In my futurist book TOMORROW NOW I was speculating that there might be a post-national global new order arising in cities. Cities as laboratories of the post-Westphalian order.

I was on a call recently with a business that produces "resilient cities" planning, database-intensive digital planning.

if we allow ourselves to buy into the fragmentation of postmodernity, where positionality, diversity and ennui rule the day, we lose sight that there are big, tangible players who have the power to behave in ways with their political clout, capital, manufacturing and commerce that are either earth-friendly or not earth-friendly.

Instead, I hope we will approach a critical mass in the populace where we persistently insist––politically, economically, spiritually––that our business and government leaders adopt behaviors that embrace a new global consciousness

The same goes for Americans trying to rebel against Wall Street. There's no visible other space. There's no liberated territory. It's like rebelling against a funhouse mirror because it makes you look so fat and stupid.

his is not just a bad vibe happening. Merrill Lynch is gone. Enron is long gone. Madoff is a crook. The big boys are hurting. Cities are broke, states are broke, the feds are a laughingstock. The Congress and the former Administration have fully earned the public's contempt. You can't "blame the media" for that. Even the media's broke -- ESPECIALLY the media.

I agree that there's an irrational panic now. There are also a large crowd of severe, real-world, fully rational, deeply structural problems that have gone unconfronted for years.

This is a frank recognition of the stakes. It's aimed at the adults in the room.

People become happy when they have something coherent to be enthusiastic about.

When you can't imagine how things are going to change, that doesn't mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.

even those who are most gung-ho about new ways of learning probably tend to cling to a belief that education has, or ought to have, at least something to do with making things lodge in the minds of students—this even though the disparagement of the role of memory in education by professional educators now goes back at least three generations, long before computers were ever thought of as educational tools.

adapting its understanding of what education is to the new realities of how the new generation of “netizens” actually learn (and don’t learn) rather than trying to adapt the kids to unchanging standards of scholarship and learning.

“lower-order skills” in comparison with the spatial, information-gathering, and pattern-recognition skills fostered by hours at the computer screen

can’t imagine a mathematician saying the same thing about math, or a biologist about biology, yet, sad to say, scholars, journalists, and other guardians of culture accept the deterioration of their province without much regret.

humanities stopped being, or even wanting to be, “guardians of culture” a long time ago.

In other words, the “mentors” have not only betrayed their pupils, they have denounced the very idea of mentorship in anything but the tools of deconstruction which allow them to set themselves up as superior to—rather than the humble acolytes of—the culture they study.

redefining education as the acquisition of information-retrieval skills

No one has ever taught them that books can be read for pleasure or enlightenment—or for any other purpose than to be exposed as the coded rationalization for the illegitimate powers of the ruling classes that they really are

But while Bauerlein takes Johnson to task on several points, he seems to suggest that all our educators have to do is expose their charges to some superior alternative to “the ordinary stuff of youth culture”

“Young people,” he rightly notes, “need mentors not to go with the youth flow, but to stand staunchly against it, to represent something smarter and finer than the cacophony of social life.” He’s also right that they need more time away from the computer in order to acquire the skills of “deep reading” recommended by Nicholas Carr.

But they are not likely to get either one so long as so many educators cling as they do now to the axiomatic belief not just that “learning can be fun” but that it must be fun, and the equally axiomatic rejection of that which may cause pain and humiliation, even if these are productive of real learning

So much of what we take for granted as part of daily life online, from the BIND software that makes domain names work, to the Apache webserver that powers a sizable chunk of the world's websites, to the cheap Linux servers that Google stacks into its global datacloud, was created by volunteers who gave their creations away to make possible something larger−the Web as we know it.

Is it possible to understand exactly what it is about the web that makes Wikipedia, Linux, FightAIDS@Home, the Gutenberg Project and Creative Commons possible? And if so, can this theoretical knowledge be put to practical use?

"We must now turn our attention to building systems that support human sociality."

We must develop a participative pedagogy, assisted by digital media and networked publics, that focuses on catalyzing, inspiring, nourishing, facilitating, and guiding literacies essential to individual and collective life.

to humanize the use of instruments that might otherwise enable commodification, mechanization and dehumanization

By literacy, I mean, following on Neil Postman and others, the set of skills that enable individuals to encode and decode knowledge and power via speech, writing, printing and collective action, and which, when learned, introduce the individual to a community.

Printing did not cause democracy or science, but literate populations, enabled by the printing press, devised systems for citizen governance and collective knowledge creation. The Internet did not cause open source production, Wikipedia or emergent collective responses to natural disasters, but it made it possible for people to act together in new ways, with people they weren't able to organize action with before, in places and at paces for which collective action had never been possible.

If print culture shaped the environment in which the Enlightenment blossomed and set the scene for the Industrial Revolution, participatory media might similarly shape the cognitive and social environments in which twenty first century life will take place (a shift in the way our culture operates). For this reason, participatory media literacy is not another subject to be shoehorned into the curriculum as job training for knowledge workers.

Like the early days of print, radio, and television, the present structure of the participatory media regime−the political, economic, social and cultural institutions that constrain and empower the way the new medium can be used, and which impose structures on flows of information and capital−is still unsettled. As legislative and regulatory battles, business competition, and social institutions vie to control the new regime, a potentially decisive and presently unknown variable is the degree and kind of public participation. Because the unique power of the new media regime is precisely its participatory potential, the number of people who participate in using it during its formative years, and the skill with which they attempt to take advantage of this potential, is particularly salient.