Entries Tagged 'books' ↓

Today will be remembered as the day of the first non white President of the United States. To reach this day after the session battles between the northern and the states of the southern belt, the discrimination the non whites, Asians and other non whites have suffered for decades is telling and is definitely a change that is a landmark in the history of the world.

Yet it takes longer for a deeper change of mentality. To wipe off the history of decades just by signing in a non white President is no easy task. There is hope for an improvement in racist behaviours yet there is still a long way to go. The question is not the signing in of a non white President, it is more accepting that the President of America can be a non white. The nomination of a person whatever his race or creed may be voted in to lead the most influential, most powerful nation.

Let us pray for Obama and believe that he would perform to the best of his capability.

Here is a wonderful summary (from the NY Times) of a book describing Obama charisma for transformation:

January 19, 2009

Books

From Books, New President Found Voice

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

WASHINGTON — In college, as he was getting involved in protests against the apartheid government in South Africa, Barack Obama noticed, he has written, “that people had begun to listen to my opinions.” Words, the young Mr. Obama realized, had the power “to transform”: “with the right words everything could change -— South Africa, the lives of ghetto kids just a few miles away, my own tenuous place in the world.”

Much has been made of Mr. Obama’s eloquence — his ability to use words in his speeches to persuade and uplift and inspire. But his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world.

Mr. Obama’s first book, “Dreams From My Father” (which surely stands as the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president), suggests that throughout his life he has turned to books as a way of acquiring insights and information from others — as a means of breaking out of the bubble of self-hood and, more recently, the bubble of power and fame. He recalls that he read James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and W. E. B. Du Bois when he was an adolescent in an effort to come to terms with his racial identity and that later, during an ascetic phase in college, he immersed himself in the works of thinkers like Nietzsche and St. Augustine in a spiritual-intellectual search to figure out what he truly believed.

As a boy growing up in Indonesia, Mr. Obama learned about the American civil rights movement through books his mother gave him. Later, as a fledgling community organizer in Chicago, he found inspiration in “Parting the Waters,” the first installment of Taylor Branch’s multivolume biography of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

More recently, books have supplied Mr. Obama with some concrete ideas about governance: it’s been widely reported that “Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book about Abraham Lincoln’s decision to include former opponents in his cabinet, informed Mr. Obama’s decision to name his chief Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as Secretary of State. In other cases, books about F. D. R.’s first hundred days in office and Steve Coll’s “Ghost Wars,“ about Afghanistan and the C.I.A., have provided useful background material on some of the myriad challenges Mr. Obama will face upon taking office.

Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers’ ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.

His predecessor, George W. Bush, in contrast, tended to race through books in competitions with Karl Rove (who recently boasted that he beat the president by reading 110 books to Mr. Bush’s 95 in 2006), or passionately embrace an author’s thesis as an idée fixe. Mr. Bush and many of his aides favored prescriptive books — Natan Sharansky’s “Case for Democracy,” which pressed the case for promoting democracy around the world, say, or Eliot A. Cohen’s “Supreme Command,” which argued that political strategy should drive military strategy. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has tended to look to non-ideological histories and philosophical works that address complex problems without any easy solutions, like Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings, which emphasize the ambivalent nature of human beings and the dangers of willful innocence and infallibility.

What’s more, Mr. Obama’s love of fiction and poetry — Shakespeare’s plays, Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and Marilynne Robinson‘s “Gilead“ are mentioned on his Facebook page, along with the Bible, Lincoln’s collected writings and Emerson’s “Self Reliance“ — has not only given him a heightened awareness of language. It has also imbued him with a tragic sense of history and a sense of the ambiguities of the human condition quite unlike the Manichean view of the world so often invoked by Mr. Bush.

Mr. Obama has said that he wrote “very bad poetry” in college and his biographer David Mendell suggests that he once “harbored some thoughts of writing fiction as an avocation.” For that matter, “Dreams From My Father” evinces an instinctive storytelling talent (which would later serve the author well on the campaign trail) and that odd combination of empathy and detachment gifted novelists possess. In that memoir, Mr. Obama seamlessly managed to convey points of view different from his own (a harbinger, perhaps, of his promises to bridge partisan divides and his ability to channel voters’ hopes and dreams) while conjuring the many places he lived during his peripatetic childhood. He is at once the solitary outsider who learns to stop pressing his nose to the glass and the coolly omniscient observer providing us with a choral view of his past.

As Baldwin once observed, language is both “a political instrument, means, and proof of power,” and “the most vivid and crucial key to identity: it reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity.”

For Mr. Obama, whose improbable life story many voters regard as the embodiment of the American Dream, identity and the relationship between the personal and the public remain crucial issues. Indeed, “Dreams From My Father,” written before he entered politics, was both a searching bildungsroman and an autobiographical quest to understand his roots — a quest in which he cast himself as both a Telemachus in search of his father and an Odysseus in search of a home.

Like “Dreams From My Father,” many of the novels Mr. Obama reportedly admires deal with the question of identity: Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” concerns a man’s efforts to discover his origins and come to terms with his roots; Doris Lessing’s “Golden Notebook” recounts a woman’s struggles to articulate her own sense of self; and Ellison’s “Invisible Man” grapples with the difficulty of self-definition in a race-conscious America and the possibility of transcendence. The poems of Elizabeth Alexander, whom Mr. Obama chose as his inaugural poet, probe the intersection between the private and the political, time present and time past, while the verse of Derek Walcott (a copy of whose collected poems was recently glimpsed in Mr. Obama’s hands) explores what it means to be a “divided child,” caught on the margins of different cultures, dislocated and rootless perhaps, but free to invent a new self.

This notion of self-creation is a deeply American one — a founding principle of this country, and a trope addressed by such classic works as “The Great Gatsby” — and it seems to exert a strong hold on Mr. Obama’s imagination.

In a 2005 essay in Time magazine, he wrote of the humble beginnings that he and Lincoln shared, adding that the 16th president reminded him of “a larger, fundamental element of American life — the enduring belief that we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.”

Though some critics have taken Mr. Obama to task for self-consciously italicizing parallels between himself and Lincoln, there are in fact a host of uncanny correspondences between these two former Illinois state legislators who had short stints in Congress under their belts before coming to national prominence with speeches showcasing their eloquence: two cool, self-contained men, who managed to stay calm and graceful under pressure; two stoics embracing the virtues of moderation and balance; two relatively new politicians who were initially criticized for their lack of experience and for questioning an invasion of a country that, in Lincoln’s words, was “in no way molesting, or menacing the U.S.”

As Fred Kaplan’s illuminating new biography (“Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer”) makes clear, Lincoln, like Mr. Obama, was a lifelong lover of books, indelibly shaped by his reading — most notably, in his case, the Bible and Shakespeare — which honed his poetic sense of language and his philosophical view of the world. Both men employ a densely allusive prose, richly embedded with the fruit of their reading, and both use language as a tool by which to explore and define themselves. Eventually in Lincoln’s case, Mr. Kaplan notes, “the tool, the toolmaker, and the tool user became inseparably one. He became what his language made him.”

