CHANGE: BACK TO THE FUTURE

Facing new realities

People who still view life through an industrial-age perspective can’t help but think that the world is spinning out of control.  Once a  paradigm shift happens, seemingly random events will start to make sense…previously unmanageable problems will, as if by magic, transform into potential opportunities.

Digital technology allows us to break up-transmit-and reassemble data.  This affords instant communication with no loss of quality and the unprecedented capacity to store and retrieve information.  Its predecessor transmitted information in tact.  The properties of analog communication transmission are structural—much like industrial age machinery and factories.

Historically, human life styles evolve in direct correlation to advancing technology.  The wheel, the compass, and air travel are just a few innovations that radically altered the way we live.  Digital technology is no exception; but this time the mega change has an interesting twist.  A close comparison of the age of extraction (farmers, fishers, hunters) to a digital world (called the “shift-age” by futurist David Houle) reveals that the two eras have much in common.

We may be heading BACK TO THE FUTURE