of special expertise. As yet the social networked world shows little sign of facilitating a scaled up adoption of that modus operandi, so it might be time to dig deeper into the ugliness of eBay for ideas as to how trust metrics might be separated from monetarisation.

Clearly, to me, the voters who will decide our approaching elections are at best ambivalent about "strong leadership" and "party unity" yet these continue to be espoused as fundamental truths by the commentariat who are rapidly becoming the last information source to trust. Group think has a lot to answer for.