The incandescent power of Lincoln’s language, its resonance and rhythmic cadences, as well as his ability to shift gears between the magisterial and the down-to-earth, has been a model for Mr. Obama — who has said he frequently rereads Lincoln for inspiration — and so, too, have been the uses to which Lincoln put his superior language skills: to goad Americans to complete the unfinished work of the founders, and to galvanize a nation reeling from hard times with a new vision of reconciliation and hope.

One of my old fellow colleagues of the FFSI network from Brazil, who had completed her MBA at INSEAD two years ago, told me how impressed she was by the lectures she attended on Strategies conducted by the authors of Blue Ocean Strategy. From my internet search I came across an article on the subject last night. In the present juncture of seemingly economic recession, and financial crisis the thoughts of the authors to explore new market spaces become more relevant than ever.

Blue Ocean Strategy

W. CHAN KIM & RENEE MAUBORGNE

For over 20 years, the key question of strategy has been: How to outpace rivals, how to out-compete? Today we can hardly speak of strategy without referencing competition or using a war analogy. Because land is limited, the only way to advance one’s territory or market share is at the expense of another—a zero-sum game.

Under this theory of strategy, the world and industry conditions are fixed. The structure is taken as given (environmental determinism). This is in-box or within industry boundaries thinking. Here structure determines strategy that leads to performance.

If we look at history, whom do we admire most? Those who out-compete and beat others? Yes, we admire winners. But even more we admire those who create new paradigms in art, music, thought; new businesses that open up new market spaces, create new demand, and improve our lives. That is what expands the pie of economic, intellectual and creative wealth.

How can we create these new market spaces? In economic terms, this is a non-zero-sum game that shifts the focus of strategy from win-lose to win-win. New market spaces (what we call blue oceans) create a win for companies, societies, employees, and sometimes even for the competition. That’s the essence of blue ocean strategy.

Blue ocean strategy goes beyond competing to creating by opening a bigger pie for all. It is a reconstructionist approach to strategy rooted in New Growth Theory. Here strategy determines structure that leads to performance. Under this strategy, even an unattractive industry can be made attractive by the efforts of companies to reconstruct market boundaries.

Consider the New York Public Library (NYPL). From 2002 to 2004, NYPL funding was cut by 20 percent. The competition was intensifying as the internet, super-size bookstores, and other media were capturing a larger share of the shrinking market. Libraries were seen as dull and lackluster. The NYPL was operating in a unattractive industry with a shrinking budget and new tough competitors. In the old view of strategy, the best the NYPL could have hoped for was to go head-to-head against new rivals to maximize its share of a declining market.

Yet in less than 10 months, from 2004 to 2005, with just two staff, a miniscule budget, and scant marketing, Paul Holdengräber, the Director of Public Programs, made the NYPL one of the hottest venues in town. All new demand was created as attendance climbed by 400 percent. Nearly every public program event is sold out.

Holdengräber did not accept market boundaries that defined what libraries can and cannot do. Nor did he focus on beating the competition. Instead he sought to create new demand by reconstructing the market the library operated in to offer the public a leap in value. As Director of Public Programs, Holdengräber was in charge of the traditional public lecture program. Most of these programs were dull book readings or one-way monologues. They rarely attracted more than small clusters of senior citizens.

Holdengräber changed all of that. He infused theater, glamour and the feeling of a French intellectual soiree into the events, newly baptized as LIVE. Holdengräber sought to create carefully thought-out cocktails of artists, poets, politicians, rock stars, and writers to host a dialogue on hot or controversial topics such as obsessions, music downloading, terrorism. He took from theater the idea of infusing the events with a bit of show-like music, dancers and opera singers to stimulate all the senses. And then he made the events two-way discourses between those on stage and the audience, also pushing the events from 6 to 7 p.m. when everyone was free after work. The result is an eclectic splicing of daytime talk show, theater, and French drawing room soiree, and price of the library speaker series. In short, Holdengräber created a blue ocean of new market space. With his strategic actions, he reconstructed the market, creating win-win performance consequences as scores of people who had never entered the library rapidly converted into enthusiastic attendees.

Every organization can break free of the head-to-head zero-sum competition and open up blue oceans of new market space. Our research looks at 150 strategic moves that created blue oceans in 30 industries, spanning back to Ford’s Model T, which created the first blue ocean in the auto industry, up until the strategic moves of Apple’s iPod and iTunes and Cirque du Soleil.

We wondered, Is there a pattern to the creation of blue oceans? If so, we can systematically pursue blue oceans. We found six paths to remaking market boundaries in an opportunity-maximizing, risk-minimizing way. None require special foresight about the future. All are based on looking at familiar data with new perspective.

These paths challenge the six assumptions that define how most organizations build their strategies—assumptions that keep them locked in the red ocean of bloody competition: define their industries similarly, look at their industries through the lens of the same strategic groups, focus on capturing more of existing customers, define the scope of their products and services similarly, accept the functional or emotional orientation of their industries, and focus on current competitive threats. The result is me-too strategies that lead to head-to-head competition.

To create new market space, you need to gain insight into all the factors you compete on that no longer add value (factors that can be eliminated or reduced for huge cost savings) and into factors you should create that your industry never before offered to unlock new demand and set yourself on a profitable growth trajectory.

Ram Charam interview with Business Week shown in this week’s issue is timely. I watched with pleasure the video. In this uncertain period: Cash is King. Take care not to be trapped in a cash crisis. Select and screen your customers to ensure that they do not drag you in a cash trap.

No wonder the theme of BW this week is Managing Through a Crisis.

After writing on Howard Gardner yesterday,I got so excited when I went back to the website of the Learning Revolution to read the Foreword and introduction of the new book: Unlimited.

I wished that our  Mauritian educationists would read about the happeings in the world of learning as described in this new book by Gordon Dryden & Janette Vos.

How do we get our responsible parties of learning to espouse the new ideas and to join the band wagon to make our nation ahead of the heap? Does any one of you my blog readers have any ideas to propose?

Here is my last night’s interesting and somewhat lenghty  reading:

The more the new technology soars,

the more the need for holistic balance

Even thirty years ago, most teachers were taught that intelligence was fixed and

could be measured from early childhood by standardized I.Q. tests.

Even today, in the country where I have spent most of my adult life, almost the

entire American schooling system is based around standardized tests of standardized

knowledge as if all children were the same. They are not.

Some of the world’s best neuroscientists have proved for over two decades that all

of us are smart in different ways. We each have a different learning style, a different

thinking style, and different ways of studying and working. So the school of the future

will be personalized for every individual learning style.

