HOME > NEWS AND EVENTS > NEWSLETTER > JUNE 2009 > FEATURE

Feature: Scotty, Take It Up To Warp Factor 5.6!

Charlie Grantham and Jim Ware

We started this series last month with a discussion of what fundamental change looks like. It's irreversible, substantive, changes our identity, and shifts our purpose. This month we take a deep dive into where that kind of dramatic change is happening and consider what it may mean for our collective future.

We believe that western society (and quite possibly the entire planet) is being transformed in five very specific ways:

• Forecasting and understanding change:  the arts and media
• Individual rights and collective choices:  government
• Buying, selling, and trading:  economics
• What we know and how we think:  education
• Where we belong and are welcomed:  community

This is about as basic as it gets.

Back Story:  The Drivers of Change

Johann Gutenberg's printing press was by far the most significant change of its time.  It shifted the world at large from an oral means of communication to printed, reproducible documents.

Today we are shifting again—from analog to digital forms of communication. Our ability to communicate with one another has gone from one-to-one (pre-Gutenberg days), through the print-based and "broadcast" media of one-to-many, to a many-to-many model (through the Internet) where everybody has the possibility of communicating with everyone else (at least among those who are on-line). And of course, our notion of "many" has gone from a small number to literally millions of people. Just as importantly we are using multiple kinds of media to communicate with each other—print, sound, and now video (e.g. YouTube and other web-based video systems) being the most common.

In its day the printing press changed basic perceptions of space and time. We went from focusing on the past (what had already happened) and being able to experience only those things that we could directly sense, to being able to experience interactions with people who are completely outside our everyday experience (and in some cases don't even exist in the real world—ala SecondLife). Today our focus is also changing from the present to the future—a world in which we can now actually create sights, sounds, and even smells that don't exist anywhere in nature; they "live" only in an explicitly-created digital world.

In addition, our mental energy has moved from being largely automatic (simply reacting to external stimuli) to becoming formally conscious of our place in a larger social context. We believe we are now at the threshold of shifting from ego-based behavior to purpose-directed behavior. That means that with the Internet we're now learning who we each are (e.g., Facebook), all for the purpose of discovering why we are (e.g., communities of interest supported by tools like Ning, Facebook. LinkedIn, and all the other social networking sites).  Communication technologies have transformed human society several times in the past, and they are doing it once again.

The Deep Dive

Given that, let's go back to those five big societal changes. The arts and media have changed considerably. In the 1500s, people's ability to appreciate and understand only those events and objects in their immediate, direct experience evolved into to an ability to appreciate people and ideas outside their "normal" experience (think of the power of a written text to make places, people, events, ideas, and emotions come "alive" to a reader—even they are entirely fictional). The media transformed from one-to-one or person-to-person to one-to-many.

Today we are creating a dynamic, "virtual" environment in which we "live" every day—including many of our social networks. Not only do we have access to many things outside our direct experience, but because of that we must also learn to question the authenticity of almost all of what we see, hear, and sense. We're now moving into an age in which the media actually lets us construct the environments that we want to be in and experience.  

Fueled by the power of the printed word, governments moved from feudal communities to empires to nation states. Now those nations are struggling once again to take the next step in their evolution, both as independent cultures and as members of a global community.  What does it mean to be a "global citizen?" The Internet is at the heart of this evolution. The last Presidential election in the United States was a prime example; U.S. voters could not avoid taking into account how the candidates and the issues "played out" in other countries, and many non-U.S. citizens played active roles in the online conversations about both the issues and the candidates.

In the 15th century economies shifted from agrarian to mercantile models that were designed to speed up the pace of transactions in the rapidly expanding marketplace. This mercantilism matured into a capitalist structure supported by democratic forms of government. Now the old economic rules of mercantilism, based on scarcity, ownership of private property, and economies of scale are running out of gas.  (Don't worry; we'll come back to this assertion at a later date.) Something new is emerging as global financial markets converge and electronic commerce brings everyone into what may soon be a unified planetary marketplace.

Education has undergone, and is once again undergoing, equally dramatic change. The informal, almost pre-literate, form of education in the Middle Ages gave way to a centralized structure built upon the printed word and books. The 15th-century model of education (what we now call the University) was spatially centralized; students traveled physically to specific places—centers of learning—to get their education.

Today learning is becoming accessible to "students" wherever they may live and/or work (and the whole concept of "student" has broadened to include just about everyone, all the time). Earlier, basic education was the private responsibility first of families and then of local communities. Now, however, we believe that all sorts of learning venues, funding models, and methods will soon replace, or at least augment, existing public school systems. Education—beyond the very basic level needed just to survive—will be delivered by the extended communities and the work organizations to which we belong.

Lastly, our whole idea of community has changed and is changing once again. "Community" used to reflect the largely homogeneous views of a few relatively authoritarian religious institutions. The printed word began to pull apart those societal structures, and its impact was immediately seen in the way communities began splintering and differentiating. Many new communities arose, often espousing distinctive belief systems. During the Renaissance, many people gained the freedom to move physically into the communities that they wanted to belong to.

Now we have thousands of on-line, virtual "communities" that thrive completely independently of any one geographic location. We can reach out beyond our local neighborhoods to discover other people anywhere on the planet who share our interests, beliefs, fears, and desires. We can then use digital technologies of all kinds to establish communications directly with them and ultimately band together, first electronically and eventually even physically, as a market or political force, if we want to do so.

Why It Matters

Simply  put, if somebody could have told people in the Middle Ages what was about to happen to their lives, they probably wouldn't have believed any of it. The changes that were about to occur were quite simply beyond their capability to imagine. And we are convinced the same thing is true today.

We are at the very front end of an incredibly broad and fundamental transformation. And we all have the opportunity—and the responsibility—to look for emerging patterns and make important choices about how we shape the future, both individually and collectively. So what are you going to do Monday morning?

Please send your comments directly to us, or post a comment on the blog version of the newsletter. We look forward to learning from you. And if you are deeply interested in this topic we'll be glad to share a much longer thirty-page treatment of these issues with you. Just ask and we'll send it out posthaste.

©Copyright 2003-2008 The Work Design Collaborative, LLC. All rights reserved. Website development by InMotionMedia, Inc