The world is changing - in no small measure because of the wide-spread use and access to computers and the internet.
A good example emerges from this piece from FP [Foreign Policy]:
"The world’s next great thinkers may well be just as brilliant as the ones on this list, but they’re likely to come to our notice in very different ways. Take William Kamkwamba, a 22-year-old from Malawi who already exemplifies a new generation of global leaders. A few years ago, he came upon an illustration of a windmill in an old textbook in a language (English) he barely understood and built one for his family so their house could have electricity. Soon he was thinking of ways to mass-produce his invention for distribution as ready-made kits.
Twenty years ago, Kamkwamba’s story might have stayed local. But instead he had the fortune of colliding with today’s Web-enabled global structure of intellectual intermediaries. In 2006, an innovation-focused blog called Hacktivate stumbled upon a write-up about Kamkwamba’s windmill in a Malawian newspaper. It took only a few months for a network of global thinkers and entrepreneurs called TED (full disclosure: I am a TED fellow) to pick up the story. In 2007, Kamkwamba spoke at a TED conference in Tanzania, where he mingled with Bono and Jane Goodall, and in 2009 he cowrote a best-selling book about his experience called The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.
Will Kamkwamba be the next Sergey Brin? We don’t know yet. But his story suggests just how dramatically the Internet era has transformed the very process of becoming a global thinker -- that is, the process of learning to get smart and heard at the same time -- and how much those changes are for the better.
In the old, pre-Internet model, aspiring thought leaders and idea entrepreneurs had to establish residence either in one of the big cultural metropolises or, failing that, a college town with a decent library. Now, however, the very prospect of living in an “intellectual metropolis” has become nearly obsolete. As Harper’s Bill Wasik pointed out recently, “[The Internet is] a place that courses with all the raw ambition and creative energy that the hard times seem to have drained from New York.” As long as you pay your Internet bill, you might as well live in Skjolden, Norway, or in a hut next to Walden Pond.
The Internet is also democratizing education, making overspecialized and prohibitively expensive graduate schools ever harder to justify. With the Kindle, printable e-books, and now potentially Google’s scanned world library, the price of books is rapidly approaching zero. Just as the invention of the printing press allowed books to be mass-produced for the first time, making them readily available for the middle class, the new economics of the Web make books freely available to anyone with access to a computer. And English, the lingua franca of today’s intellectual world, is easier and cheaper than ever to learn, with millions of potential tutors just a Skype call away."
Continue reading here.
A good example emerges from this piece from FP [Foreign Policy]:
"The world’s next great thinkers may well be just as brilliant as the ones on this list, but they’re likely to come to our notice in very different ways. Take William Kamkwamba, a 22-year-old from Malawi who already exemplifies a new generation of global leaders. A few years ago, he came upon an illustration of a windmill in an old textbook in a language (English) he barely understood and built one for his family so their house could have electricity. Soon he was thinking of ways to mass-produce his invention for distribution as ready-made kits.
Twenty years ago, Kamkwamba’s story might have stayed local. But instead he had the fortune of colliding with today’s Web-enabled global structure of intellectual intermediaries. In 2006, an innovation-focused blog called Hacktivate stumbled upon a write-up about Kamkwamba’s windmill in a Malawian newspaper. It took only a few months for a network of global thinkers and entrepreneurs called TED (full disclosure: I am a TED fellow) to pick up the story. In 2007, Kamkwamba spoke at a TED conference in Tanzania, where he mingled with Bono and Jane Goodall, and in 2009 he cowrote a best-selling book about his experience called The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.
Will Kamkwamba be the next Sergey Brin? We don’t know yet. But his story suggests just how dramatically the Internet era has transformed the very process of becoming a global thinker -- that is, the process of learning to get smart and heard at the same time -- and how much those changes are for the better.
In the old, pre-Internet model, aspiring thought leaders and idea entrepreneurs had to establish residence either in one of the big cultural metropolises or, failing that, a college town with a decent library. Now, however, the very prospect of living in an “intellectual metropolis” has become nearly obsolete. As Harper’s Bill Wasik pointed out recently, “[The Internet is] a place that courses with all the raw ambition and creative energy that the hard times seem to have drained from New York.” As long as you pay your Internet bill, you might as well live in Skjolden, Norway, or in a hut next to Walden Pond.
The Internet is also democratizing education, making overspecialized and prohibitively expensive graduate schools ever harder to justify. With the Kindle, printable e-books, and now potentially Google’s scanned world library, the price of books is rapidly approaching zero. Just as the invention of the printing press allowed books to be mass-produced for the first time, making them readily available for the middle class, the new economics of the Web make books freely available to anyone with access to a computer. And English, the lingua franca of today’s intellectual world, is easier and cheaper than ever to learn, with millions of potential tutors just a Skype call away."
Continue reading here.
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