We also learn best in a happy, safe environment, with good diet and nutrition, in

caring, loving families, and in schools where lifeskills and holistic learning are even

more important than learning to master the new tools of high technology.

So capitalizing on the new world of instant information and interactive technology

is only one side of the path to a potentially unlimited future. Every good parent and

teacher knows the other side involves the whole person, in a caring home and a caring

community—with brain, mind and body acting together in balance.

At its simplest, you cannot learn well if you’re hungry or fearful. You cannot learn

well if your brain has been stunted from birth because you’re under-nourished. You

cannot benefit from a world of potential plenty if you live in a country with polluted

water, unsanitary sewerage, without adequate food, clothing and security; in world

where sometimes obscene wealth is surrounded by overwhelming poverty.

An over-riding message of this book is that all of us can also learn best when we

use the whole world as a classroom  especially when that world is a welcoming,

caring, sharing one. But even in the world’s most affluent countries in North America,

western Europe, Australia and New Zealand many are handicapped by poverty,

emotional stress, bad nutrition and poor family environments.

We also all live in a series of interlocking eco-systems, where pollution, environmental

degradation and climate change are crying out for new solutions. We live,

too, in a world where a $600-billion-a-year pharmaceutical drugs industry is mistaken

for a real health policy. Often where inadequate schooling is mistaken for real-life

education. Where inefficient bureaucracy is mistaken for social innovation.

As we two co-authors have travelled to many parts of the world, we have seen the

positive, holistic alternatives that can match the new digital wealth-producing revolution

with an equal balance of social, emotional, mental and cultural enrichment.

❏ Children of poor parents in developing countries, like India, have filled schools

whenever daily meal programs have been introduced.

❏ Entire school-age populations have prospered as in Finland when the government

provides high-quality teachers and teacher training programs.

❏ The soaring world population, in over-crowded poor countries, is matched by a

growing environmental crisis and equally successful sustainable technologies.

❏ Small nations like Singapore, Ireland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and

New Zealand have shown that size is not important for national success.

❏ The enormous cost of the war in Iraq proves that money is not the problem. Nobel

prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz estimates that war will end up costing at

least $3 trillion.1 So even a tiny fraction of that, invested in the right way, would more

than solve the world’s problems of poverty, malnutrition, poor health—and provide a

decent basic education for all.

❏ Ideally, too, we now know that well-prepared parents are the world’s best first

teachers. A happy, healthy home is the world’s best school. A healthy, caring community

is the world’s best playground. A secure, ecologically balanced world is the

planet’s best classroom—that unlimited global classroom we all share together.

History’s newest revolution

and the seven keys to unlock it

All of us, together, are surging through the most profound revolution in human history.

Its impact is personal, national, global and, in many ways, unlimited.

At its core are seven catalysts, now converging and fusing to change the way we

live, work, play, learn, teach, think and create at any age.

This new networked age makes it urgent to rethink entirely what we mean by education,

learning, teaching and schooling. For education is changing more than it has

since the invention of the printing press over 500 years ago and compulsory classroom

schooling 300 years ago. Now the world is your classroom and learning is lifelong.

Already two billion students spend four-fifths of their waking hours outside school,

in an iPod, YouTube, Google, Bebo, Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, Skype and Sim-

City world so different from yesterday’s deskbound classrooms.

Business Week magazine says lifelong learning will soon be the world’s greatest

growth industry, with $370 billion a year in sales as millions learn online. And

Google CEO Eric Schmidt predicts that before long all the world’s information will

be instantly available on pocket computers like the Apple iPod. Then students will

be able to find answers quicker than professors can ask questions.1

The keys to unlock the future are simple but revolutionary. Once unlocked, that

revolution has the power to unleash the combined talents of millions:

1. It’s PERSONAL: where information and learning programs can be personalized and tailored to your own passions, talents, interests and needs. And where you

can share your own talents and skills with millions—for both fun and income.

2. It’s INTERACTIVE: with new digital platforms and templates to make it easy,

simple and fun to learn by doing, playing, creating, producing and interacting a new

world of creative experiences.

3. It’s GLOBAL: the ever-expanding world-wide Internet owned by no one, used

by everyone; where the combined knowledge of humankind is now available to virtually

all at the tap of a digital keyboard or a touch screen.

4. It’s INSTANT: for the fi rst time in history, the ability to learn anything “just in

time”, when you need it, as you need it, at your request, and in your own way.

5. It’s MAINLY FREE: or nearly so—one low-cost click-at-a-time. The World

Wide Web, browsers, search engines and digital platforms make it easy to access

much information free, and to download other information for a few cents. Even free

international phonecalls.

6. It’s EASILY SHARED: the new world of collaborative networks to share your

abilities with anyone, anywhere. To store free online and on community websites

your family photographs, videos, music and even your digital multimedia portfolios

to demonstrate what you know and what you can do.

7. It’s CO-CREATIVE: if we can dream it, we can now do it together with millions

around the world. Now we can merge our own talents into multi-talented global

teams, to produce new innovative answers to major global problems.

These seven keys have already unlocked new doors to transform industries, countries,

communities, commerce, communications and companies. They have the power

to reinvent every aspect of lifelong learning, teaching and schooling. But when these

“tipping points” link with other sweeping changes, the impact will be even greater:

❏ The neuroscience revolution: our new-found abilities to unlock the incredible

potential of the human brain and mind, and shatter many of the myths on which much

of “education” is based. That research shows that everyone can learn anything faster

and more efficiently. That learning starts in the womb and flowers through life.

❏ The genetic revolution: the knowledge that “all life is one”: that all living things

are made from the same genetic code where we’ll soon have access to our own.

❏ The demographic revolution: in which, of all people who have ever lived

longer than sixty-five years, two-thirds are alive today—while two billion, mainly in

the poor world, are under age twenty. But now the wisdom of age and experience can

link, in new ways, with the soaring hi-tech skills of children and grandchildren.

❏ Above all, the new Open Revolution: at long last the chance to find a genuine

new way to reinvent society. Not only a choice between free-enterprise capitalism and

state-controlled socialism. But a new unlimited choice of cooperative enterprise and

collaborative co-creativity.

For global education the need has never has been greater.

❏ As Philippe Legrain summarizes it in Open World: The truth about globalization:

“One in five of the world’s 6.6 billion people live on less than a dollar a day almost

half on less than two dollars a day. More than 850 million cannot read or write. Nearly

a billion do not have access to clean water, 2.4 billion to basic sanitation. Eleven million

children under five die each year from preventable diseases.”

But already the tools exist to share some of the world’s best and simplest learning

and health programs with billions of poor people: to provide them with most of the

unlimited opportunities that today only rich countries and people enjoy.

❏ Those wealthy countries are already spending billions on these new tools that

have the power to reinvent education. But most are “doing it wrong”.

