Visions of the Future: The Long Tail in the Flat World
The Future ...
"The future" is an as-yet unlived story that everyone likes to hear about and many spin stories about -- and it can be easily argued that the whole point of education is to prepare students for the future -- making it an important story for schools to be following.
"All education springs from some image of the future. It springs from some implicit assumptions about what the future holds....If the image of the future held by a society is grossly inaccurate, its education system will betray its youth."
-- Alvin Toffler
"The great use of a continuous future... is its inclusiveness.... Steadily engaging the future teaches us wariness about events and trust in each other We don't know what's coming. We do know we're in it together."
-- Stewart Brand
-- Globalization 1.0 was about countries globalizing (from 1492 to about 1800)
-- Globalization 2.0 was about companies globalizing ( from about 1800 to 2000)
-- Globalization 3.0 is about the "newfound power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally"
-- "Everywhere you turn, hierarchies are being challenged from below or transforming themselves from top-down structures into more horizontal and collaborative ones." (p. 45)
The ten forces that flattened the world:
- 11/9/89 -- The Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Rise of Microsoft
- 8/9/05 -- When Netscape Went Public
- Work Flow Software -- "Let's do lunch: have your application talk to my application"
- Open-Sourcing -- Self-Organizing Collaborative Communities
- Outsourcing Y2K
- Offshoring
- Supply-Chaining
- Insourcing
- In-forming -- Google, Yahoo!, MSN Web Search ("In-forming is the individual's personal analog to open-sourcing, outsourcing, insourcing, supply-chaining, and offshoring." (p. 153) It's about the democratization of information.
- The Steroids -- Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual
"There is no future in vanilla for most companies in a flat world."
"It is a truism, but the more educated you are, the more options you will have in a flat world."
"The more you have a culture that naturally glocalizes -- that is, the more your culture easily absorbs foreign ideas and best practices and melds those with its own traditions -- the greater advantage you will have in a flat world."
Joyce Valenza, a school librarian who blogs at NeverEnding Search, has done an Inspiration map of Friedman's book.
Daniel Pink argues that because of 3 As
- Asia (or the outsourcing of 'good jobs' overseas)
- Abundance (or rising affluence)
- Automation (the computerization of our lives)
we are shifting from the 20th century "information age" to the 21st century "conceptual age".
(See also reference to Pink under New literacies, New learning.)
This is a huge and fascinating area of research and reading.
For a good overview of the emerging science of self-organizing, scale-free networks, see Unintended Consequences: Doug Simpson's weblog of research on the collision of law, networks and disruptive technologies -- a review of the book Linked: The New Science of Networks (alternatively subtitled, How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means) by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.
For an example of "the wisdom of crowds" being implemented in a business environment, see this article in the March 26th edition of the New York Times: \"Here's an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas\" -- about a software company that uses an internal market to determine what the company will produce and to get suggestions and support for new projects of the company. Like the open source software movement, this company believes innovation is best driven by the "grass-roots brilliance" of the many.
... and the Web of the Future
The Read/Write Web / Web 2.0 / The Semantic Web
"Web 2.0 isn't driven by technology, it's driven by that critical mass of users."
-- Casey Bisson
Read Wikipedia's extensive entry on Web 2.0 -- or just absorb this mind map created by Markus Angermeier on November 11, 2005 (via Wikipedia):
Here's another visual to help appreciate the Web 2.0 discussions going on:
David Warlick summarizes the changing shape of information with three words:
- Networked
- Digital
- Overwhelming
He goes on to summarize Web 2.0 -- "based on the rise of blogging, podcasting, wikis, social bookmarks, social media, and other applications -- all tied together by RSS and aggregated content" -- with three concepts:
- Content is increasingly conversation
- Content seemingly organizes itself
- People are now connecting to each other through their content
The Push / Pull Economy
"Companies like Google, Yahoo!, Amazon.com, and TiVo have learned to thrive not by pushing products and services on their customers as much as by building collaborative systems that enable customers to pull on their own, and then responding with lightening quickness to what they pull. It's so much more efficient."
-- Thomas Friedman, "The World is Flat", p. 156
This short online video has been widely circulated -- it's well worth watching:
-- EPIC, a 'documentary made in 2014' re personalized (totally pull only what you want) news/media in the future
The Long Tail
Chris Anderson article in Wired, October 2004.
The Long Tail
| "As the data indicates, recommendation tools can provide important stimuli for increasing the diversity..." |
The Long Tail and Libraries
See the blog posting \"Libraries, logistics and the long tail\"by Lorcan Dempsey (of OCLC) for an extended discussion.
Lorcan Dempsey on Ranganathan and the Long Tail:
If the Long Tail means aggregation of supply and aggregration of demand...
In this context, aggregation of supply is about improving discovery and reducing transaction costs. It is about making it much easier to allow a reader to find it and get it, whatever it is. Or, in other words, every reader his or her book.
Aggregation of demand is about mobilizing a community of users so that the chances of rendezvous between a resource and an interested user are increased. Or, in other words, every book its reader.
| "Libraries do indeed collectively manage a long tail of research, learning and cultural materials. However, we need to do more work to make sure that that long tail is directly available to improve the work and lives of our users." |
Read More and Explore...
-- Some books we recommend (in an online list created using LibraryThing, a social software site) -- these were some of the books that inspired this workshop...
-- Best Books and Reports identified by the World Future Society -- whose website is well worth exploring.
-- 50 Books for Thinking about the Future Human Condition, suggested by the Rand Pardee Center. "The mission of the RAND Frederick S. Pardee Center for Longer Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition is ultimately to improve the human condition in the longer-range future."
-- Reading for the Future: encouraging literacy through speculative fiction website. "Reading for the Future is a grassroots volunteer organization whose aim is to help young people develop a love of reading and intellectual adventure through the vehicle of science fiction, fantasy and other speculative fiction."
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