The Times They Are A-Changin’
You’ve gotta check out this video. If you don’t have time to watch it right now (it’s five minutes long) please bookmark it for later. Everybody — including YOU — needs to have their personal belief systems and comfort zones pulled and stretched and twisted beyond recognition. It’ll do you good.
cross-posted at Bring It On!
posted by Tom Harper @ 12:26 PM
12 Comments:
That's pretty bitchin'. I saw a version of that for the first time last October at a conference.
That was highly disturbing, actually.
Good thing I lost all my archaic belief systems way back in the 80's.
:)
Quite a sobering piece. Our processes are evolving faster than we can process them.
Carlos: I never saw it until yesterday when somebody forwarded it to me. It makes perfect sense too, as mindboggling as it is.
Bee: I think it's equal parts fascinating and disturbing. It sure makes most American political issues moot, if China and India are gonna be pulling the world's strings. That's OK, it's somebody else's turn.
Lew: "Our processes are evolving faster than we can process them" -- very well put.
Good food-for-thought find, Tom, and your headline is perfect. The people who put the video together are sharp.
One thing it conveys in a big way is that the America that led the world in nearly everything from 1945 to about 1965 is no more. No longer master of all he surveys , Uncle Sam must learn to be a good and responsible neighbor.
I did find one thing in the video questionable. It was the item about the info first-year college students learn becoming invalid (or outdated) by the time they're in their third year.
I have no proof, but that seems a stretch. And, I notice they didn't offer proof or a source to back up that claim.
Hey, Tom. Love your blog. Wanted to invite you to add your RSS feed and become a featured blogger at http://bestoftheblogs.com, a new progressive blogger network. Your Port Angeles blog would be a nice fit at http://sustainablecitiescollective.com Any questions, send me an email at jerry (at) socialmediatoday (dot) com
SW: I think the next few decades will be one of those "out with the old, in with the new" eras -- whatever the "new" turns out to be. Either the largest Asian countries will be the next superpowers, and/or the world will be too small and too interconnected to have just a few countries calling the shots for everybody else. And since so many things are increasing exponentially, we probably can't even begin to imagine what things will be like 20-30 years from now.
Jerry: Thanks for the links. I'll check them out and send you an e-mail.
dude, that blew my mind. Isn't the human capability so amazing?
fyi, China isn't actually the number one English speaking country in the world (nor is India...it is still the US). They are stretching that one a bit. They are counting people who are studying the language in one way or another. By their standard, I would be an American who speaks English, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, and Hogan (Okinawan dialect). I can hold my own in Spanish, and a little Arabic, but I would not consider myself a speaker of any of those languages.
Many of the claims are exaggerated, but the point is definitely not. America is becoming increasingly small in this world and if we do not increase our standards we may become irrelevant.
It's hard to fathom what exactly we did to screw around at work before the internets.
DB: I'm sure there are parts of the video that are either exaggerated and/or not verified (as SW was saying). But the overall projection was just mindboggling. We'll probably be in the shadow of China and Japan and India; maybe Brazil and Indonesia too. But it seems like the world will be too small and too connected to have one or several superpowers dominating the rest of the planet.
I know what you mean about "English speaking" countries. I was in Sasebo, Japan for about a week when I was in the Navy (this was in the early '70s). Supposedly, people who dealt with tourists -- cashiers, waiters, taxi drivers -- spoke English, but that sure wasn't my experience. Thank God for all those restaurants that had pictures of all their food items, so you could just point to the picture of what you wanted.
Randal: Screwing around at work? Hey, the internets are for official business use only :)
Randal, newspaper reading, word jumble, crosswords, long errands, etc., for the worker bees, extended tee martooni lunches with "strategic" clients for the executive set. ;)
What Lew said.
Amazing... Of course the Mayan Calendar says the world will end in December of 2012. Maybe that date will be the date our processes will officially outstrip our capacity to process them, ushering in a new world order of new-agey something-or-other.
It's kind of like a big pimple building up, getting into the whitehead stage, and ready to pop.
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