Very simply, they are trying to patch the technology of the twenty-first century on

to a classroom system invented for a bygone age: a school system gradually conceived

after the invention of the printing press in Europe more than 500 years ago.

❏ Where kindergartens, schools, colleges, universities and organizations are “doing

it right”, the results are remarkable. This book abounds with them. They start

with individual brainpower and the seven keys to unlock the future that are already

transforming nearly every other aspect of society. Together they provide the catalyst

to reinvent education itself: personally, locally, nationally and globally.

1. It’s PERSONAL

For everyone, everywhere, any time, in your own way

Two years ago, Time magazine named its Person of the Year simply: YOU.

Its cover subtitle puts it succinctly: “Yes, you. You control the Information Age.

Welcome to your world.”2 That cover story simplifi es its main message: “This was the

year that the people took control of the media. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web

2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution. It’s

a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making

them matter.”

Time calls it a massive social experiment: “an opportunity to build a new kind of

international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but

citizen to citizen, person to person.” In some ways it’s a “new digital democracy”:

❏ Blogs or Web-logs: More than 100 million of personally-written websites flooding

the Internet for anyone to share not counting 72 million in China alone.

❏ Mobile phones: soaring to 3.3 billion in use around the world in 2008, predicted

to rocket to at least four billion before the end of 2009.

❏ eBay.com: the world’s biggest online auction site where 200 million registered

users each day trade goods and services worth $100 million: a new global community

“flea market” where anyone can sell to anyone anywhere.

❏ MySpace.com: a new online community of over 100 million active users.

❏ Flickr.com: which hosts two billion photos in the world’s biggest album.

❏ Facebook.com also with more than 100 million registered users by mid-2008,

growing by 25,000 a day, and 65 billion “page views” a month as friends share their

experiences, videos and photographs.

❏ YouTube.com the video-sharing phenomena where visitors to the site can

choose from 83.4 million video-clips. YouTube is the forerunner to a completely new

form of international online television. Only a few years back such videos would have

been shot by professionals on expensive cameras and edited by other experts. Todaythey’re even shot by young children, edited on home computers and viewed on a new

breed of digital pocket-phone-computers the size of a pack of playing cards.

No longer is education a one-way presentation process, with students as passive

receivers. Now you can co-create your own lifelong learning plan and keep on expanding

your individual talent with new skills throughout life.

2. It’s INTERACTIVE

Easy-to-use templates make it simple at any age

In yesterday’s world, one-year-olds loved to see and hear their parents read colorful

nursery-rhyme books.

Today’s one-year-olds still do. With the help of their parents, they can now also

flop their tiny hands anywhere on to a computer keyboard, and see shapes, numbers

and colors and hear them in eight languages: on BabyWow software, invented by a

parent for his new baby.

Yesterday, four and five year-olds loved to color-in scrapbooks, with crayons and

finger-painting. They still do. They can also now create brilliant and colorful digitized

artwork on such programs as Kid Pix Deluxe.

Yesterday, children went to the movies. They still go. They can also use Microsoft

Movie Maker and Apple iMovie software to professionally edit videos they have shot

themselves or in teams.

In many New Zealand public schools, six-year-olds, from their fi rst day in grade

one, start using video cameras to explore their world and record it. They quickly learn

to edit video and compose music.

In yesterday’s world, seven-year-olds lucky enough to live near the sea loved to

swim and build magic sand castles. They still do. They can also now download free

software from the Web to make their own three-dimensional animations.

Great teachers have always involved their students in interactive learning. Now we

can each use twenty-first-century tools to create an entire new world of interactive

experiences: our own Disneylands if we wish.

3. It’s GLOBAL

The Web owned by no one, but used by almost everyone

Better still, we can go on learning and sharing new skills throughout life: we can

co-create the future together.

Says Canadian researcher and author Don Tapscott in The Digital Economy:

“We are at the dawn of a new Age of Networked Intelligence an age that is giving

birth to a new economy, a new politics and a new society.”

Says British scientist and author Matt Ridley, in his book, Genome: The autobiography

of a species: “I genuinely believe we are living through the greatest intellectual

moment in history. Bar none.”

Says Dee Hock, the founder of Visa International and author of Birth of the Chaordic

Age: “The undeniable fact is that we have created the greatest explosion of capacity

to receive, store, utilize and transform information in history. There is no way to turn

back. Whether we recognize it or not, whether we will it or not, whether we welcome

it or not, whether it is constructive or not, we are caught up together all of us and the

earth as well in the most sudden, the most profound, the most diverse and complex

change in the history of civilization. Perhaps in the history of earth itself.”3

Says Professor Michio Kaku, author of Visions: “Since the 1950s, the power of our

computers has advanced by a factor of roughly ten billion. By 2020, microprocessors

will likely be as cheap and plentiful as scrap paper, scattered by the millions into the

environment, allowing us to place intelligent systems everywhere.”4

Says Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web: “The vision I still have of the Web is

about anything being potentially connected with anything.”5

And from Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page, on its mission: “To organize the

world’s information and make it available to anyone.”

But the new co-creative learning revolution will be equally astounding.

❏ The Hewlett Foundation, inspired by the life of Silicon Valley pioneer Bill Hewlett,

has invested $68 million charting precisely how it will come about: led by some of our

best universities in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. ❏ The International Baccalaureate movement already provides a global curriculum

to 539,000 students, aged from three to nineteen, in 2,051 schools in 125 countries.7

❏ SUN Microsystems’ co-founder Scott McNealy has set up Curriki as The Global

Education and Learning Network, to work towards a worldwide online curriculum for

K-12 schools.8

❏ John Seely Brown, former head of the Silicon Valley Palo Alto Research Center

that invented the personal-computer age, has spelled out how young students themselves

are already leading that revolution.9

And brilliant schools, like Singapore’s Overseas Family School, Britain’s Cramlington

Community High School, Mexico’s Thomas Jefferson Institute, and The Master’s

Academy in Canada, are pioneering new ways to globalize lessons.

4. lt’s INSTANT

Just in time, when you need it, as you need it

For most of the last century, the assembly lines of Ford and General Motors typified

the mass-production revolution.

Then Japan’s Toyota introduced just-in-time mass-production, with all the hundreds

of car-parts delivered each day as needed, where needed. Soon Japan and its methods

dominated the world’s car industry.

Then in the early 1990s a small band of computer-science students and graduates

started to use online digital and interactive technology to reinvent the entire world:

❏ Tim Berners-Lee invented the tools for the World Wide Web.

❏ Mark Andreessen and his fellow Illinois students linked with fi nancier Jim Clark

to produce Netscape, the world’s fi rst real browser—to instantly surf the Web.

❏ Then students Sergey Brin and Larry Page invented Google, with the incredible

ability to soon scan billions of Web sites and fi nd answers in under half a second. Now

with more than 300 million visitors every day.

