Posts Tagged ‘Shift Happens’
Shifting
Sometime in the last year ‘did you know’ became ‘you should know’ thanks to Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod’s Shift Happens presentation:
(That’s a slightly updated version – here’s the original).
The video does a great job of making the audience sit upright, but who is that audience? America? Perhaps. The presentation was originally for only 150 teachers in Colorado. So, the West? Certainly.
There’s a jolt around the 45 second mark when we’re thrown back to 1900 and Great Britain was the centre of the world. Do You Know? Asks questions in order to show that we have some work to do if we’re not going to get left behind again and pushed further back to become a footnote in someone else’s history.
It’s the ‘someone else’ aspect of the presentation that alarms me more than the statistics.
The overwhelming message as I hear it is that the near future is going to be a seriously interesting place to spend our time. For others, however, it’s all about not being swept away by India and China. I prefer to take the broader view that it’s remarkable than the human race is pushing forwards so quickly, but if India and China are going to be pioneering so much of that next frontier then we need to find a way to move our insular 20th century burdened brains towards a 21st century global perspective.
It’s not them and us anymore. It’s simply us.
Black Ships 