Mass media – a necessary component of hyper-centralized system – must produce substantial amounts of content to maintain the centralization. This content must not contain any values and can not oppose any truth.

Therefore it is empty content – content which does not develop consciousness and is not entering in conflict with any established truth. Purpose of this content is to exist and spend the limited cognitive resources of system members. It is not engaging members on the level of intelligence or consciousness, but on the level of instinct, or is avoiding any engagement.

Manufacturing of empty content is the result of a closed system which is not capable to create values and change, but focuses only on managing risk – avoiding conflict with truth and avoiding radical unknown incontrollable change.

To add values to content it is necessary to open the mass media and switch to open decision making in the centralized system. Once values are added to the content and mass media, intelligence, and – more importantly – consciousness will start to develop.

Otherwise empty content will continue to regress consciousness and intelligence of its members.

Knowledge can be defined as an ontology. Language is the dominant ontology management method in contemporary systems. It is more effective than imagery and other methods because contemporary systems depend highly on abstract yet precise ontologies. Therefore ontology, knowledge, and language are one in this article and will be presented by the “ontology”.

If a goal of a system is to increase collective intelligence and consciousness, system changes should be observed through ontology changes. Ontology changes between traditionalism, modernism, and postmodernism show what kind of language is needed for metamodernism and openness to increase collective intelligence and consciousness.

Traditionalism had a stable ontology. Modernism rapidly expanded the traditional ontology by adding to it and rarely changing it. Postmodernism is mostly focused on changing traditional and modern ontology, adding little to both. Postmodernism depends on closed centralized power to create these ontology changes.

Metamodernism and openness should direct ontology development towards following goals:
– Postmodernism expands instead of changes traditional and modern ontologies,
– Ontology changes are more open and less centralized,
– Adoption of non-binary (oscillating) ontologies.

If ontology development is directed towards these goals a system will experience increase collective intelligence and consciousness growth, and will avoid reductive conflict caused by closed and centralized ontology changes.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems with currently available information. Consciousness is the ability to be self aware which enables far more complex problem solving that intelligence. Individual consciousness and collective intelligence are in conflict. There is always a delay between individual ability to understand and the collective ability to create.

Individual humans have the capacity for consciousness, but they can only create real change when as a collective. Also our consciousness – wisdom and abstract thinking – depend greatly on the collective education, exchange, and culture. Culture being a collection of wisdom, often simplified, over hundreds of generations.

In simple words – an individual is smarter than a collective, but the collective is more able than an individual. Also the collective makes the individual smart, hoping that in return the individual slightly increases the collective smart. The main difference being that individual has consciousness while the collective never had and never will have consciousness.

As automation in a system – a collective – increases it should strive towards automating intelligence while it uses more of individual consciousness. Openness is a tool to achieve this. Openness allows individual consciousness to influence the collective intelligence. The more open a system, a collective, is, the more it will use individual consciousness to increase its own intelligence.