❏ Atomic Learning,10 a company set up by ex-teachers, offers 35,000 instant, ondemand

personalized video tutorials to provide any subscriber with easy-to-followgraphic instructions to learn more than 100 computer programs: from editing video to

making three-dimensional animations.

But probably the greatest early impact has been with music: and the power to allow

fans anywhere in the world to download their favorite tracks, instantly and on demand,

from a variety of online libraries, generally for under $1 a track.

The most popular service is Apple’s iTunes, which by early 2008 offered a library

of more than six million tracks. That links directly to Apple’s other major twenty-fi rst

century innovation, the iPod. A brilliantly-designed personal music library, it’s also

only the size of a pack of playing cards, yet able to hold up to 15,000 personally-chosen

tracks on the most expensive iPod.

And if students can download their choice of music instantly on demand, why not

the same access to instant learning programs?

5. It’s MAINLY FREE

Or nearly free: often one low-cost click at a time

Imagine any sales manager twenty years ago deciding to give away millions of copies

of his company’s main product absolutely free. The result: probably instant dismissal

or referral to a psychiatrist. But that’s what Netscape did in 1994 when it launched its

fi rst Navigator browser. Within a few weeks forty million computer buffs around the

globe had downloaded it free. Soon Netscape was selling other advanced copies to

business. And when their company “went public” in 1995 it turned fi nancier Jim Clark

into an instant billionaire. It also made multimillionaires out of Marc Andreessen and

his fellow young Illinois college developers. Since then that’s been one of the keys to

the Web-based revolution: give away instant service free—and sell the extras.

But the new ingredient: sell those extras “one low-cost click at a time”—on some

sites as low as 5 cents a click—just like Google does with its sponsored advertising

links. Millions of people can now turn their own highly-specialized talents into saleable

products or services. They can give away millions of free summaries on Google,

and then sell the extras for a few cents or dollars on every click.

Now an entirely new marketing concept has soared into prominence. Chris Anderson, the Editor in Chief of Wired magazine, calls it “the long tail”.11 Up till recently,

he says, we lived in “the age of the blockbuster”. Only the world’s top-selling books

or long-playing records featured in most bookstores or radio-station play-lists.

Now, as Apple has proved, if only ten copies each of fi ve million songs are sold, on

average, at under $1 each, that would achieve sales of $50 million. Apple has made

big profi ts from that.

But Apple has made even bigger ones by selling more than 140 million iPods in six

years. In that time iTunes has sold over four billion songs, 50 million TV shows and

1.3 million movies. That’s the kind of impact that Google’s Schmidt is talking about

when he says “we should think of all the world’s information being available in the

equivalent of an iPod”.

And Harvard Business Professor Clayton M. Christensen—an expert on “disruptive

innovation”—predicts this revolution will go further. No later than 2014, he says, 25

percent of all high school courses will also be available online—later personalized to

each student’s preferred learning style. By 2019 that will be 50 per cent.12

6. It’s EASILY SHARED

The new world of collaborative networks

All seven “keys” are of vital importance for education. But none more so than the

new world of cooperative networks of teachers and students.

Wikipedia is the ideal example.13 Ten years ago it didn’t exist. Other encyclopedias,

such as Britannica and World Book, sold for $1,000 or more. Microsoft’s Encarta

soon surpassed them in popularity, given away free or sold cheaply on a CD-rom to

encourage sales of Windows. But Encarta was based on an inferior printed encyclopedia,

with only 4,500 articles.

Now Wikipedia is by far the world’s largest encyclopedia. It has around 2.5 million

English entries, with over ten million in all its 252 languages: instantly available, free,

on the Web. All are contributed free by more than 75,000 volunteers.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales states his aim succinctly: to give “every single person

free access to the sum of all human knowledge”.14 Now apply that same principle tolearning and schooling. The world currently has around 59 million K-12 (kindergarten

to twelfth-grade) teachers, with about 1.5 billion students.

Silicon Valley researchers say around 2 percent of adults are innovators and another

13 percent “early adopters”. Simple arithmetic shows 15 per cent of 59 million equals

8,850,000 teachers. Imagine each of those contributing only one favorite teaching or

learning idea in a year, and sharing it with teachers around the world. Now imagine

one each a month!

Britain’s Promethean company already provides a model. It makes some of the

world’s best interactive digital whiteboards (at right), with built-in touch-screen software

to teach mathematics, science, geography and other subjects. Promethean also

coordinates collaborative online classrooms. In them, science and other teachers at

every level can share their best lesson plans online with teachers around the world.

7. It’s CO-CREATIVE

To link your unique talents with multi-talented teams

As we’ll explore in later chapters, everyone has a talent to be good and probably

great at something. The trick is to fi nd that something, and now to blend it together

with the talents of others—anywhere.

Most people—if provided with the opportunities—probably have a passion for

something. And when both passion and talent are unleashed, those opportunities are

virtually limitless. Great schools are already achieving this by enthusing students to

set up their own personalized learning plans. And to keep on upgrading them, and their

skills, throughout life”: to be self-directed, self-motivated lifelong learners.

Many brain researchers, such as Harvard’s Professor Howard Gardner, have argued

for more than twenty years that intelligence is not fi xed and that each of us is smart in

different ways. Many schools now include Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences”

into their daily program—so that students can build on their own strengths and learn

from the strengths of others.

But the new twenty-fi rst century world of digital multimedia means that students,

even from early elementary-school age, can blend their own talent into semi-professional multi-talented teams. Scripting, shooting, editing and providing music and props

for school videotape, for example, requires many different talents: technical, visual,

musical, graphic, linguistic and animation.

Wikipedia provides a brilliant one-dimensional model for cooperative sharing and

co-creation. But leading American digital games producer Marc Prensky has an even

better idea.15

Like the co-authors of this book, he wants the world’s students to reinvent education,

reinvent schooling, reinvent the way the world learns and teaches.

And he wants them to do it by cooperatively building digital learning games with

the same appeal that Sony PlayStation 3, Nintendo and Microsoft interactive games

already have for tens of millions of children in every continent. Kids love them because

they’re interactive fun.

Now imagine tens of thousands of individual colleges, schools or millions of classrooms

each taking responsibility for becoming the expert on one “subject” or aspect

of each subject. The goal: the best learning software, produced by the students of the

world, and shared freely with all other students around the world—on every aspect of

every “subject”. Welcome to the real Free World. Linux, the open-source computer

operating system inspired by Finnish student Linus Torvalds, was co-created by thousands

of computer-science students around the world. You can now download it free

from the Web, like you can download low-cost or free software or music.

“Linux,” says Eric Raymond, “was the fi rst project to make a conscious, successful

effort to use the entire world as a talent pool.”16 A small group of students on the new

Web fi rst proved this by together co-designing a complete computer operating system.

Now one million are working together on other digital projects—and a new business

model: instead of the winner-takes-all—all can be winners.

