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The
MEME
Pool |
;)
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Drachma-Denarius
Applied Futures
Research
and
Strategic Planning
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August 25, 2002
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From: |
Raymond Bouchard |
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To: |
Arthur Cordell |
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Subject: |
Meme
024 |
Dear Arthur
Here's the latest edition of the Meme Pool, the newsletter
of web articles of interest to futurists and strategic planners. It is presented
once a week.
HISTORY
Your
(Grand)Father's Internet
The forecasting of telecommunications
trends consumes much ink and paper. The rapid adoption of the World Wide Web
will cause transformations that we are only beginning to understand.
Tom
Standage, technology correspondent for the Economist suggests we look for clues
in the growth of an earlier internet - the telegraph system. Writing in Context
Magazine he notes that "The
Internet hysteria of the late 1990s was nothing compared with the excitement
greeting the completion of the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable in 1858.
There were hundred-gun salutes in Boston and New York. There were fireworks,
parades, and special church services. Tiffany & Co. bought the leftover
portion of the Atlantic cable, cut it into four-inch pieces, and sold them as
souvenirs."
[Context
Magazine]
MEANING
OF LIFE
Is This As Good As It
Gets?
Steve Gorelick, organic farmer, sees the children of
America (and by extension the industrialized world) as canaries in a mineshaft.
The drugs, violence, depression and aimlessness are bad enough. What is worse,
is that this view of progress is the end point of globalization.
"Children in the US are far from 'confident,
self-reliant, tolerant, generous, and future-oriented'. One indication of this
is that an estimated five million of them are being given at least one
psychiatric drug. This disturbing trend is growing rapidly. The number of
children ages 2-4 for whom stimulant and anti-depressant drugs have been
prescribed increased 50 per cent between 1991 and 1995. In the following four
years, prescriptions for anti-depressant drugs rose even more steeply, climbing
151 per cent for children in the 7-12 age group, and 580 per cent for children
six and under."
This may be an extreme point of view that ignores
many of the substantial benefits provided by modern society - health, education,
clean environment, to name a few. Nevertheless, it does point out that we
ourselves are still a work in progress, and that many of our problems may not be
simply a list of things we haven't fixed yet, but rather a list of problems we
have created for ourselves.
[The
Ecologist]
TIME
The Pace Of Change
What is time? Futurists,
in particular need to be attuned to the nature of timescales, noting that some
phenomena are measured in years (technology diffusion), while others are
measured in generations (social), or centuries (environmental). Cross-impacts of
social and technological change are tricky to forecast, in part because society
and technology evolve at different rates. We also must consider whether certain
technologies are having the effect of compressing time frames.
Saint Augustine described the
definitional dilemma more eloquently than anyone. "What then, is time?" he asked
in his Confessions. "If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it
to someone who does ask me, I do not know." He then went on to try to articulate
why temporality is so hard to define: "How, then, can these two kinds of time,
the past and the future be, when the past no longer is and the future as yet
does not be?"
We may not have made much progress in defining time
since the days of St. Augustine, but certainly we know more about its
measurement. Scientific American has
an interesting article on the nature and measurement of time.
[Scientific
American]
HISTORY
The
Calculus Of Power
John Mearsheimer, has for some time now been an iconoclastic voice in
America's foreign-policy elite. His book, The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics, gets us ready for the great wars of the next century. Mearsheimer
rejects the notion he calls 'defensive realism', in which states seek to
maintain a balance of power within a constrained international system. He
replaces it with 'offensive realism'. In this world, there is no such thing as a
satisfied state. Far from behaving defensively, great powers exercise their
power advantage over rivals in an aggressive manner simply because it has the
capability as well as the incentive to do so'.
This macho-man,
Hobbesian, view of the world is critiqued in The New Left Review by Peter Gowan.
Gowan finds plenty to dispute in the book, both in fact and in analysis. He
nevertheless ends in a note of respect when he says, "The Left has more to learn
from it than from any number of treatises on the coming wonders of global
governance."
[New Left
Review]
|
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