Many people in the United States purchase one or fewer books every year.
Many of those people have seen every single episode of American Idol. There is clearly a correlation here.
Access to knowledge, for the first time in history, is largely unimpeded for the middle class. Without effort or expense, it's possible to become informed if you choose. For less than your cable TV bill, you can buy and read an important book every week. Share the buying with six friends and it costs far less than coffee.
Or you can watch TV.
The thing is, watching TV has its benefits. It excuses you from the responsibility of having an informed opinion about things that matter. It gives you shallow opinions or false ‘facts' that you can easily parrot to others that watch what you watch. It rarely unsettles our carefully self-induced calm and isolation from the world.
I got a note from someone the other day, in which she made it clear that she doesn't read non-fiction books or blogs related to her industry. And she seemed proud of this.
I was roped into an argument with someone who was sure that ear candling was a useful treatment. Had he read any medical articles on the topic? No. But he knew. Or said he did.
You see a lot of ostensibly smart people in airports, and it always surprises me how few of them use this downtime to actually become more informed. It's clearly a deliberate act–in our infoculture, it takes work not to expose yourself to interesting ideas, facts, news and points of view. Hal Varian at Google reports that the average person online spends seventy seconds a day reading online news. Ouch.
Not all books are correct or useful. Not all accepted science is correct. The conventional wisdom might just be wrong. But ignoring all of it because the truth is now fashionably situational and in the eye of the beholder is a lame alternative.
I know this rant is nothing new. In fact, people have been complaining about widespread willful ignorance since Brutus or Caesar or whoever invented the salad… the difference now is this: more people than ever are creators. More people than ever go to work to use their minds, not just their hands. And more people than ever have a platform to share their point of view. I think that raises the bar for our understanding of how the world works.
Let's assert for the moment that you get paid to create, manipulate or spread ideas. That you don't get paid to lift bricks or hammer steel. If you're in the idea business, what's going to improve your career, get you a better job, more respect or a happier day? Forgive me for suggesting (to those not curious enough to read this blog and others) that it might be reading blogs, books or even watching TED talks.
As for the deliberately uninformed, we can ignore them or we can reach out to them and hopefully start a pattern of people thinking for themselves…
Phi Beta Iota: One of the reasons we published 1995 GIQ 13/2 Creating a Smart Nation: Strategy, Policy, Intelligence, and Information was our early emerging sense that US “intelligence” did not know what the Nation needed to know, and neither did the Nation (in the Stephen Colbert sense of word: “Nation, you are stupid!”). America is at a turning point in which most of the foundation jobs have been exported and the menial jobs given over, deliberately, to illegal aliens; the schools have hit bottom, the government is out of control, and Wall Street, while in charge, has looted the Treasury and imploded the economy. The federal government mutters darkly about “federalizing” state and local police and “disarming” the public. What we really need–Thomas Jefferson understood this–is a fully armed, fully educated public that is attentive to its civic duty and will not tolerate corruption among its officials. This is going to be a long struggle. The good news: Obama activated the Davies J-Curve. America expected him to make positive change, he did not, now the myth is exposed. States (we are the United STATES of America) are finally starting to exercise their Constitutional authority to see to their own defenses, and a MAJORITY of the voting public now sees the two-party tyranny for what it is: a corrupt cesspool….one bird, two wings, same shit.
November 30th, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could
potentially engage in one of the largest federal power grabs we have ever
seen.
At the FCC’s November meeting – note the coincidental date of choice,
AFTER the impending election – three unelected bureaucrats (of five) could
simply vote themselves rulers of 1/6th of our entire economy – the
information and technology sector.
Meaning the Internet that you currently enjoy – that has been a marvel of
economic and information innovation and success – will be subject to vast
new governmental regulations. You didn’t elect these people – but they
are on the verge of electing themselves Internet overlords.
November 30th, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could potentially engage in one of the largest federal power grabs we have ever seen.
After two years of this Presidential Administration and this Congress, that is saying an awful lot about an awful lot.
And what’s worse, the FCC would be doing it without Congress weighing in. At the FCC’s November meeting – note the coincidental date of choice, AFTER the impending election – three unelected bureaucrats (of five) could simply vote themselves rulers of 1/6th of our entire economy – the information and technology sector.
One reason why Apple is innovating and winning, while Nokia is not.
Unfortunately, the headline using a dramatic effect to get attention, but is not an accurate statement. Be careful about too much credit to Apple's current design efforts. Apple has had several flops in the past. Is this conscious or are they experiencing their own randomness?
It can be easily observed that systems endure with marginal improvements. Of course, if you do not want the undesirable effects that are being generated by your system, making marginal improvements has little hope of removing these undesirable effects, since effects can only be created by deeper cause(s).
So to claim that looking at the past to design the future demands that you will crash and burn is an easily disproved hypothesis. Yet, we also know that when you design a system for the future, you can also build an ineffective system. The world is littered with dead businesses created on the belief that they will have the utopian design.
OEDb currently contains reviews of 1,025 programs from 83 accredited online colleges. Unlike other leading online education directories, our database only lists accredited online colleges so that you can be sure that these degrees will be respected by potential employers. Our database allows you to sort reviews by program, college, or degree level.
Caucus is an open-source, web-based eLearning and discussion platform. It is used in universities, non-profits, and companies wherever learning, conversation, and coordination must happen together.
Shareable presents an excerpt from Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, Rushkoff’s introduction to his bold-yet-accessible work. On Tuesday, October 12, Shareable will run an exclusive interview with Rushkoff, followed with an online discussion on October 13 and 14 between Rushkoff and the entire Shareable community. We invite you to take part in the discussion of these provocative and compelling ideas.
When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak. When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. And as we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them.
In the emerging, highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software. It’s really that simple: Program, or be programmed. Choose the former, and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.
For while digital technologies are in many ways a natural outgrowth of what went before, they are also markedly different. Computers and networks are more than mere tools: They are like living things, themselves. Unlike a rake, a pen, or even a jackhammer, a digital technology is programmed. This means it comes with instructions not just for its use, but also for itself. And as such technologies come to characterize the future of the way we live and work, the people programming them take on an increasingly important role in shaping our world and how it works. After that, it’s the digital technologies themselves that will be shaping our world, both with and without our explicit cooperation.