In pockets around the planet, talented school teachers have also started the reinvention.

All great teachers involve their students in challenging, interactive projects.

Some of their interactive classroom innovations are brilliant, but serve only twenty

to forty students. We’ve called that The Learning Revolution 1.0.

Now the overwhelming need is to “scale up” their efforts—to make them available

to hundreds of millions—to use the whole world as this new talent pool. And this is

The Learning Revolution 2.0.

Just as genius students like Google’s Brin and Page can turn their combined talents

into a company valued at $170 billion—so too can the world’s greatest teachers and

other bright students share their talents with millions—some free and others as incomeearners.

❏ At Singapore’s Overseas Family School, with international students from

seventy-four countries, teachers and students have digitized most of their lesson plans,

for sharing with others. And they’ve also used their own excellent computer network

to provide individual learning programs for all 3,500 students.

❏ At Mexico’s K-12 Thomas Jefferson Institute, highly creative students from its

high schools and middle schools each produce one Broadway musical a year to professional

standards: from The Disney High School Musical to Cats and Wicked. And

the Institute has ongoing global relationships with MIT’s MediaLab, NASA, Apple,

Microsoft and top-tier schools and universities around the world. Their high school

students even take the Harvard Business School’s business courses.

❏ In New Zealand, the Government abolished its national Education Department

almost twenty years ago and replaced it with a much smaller policy-recommending

Ministry. Since then all schools, public and private, have been charter schools, run by

local boards. Innovation has soared.

At two new special-designation schools in Christchurch, students use the entire city

as a classroom. Each student has a personalized learning plan, worked out in partnership

with parents and learning advisers. Each plan starts with the student’s own passions,

talents, interests, vision and drive. The very names of the schools—Discovery One

(for primary students) and Unlimited (for high school)—echo the emphasis.

New Zealand’s new national curriculum guidelines are also being hailed as an international

model for K-12 education.17 The vision is for young people who are confi

dent, connected and enthusiastic lifelong learners, with goals to achieve excellence, innovation and diversity as well as twenty-fi rst century literacy and numeracy.

A completely new approach is also about to revolutionize university life. A group

of educational leaders have used a $68 million fund from the Hewlett Foundation to

show how the world can build a new online Global Cyberspace Learning Web. This

will be co-created by all, shared by all, expanded by all.

But we stress that this is not a book that recommends interactive technology and

the Internet as new all-embracing “magic bullets” to transform education. Only a fool

worships his tools. But over centuries dramatic new disruptive technologies—from

the wheel to the plow, sail-power to steam-engines, printed books to electric power,

automobiles to television—have ushered in great social changes.

Those changes transcend the technologies themselves. And this new revolution is

more about the social and personal changes than the technologies that spur them.

Link those new innovations with the incredible powers of the human brain—and

the new breakthroughs to unleash the unique power of the human mind—and the

scope of the new revolution is truly unlimited.

As Gary Hammel summarizes it in Leading The Revolution: “We are now standing

on the threshold of a new age—an age of revolution. Change has changed. No longer

is it additive. No longer does it move in a straight line. In the twenty-fi rst century,

change is discontinuous, abrupt, seditious. In a single generation, the cost of decoding

the human gene has dropped from millions to less than a hundred bucks. The cost of

storing a megabyte of data has dropped from hundreds of dollars to essentially nothing.

The Web is rapidly becoming a dense global matrix of connections between people,

their ideas and their resources.”18

In this new world, says Hamel, the future is not something that happens to you, but

something you create.

And now we can co-create that future together, wherever we live.

The Mauritian education systems seem to measure only 2 intelligence centers.This is not the case only for Mauritius, it is the sin of most non progessive nations.  What about the other intelligences? Is it time for a reform? Do we have the political guts to undertake such reforms for the betterment of our nations?

Howard Gardner, world renowned educationist has more to say based on the new discoveries on the human brain.

Your many different “intelligence centers”, what are they?

Ask Harvard psychologist Professor Howard Gardner, and he’ll tell you that visual ability is only one of your many “intelligences”. He’s spent years analyzing the human brain and its impact on education. And his conclusions are simple but highly important.
Gardner says we each have several different types of intelligence. Two of them are very highly valued in traditional education.
He calls the first one linguistic intelligence: our ability to read, write and communicate with words. Obviously this ability is very highly developed in authors, poets and orators.

The second is logical or mathematical intelligence: our ability to reason and calculate. This is most developed in scientists, mathematicians, lawyers, judges.
Traditionally, most so-called intelligence tests have focused on these two talents. And much schooling around the world concentrates on those two abilities. But Gardner says this has given us a warped and limited view of our learning potential. He lists the other main distinct intelligences as:
Musical intelligence: obviously highly developed in composers, conductors and top musicians, from Beethoven to Louis Armstrong;
Spatial or visual intelligence: the kind of ability used by architects, sculptors, painters, navigators and pilots – what the current authors would argue are, in fact, two separate forms of intelligence.
Kinesthetic intelligence or physical intelligence: very highly developed in athletes, dancers, gymnasts and perhaps surgeons;
Interpersonal intelligence: the ability to relate to others – the kind of ability that seems natural with salesmen, motivators, negotiators.
And intrapersonal intelligence or introspective intelligence: the ability of insight, to know oneself – the kind of ability that gives some people great intuition. The kind of ability that lets you tap into the tremendous bank of information stored in your subconscious mind.
But these are not merely arbitrary functions that Professor Gardner has invented for a Ph. D.dissertation. He says brain surgery and research have shown that some of these “intelligences” or abilities are located in distinct parts of your brain. Severely damage that part and you could lose that ability. That is why strokes can affect the ability to walk or talk, depending on which part of the brain is affected.
Professor Gardner now considers there is another intelligence: “naturalist”: the ability to work with and harmonize with nature. The two current authors consider this might better be grouped with several other types of learning styles, which we cover in the book: the Learning Revolution.*

* Professor Gardner’s model does not cover what we consider one of the most important “intelligences” of all: the ability to create totally new concepts by linking together information from different parts of the brain. Many modern thinkers, such as British Professor Charles Handy, say there are several other intelligences, such as plain common sense. But Professor Gardner’s research is a brilliant starting point for designing schools that cater to different abilities and learning styles.

In their dwellings, they love the earth.
In their hearts, they love what is profound.
In their friendship, they love humanity.
In their words, they love sincerity.
In government, they love peace.
In business, they love ability.
In their actions, they love timeliness.
It is because they do not compete
that there is no resentment.

Those who know others are wise.
Those who know themselves are enlightened.
Those who overcome others require force.
Those who overcome themselves need strength.
Those who are content are wealthy.
Those who persevere have will power.
Those who do not lose their center endure.
Those who die but maintain their power live eternally.

