John Naisbitt Hates the "Change" Meme
June 06 2008 / by Alvis Brigis
Category: Technology Year: General Rating: 4 Hot
John Naisbitt, author of the popular MegaTrends (1982) and MegaTrends 2000 (1990), hates the word “change”.
“Because we are so bombarded by information about change we think that everything is changing, which is not true,” argues Naisbitt.
He supports this sentiment/analysis by arguing that “we human beings use the internet to do what we’ve always done” and that the underlying market forces driving human behavior have not fundamentally changed in at least 40 years that only “superficial” changes are occurring.
Check out the video here:
While I do agree that market behavior, aka the invisible hand, is a general constant (which we generally underestimate or forget about) because it seems to be a fundamental law of life systems here on Earth, having been around since the first amoeba was brought to life in the water vapor, hydrogen gas, ammonia and methane soup, I find Naisbitt’s argument that the change seen in the last 40 years, the change we’re experiencing, and the change we’ll see in the near-future is nothing but trivial, a bit naive and curmudgeonly. (cont.)
Yes, it’s popular to say that everything is changing. Sure, many people make that statement without analyzing any deeper trends or facts. Yes, some people blindly accept Kurzweil’s conclusions without taking into consideration the possibility that the exponential curves could smooth out into S-curves sooner than later. Sure, many futurists have been bitten in the ass when projecting overly quick change.
But we are seeing/experiencing/living through mega trends such as the increase in rate of information, communication and innovation growth and that are fundamentally changing our individual behavior, social behavior, health prospects, economic opportunities, etc.
Simply compare a typical 20-year-old human with a typical 80-year-old human. Generally speaking, the 20-year-old will more efficiently utilize new tools such as email, IM, GPS, virtual worlds, iPhones, iPods, social media, complex video cameras, etc, making them fundamentally better suited for the new economy and environment that is evolving – which is one of the main reasons death has been built into biological organisms. Sure there are exceptions to the adoption/acclimation rules, but I think it’s fair to say that younger generations develop serious advantages because their brains can soak up the newest rules during critical periods, allowing them to function better in a flattening world in which, as Naisbitt puts it, “we are drowning in information”.
Hell, I’m 28 and I already feel like I’m falling behind the younglings in the use of some fundamental, from my perspective – not from a universal history-of-earth perspective, communication technologies that will be critical over the next decade. Some of these include 3D interfaces (kids are developing quick topsight analysis abilities over complex spaces), video editing (my experience in LA shows that younger editors generally adopt the newest software, techniques and shortcuts much more quickly), text messaging (I am sloth at text messaging compared to the wee ones), etc.
As our economy becomes more digital and super-fluid, these basic skills and new ones that do not yet exist will be fundamental to navigating the new environments and will impart serious advantage as comm/tech/info growth accelerates. Yes, us older ones may be able to keep up, but only if our brains and learning devices fundamentally change to accommodate the deluge of the new.
Perhaps Naisbitt is just a typically jaded 80’s futurist who’s sick of hearing about the flying car over and over. Maybe he’s simply not giving enough credence to the “under the hood”, to borrow one of ASF President John Smart’s favorite terms, transformations that are constantly occurring. Or it could be that his “40 years in business” was served at a relatively static, non-innovative place. I don’t know.
But what I do know is that whatever it is that’s got him all pissed off is preventing his brain from fundamentally acknowledging that comm/tech/info growth is fundamentally changing humans.
Would a typical human raised in the 1800s know what to do in our modern economy? I don’t think so. Will a typical child raised in the 2000s during the acceleration era behave fundamentally differently that someone raise din the 1960s? I do think so.
Naisbitt himself states that, “We are drowning in information and starved for knowledge. The information just keeps pouring in so you have to really sort it out and not let it drown you.”
So what do we do? We adapt, evolve, change with the tide in order to survive, cope and thrive – not superficially, fundamentally.
Over the next 30 years, this change will likely transform our bodies (machine limbs, regrown body parts), our intelligence (prosthetic memory, access to information, AI-ish things), our environment (designer plants/animals, new self-powered adjustable materials), the web (immersive virtual reality, direct neuronal manipulation), work (distance labor, rewards for natural behavior), our actualization (constantly ascending hierarchy of needs), our economy (robotics, self-replicating machines, cheap solar power), and so forth.
To say that these are not basic changes, and that we haven’t been experiencing basic changes, is flat out wrong. I get what Naisbitt is saying about underlying economics remaining static, and to perhaps argue that change is constant and therefore not noteworthy, but to use that thinking to argue against change, especially from a human-centric perspective (which is where we’re all coming from), is a misleading misuse of the term.
If you’re going to argue universal macro systems, then just make that clear, rather than arguing that things aren’t basically changing.
John Naisbitt is either a bad communicator or fundamentally a hater of the “change” meme who’s probably in for one hell of a surprise as we enter the knee of the macro curve(s).
Get over it John, “change” is for real, whether or not the term incites a great deal of social hulabaloo.
Note: Naisbitt’s other silly statements include phrases like “there are many constants like family, religion, sports” and “the internet is not a technological phenomenon, it’s a social phenomenon”, both of which sound plausible but are technically ridiculous in the context of evolution and acceleration. But I don’t have enough time to go there.
(via Media Futurist)
