The Digital
Dynamic: How Communications Media Shape Our World (Miller,
2005)
This most excellent article appears in the May-June Futurist. I
have I copy if you wish to borrow it. Miller makes the point that
as digital media become the dominant means of communication, they will
usher in a new paradigm, transforming how we think, behave, relate, and
create. The centerpiece of the article is a compelling matrix of
the Four Communications Eras (oral, print, broadcast, digital). He
compares how shifts in communication media can affect the following
aspects of human life: collective memory, sense of identity,
truth, reasoning process, perception of reality, learning, work,
building wealth, sense of time, Management, Value, production, medium of
exchange, and art.
Miller concludes
"today, we need institutions build like North Atlantic tankers to
meet the colossal waves of largely unpredictable social change.
They need to be highly agile and fast-changing, with extra capacity,
awareness of the environment, powerful stabilizers, and buffering, like
the double hulls of the tankers. Redesigning our instituions for
the stresses and opportunities of the Digital Era is now the greatest
challenge we face."
The
World is Flat (Friedman, 2005)
Globalization has raised the notion that someone anywhere on earth can do your job, more cheaply. Can Americans rise to the challenge on this leveled playing field?''Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing happening today in the world,'' Nilekani explained. ''What happened over the last years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables, all those things.'' At the same time, he added, computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of e-mail software, search engines like Google and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore and one part to Beijing, making it easy for anyone to do remote development. When all of these things suddenly came together around 2000, Nilekani said, they ''created a platform where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced and put back together again -- and this gave a whole new degree of freedom to the way we do work, especially work of an intellectual nature. And what you are seeing in Bangalore today is really the culmination of all these things coming together.''
The
MIT
video stream of Friedman's speech is a compelling resource.
Generation
M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds (Rideout et. al.,
2005)
Kids are spending more time with new media, including computers and video
games, without cutting back on TV watching, reading or listening to music.
That's because they are becoming multi-media-taskers, according to a study
from the Kaiser Family Foundation released Wednesday. The study found that
since 1999, children and teens' exposure to media has gone up by more than
an hour, from 7:29 per day to 8:33, most of that increase coming from video
games or recreational computer time. |
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Ruins
of a Hopi senior project
built in Arizona, circa 1300. |
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