The more restrictions there are, the poorer the people.
The more sharp weapons, the more trouble in the state.
The more clever cunning, the more contrivances.
The more rules and regulations, the more thieves and robbers.
Therefore the wise say,
“Do not interfere, and people transform themselves.
Love peace, and people do what is right.
Do not intervene, and people prosper.
Have no desires, and people live simply.

These are wise words from the Chinese philosopher from  Sanderson Beck

Ilian Mihov says that OBAMA could help US economy to recover by mid-2009. Let us hope that his prediction comes true.

The victory of Barack Obama, the first African-American to become president of the United States, could help the troubled US economy recover by the middle of next year, says Ilian Mihov, professor of economics at INSEAD.

“Obama’s platform when he was campaigning was to increase government spending and cut taxes. If the change is aggressive and very determined, I think the US economy can start recovering by the middle of next year,” Mihov says.

With the US economy being dragged into recession and economic conditions expected to deteriorate further this quarter, the Federal Reserve aggressively cut its key rate to 1.0 per cent from 1.5 per cent at its rate-setting meeting earlier this month.

Mihov believes the Federal Reserve has not necessarily exhausted all the tools needed to stimulate the economy with the recent aggressive rate cut. “Lowering interest rates is necessary but this does not exhaust all the tools available to the Fed in order to stop deteriorating demand.”

Should economic conditions deteriorate further in the months ahead, the Fed will likely ease rates further to near zero, much like what Japan has done in recent years. But the Fed’s strategic options do not end when key US interest rates fall to zero or near zero.

The Fed can inject liquidity into the financial system by other means other than cutting interest rates, Mihov says. The Fed has been providing liquidity to banks, causing the Fed’s balance sheet to more than double to US$2 trillion from US$890 billion, he says.

But because banks have refused to lend due to the prevailing uncertainty, monetary aggregates in the US are shrinking , prompting the Fed to become the lender of last resort to companies in need.

“The Fed has made unorthodox changes,” Mihov says.

Among the key changes the Fed introduced under the leadership of Ben Bernanke is the purchase of commercial paper from companies which cannot get access to normal credit channels.

“This is unprecedented. At the same time, this is a way of minimising the impact of the credit crunch,” Mihov says, noting that the credit extended by the Fed to cash-strapped companies ballooned to US$240-250 billion within a period of just 10 days.

More work needs to be done to stimulate the economy and counter deflation.

“It remains to be seen whether the US Congress will immediately approve an aggressive fiscal stimulus. As we saw in the case of the US$700 billion bailout package discussions, sometimes politicians do deviate in the wrong direction instead of being focused on the fact that the faster you do this, the smaller will the damage be,” Mihov says.

It took Congress several weeks in September and October to pass the bailout plan even as bank failures in the US mounted, with Lehman Brothers going bankrupt and mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae being nationalised.

The handover of power from George W. Bush to Obama is now crucial.

“Transitions are a very serious issue. If you look at 1932-1933, Roosevelt was elected in November 1932 but somehow he stepped into the White House only in March 1933,” Mihov says.

“The biggest banking panic in the US occurred in January 1933 during the transition when the outgoing president did not have much an incentive to do anything and when the incoming president did not have the power to do much,” he says.

Should the politicians acknowledge the severity of the economic problems and realise that the longer they wait the bigger the problems could become, Mihov says it is possible to start discussing possible solutions and move ahead.

The Green Revolution

Hot, Flat, and Crowded culminates in a level-headed

analysis of the best answers to the hot-plusflat-

plus-crowded equation. Friedman’s

goal is to energize a green revolution, the

likes of which the world has never seen.

Since climate change, rising middle classes

and swelling populations are vital concerns,

Friedman’s response is more than a simple,

short-term solution. Instead of only fighting

the symptoms of planet wide problems, he

proposes a complete “Clean Energy

System” to eliminate the many sources of

our possible demise.

Friedman’s latest book also serves as a

wake-up call to leaders at all levels to

“actually generate the vision and authority

to pull that system together.” This requires

thinking past the next round of sound bites

and the next season of elections to develop a plan of

action for guiding the country to better economic and

environmental health. Friedman writes that this effort

also requires the leadership of a U.S. president who is

capable of rallying the country to change its wasteful

ways and igniting the innovation of a nation. That kind

of authority can be rare, Friedman points out, but it will

be required for a truly green revolution to make the

necessary changes to avoid disaster.

Presidential Power

While analyzing the role of the U.S. presidency in

leading the country through the massive changes needed

to keep the country competitive, Friedman points out

that Abraham Lincoln won the Civil War by expanding

the federal government. He adds that Franklin

Roosevelt also transformed a weak federal government,

turning it into the organization that conquered the Great

Depression and won World War II.

Likewise, Friedman writes that it is possible for another

strong president to lead the country through the

green revolution. Using every democratic means necessary,

Friedman explains, the president must have priorities

that include a new integrated national energy system

that replaces our currently inefficient grid. Regulated by

too many agencies rather than a single powerful guiding

entity, the current system, Friedman says, is a jumble of

mismatched parts that makes it hard to improve efficiency

and add alternative sources of energy to the mix.

Friedman writes that the United States needs an energy

policy whose primary focus is making clean power a

priority. It starts with innovating cleaner alternatives to

oil and generating cleaner power. It continues by building

a real system for creating greater efficiency and conservation.

In other words, Friedman proposes, the country

needs a “real” Department of Energy that works to

help the green revolution take root.

Turning problems into opportunities is the underlying

power of Hot, Flat, and Crowded. By considering all the

facts and issues involved in the big picture, and then formulating

the data into answers to the enormous difficulties

he describes, Friedman aims to shift the world’s perspective

away from conspicuous consumption and

toward conscious consumption. Meanwhile, he offers the

tools to make those adjustments permanent. Friedman

proposes immediate actions that can lead the country and

the world down a more sustainable path. He also confronts

our issues head on, turning them into opportunities

for valuable rewards. Through well-rounded reporting

and encouragement of positive change, he offers clarity

and ammunition for the uphill battle through the hot,

flat and crowded quagmire to a better place.

The Energy-Climate Era

At this pivotal point where the Energy-Climate Era

could go in an even more dangerous direction, we have

a chance to build sustainable solutions before our problems

grow too large to manage. Friedman’s latest book

offers timely hope to those overwhelmed by the clear

evidence of our difficult path ahead, which grows wilder

with challenges from all sides. The ride to prosperity

will be long and daunting, Friedman writes, but the

solutions to our problems are possible and abundant

with the proper attitudes and leadership.

