Thomas Friedman, NY Times Columnist, discussed the future of the middle class at the annual conference of the Committee of 100. The Committee of 100 is a national non partisan organization composed of American citizens of Chinese descent. From Bill Belew at PanAsianBiz blog has posted some of the ideas raised in the speech.
Looking ahead, Thomas Friedman sees the middle class made up of workers in 8 fields. They are:
1. The Great Collaborators
2. The Great Leveragers
3. The Great Synthesizers
4. The Great Localizers
5. Passionate Personalizers
6. Anything Green
7. The Great Explainers
8. The Great Adapters
What's interesting about this list is the number of roles that librarians already play. We definitely are localizers, explainers, adapters, and leveragers. Some of us are collaborators in the sense Friedman means and passionate personalizers. There is a lot of right brain type thinking at work in librarianship. Sometimes, we may be better at doing right brain thinking then we are at celebrating it and acknowledging.
Andrew Hill, Financial Times Editor, interviews Thomas Friedman about how his ideas on globalization are changing. Friedmans' book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, was the winner of the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.Friedman comments that:
I think there are two skills that you really, really need in a flat world. One is the ability to learn how to learn - that's really, really important because it's really not what you know, it's how you learn, because what you know today will be out of date tomorrow.[referring to Daniel Pink's ideas and book, Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future] ... when the world gets flat, everything on the left side of your brain is going to get automated or outsourced. It's going to be a right brain world. ...how you nurture the really intangible, creative, personalised things you bring to any job - that's really where the value is going.
Friedman also discusses the notion of web as platform, a a greater leveler and a rich primordial soup from which all sorts of innovative products and services can spring up and reach a global market. He describes how quickly this phenomena struck home for him personally when his audio book the number one podcast downloaded from iTunes one day. He comments:
"But what's really interesting is that when I started this book in March 2004, podcasting didn't exist. So here's a format that has emerged - which I think is going to be a monster - which didnĀ?t exist when I started this book. It wasn't like I started this book in 2000 or 1999: I started it in 2004. I finished it in December 2004 and podcasting didn't exist. Now the audio version of this book is number one selling podcast album for one day on Apple iTunes. And what's even more sort of interesting to me is: Who invented podcasting? Nobody. It was a kind of emerging application that just kind of emerged from the network. I really have come to appreciate more and more that the flat world is really a platform - a global, web-nabled platform for multiple forms of sharing knowledge, work, innovation and entertainment."
This notion of platform and globalization is having a profound effect as we move from an economic model of creating works for print instance of the work to digital copies. Mass digitization projects underway give glimpses of a uber hyperlinked corpus of texts and words. Words and phrases could be traced and indexed historically.
Tags: library | skills | trends|