Sustainable development is within our grasp, and

the green revolution is a helpful guide through which

we can review our actions and our work. By showing

readers how this revolution works, what it is trying

to accomplish and how each individual can make a

difference on a planetary scale, Hot, Flat, and Crowded

offers both concern and hope, along with the rich

ideas that can help hope become contagious. In it,

the opinions and ideas of many experts make the

imperative for action clearer with every chapter, so

readers can understand the importance of sustainable

solutions to entrenched habits and behaviors. According

to environmental law expert John Dernbach, the

decisions Americans make about sustainable

development “are decisions about who we are, what

we value, what kind of world we want to live in,

and how we want to be remembered.”

Thanks to Friedman’s vast experience and insight into

globalization and the resources involved in its evolution,

he is revered as a writer who works to keep humanity

from becoming an endangered species. His prescription

for redefining the most important issues of our day and

reigniting the passion of the country for innovating solutions

where they are needed most is massive yet realistic.

In the end, he points out, we need to rise to this enormous

challenge if we want to continue to live on a

planet that is hotter, flatter and more crowded than ever

before. By helping to clarify the focus of the United

States and the rest of the world on the most pressing

issues they face together, and on better strategies for

moving forward together, Thomas Friedman and his

book Hot, Flat, and Crowded deserve all the praise and

popularity they’ve been given by worldwide institutions,

media and admirers.

Quelques années de cela, j’ai eu l’occasion d’assister à une conférence par Kjell Nordstrom, professeur à l’Institute of International Business de la Stockholm School of Economics. C’était dans le cadre de la convention annuelle des franchisés SPAR.

Seul le talent fait danser les capitaux. Plus question de continuer à faire des affaires de façon traditionnelle : place au business funky.

La technologie, les institutions et les valeurs en sont chamboulées. Elles constituent la triade d’énergies à l’origine du changement, s’influençant mutuellement et créant un village mondial chaotique en proie aux tribus et aux fusions.

Ces forces motrices sont en train de mettre en place un monde connecte original. Alors préparez vous à l’e(motion-nel)-commerce.

Depuis Norstrom et Ridderstrale ont publie un livre

Je vous conseille de lire le livre, à défaut, lisez un critique du livre qui résume en onze pages, excellemment bien les idées des auteurs.

The Nexus of Time and Space

My reading today brings me to the works of Paul Virilio who studies Time and Space and the notion the society is making out of these elements in the future. Our paradigm of Time and Space are evolving at a great speed because of technology. To be everywhere, whilst being anywhere at any one time seems to be the essence of the day.

Internet and the speed of technology bring the world to us in any instant: one can be aware and lives the world events through the internet portable phone. Our mindset has to change, we are becoming more ‘zappers’ and yet more reachable. Our minds and attention could well be everywhere and yet we are reachable.

As much as the speed of technology frees us from lag time of receiving information, it imprisons us in its overflow of data. More data to select from, may mean sharper and more precision in our analysis. Do we discern better and take better decision? Having the skills of Zapping have to be reinforced by a sharper skills of focusing.

Living the Here and Now

Paul Virilio’s thesis:

The war model

Virilio developed what he calls the ‘war model’ of the modern city and of human society in general and is the inventor of the term ‘dromology’, meaning the logic of speed that is the foundation of technological society. His major works include War and Cinema, Speed and Politics and The Information Bomb in which he argues, among many other things, that military projects and technologies drive history. Like some other cultural theorists, he rejects labels – including ‘cultural theorist’ – yet he has been linked by others with post-structuralism and postmodernism. Some people describe Virilio’s work as being positioned in the realm of the ‘hypermodern’. This description seems most apt, as Virilio works very much with the concepts and artefacts of modernism. He has repeatedly affirmed his links with phenomenology, for example, and offers humanist critiques of modernist art movements such as Futurism. Throughout his books the political and theological themes of anarchism, pacifism and Catholicism reappear as central influences to his self-proclaimed ‘marginal’ approach to the question of technology. His work has been compared to that of McLuhan, Baudrillard, Deleuze & Guattari, Lyotard, Ellul, and others, although many of these connections are problematic. Virilio is also an urbanist. He still lives in Paris.

Virilio’s predictions about ‘logistics of perception’ – the use of images and information in war – (in War and Cinema, 1984) were so accurate that during the Gulf War he was invited to discuss his ideas with French military officers. While Baudrillard infamously argued that the Gulf War did not take place, Virilio argued that it was a ‘world war in miniature’.

The integral accident

Technology cannot exist without the potential for accidents. For example, the invention of the locomotive also contained the invention of derailment. Virilio sees the Accident as a rather negative growth of social positivism and scientific progress. The growth of technology, namely television, separates us directly from the events of real space and real time. We lose wisdom, lose sight of our immediate horizon and resort to the indirect horizon of our dissimulated environment. From this angle, the Accident can be mentally pictured as a sort of “fractal meteorite” whose impact is prepared in the propitious darkness, a landscape of events concealing future collisions. Even Aristotle claimed that “there is no science of the accident,” but Virilio disagrees, pointing to the growing credibility of simulators designed to escape the accident — an industry born from the unholy marriage of post-WW2 science and the military-industrial complex. A good example of Virilio’s integral accident is Hurricane Katrina and the disastrous events that followed, which brought the eyes of the world upon a single nexus of time and place. From his article on Katrina, “Ah ouai, ce méchant vent, vent qui siffle, siffle. Tout le monde regarde, c’est sur toutes les chaînes, c’est l’émission dont le monde parle. Et c’est tellement, tellement mouillé la bas.” Roughly translated, “Oh yeah, that nasty wind, wind that blows, blows. The whole world is watching, it’s on every station, it’s the program the world is talking about. And it’s so, so soggy, down there.”

Dromology

‘Dromos’ from the Greek word to race (Virilio 1977:47). Meaning: the ‘science (or logic) of speed’. Dromology is important when considering the structuring of society in relation to warfare and modern media. He notes that the speed at which something happens may change its essential nature, and that that which moves with speed quickly comes to dominate that which is slower. ‘Whoever controls the territory possesses it. Possession of territory is not primarily about laws and contracts, but first and foremost a matter of movement and circulation.’ Source

Logistics of perception

In contemporary warfare logistics does not just imply the movement of personnel, tanks, fuel and so on but also implies the movement of images both to and from the battlefield. Virilio talks a lot about the creation of CNN and the concept of the newshound. The newshound will capture images which will then be sent to CNN, which may then be broadcast to the public. This movement of images can start a conflict (Virilio uses the example of the events following the broadcasting of the Rodney King footage). The logistics of perception also relates to the televising of military maneuvers and the images of conflict that are watched not only by people at home but also by the military personnel involved in the conflict. The ‘field of battle’ also exists as a ‘field of perception’.

War of movement

For Virilio, the transition from feudalism to capitalism was driven not primarily by the politics of wealth and production techniques but by the mechanics of war. Virilio argues that the traditional feudal fortified city disappeared because of the increasing sophistication of weapons and possibilities for warfare. For Virilio, the concept of siege warfare became rather a war of movement. In Speed and Politics, he argues that ‘history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems’.