2 Nature of the Information Revolution

The end of World War II introduced a new environment —the Cold War—that would soon see America in an ideological competition with the Soviet Union as well as the first forays into the Information Revolution.  President Truman created a Commission on Higher Education that, in its 1947 report, identified eleven principles or goals that summed up key characteristics of an educated person on the eve of the new era:

• An ethical code of behavior
• Informed and responsible citizen solving problem skills
• Understanding global interdependence
• Habits of scientific thought in personal and civic problems
• Understanding others and expressing one’s self
• Enjoyment and understanding of literature and the arts
• The ability to create a satisfying family life
• The ability to choose a useful and satisfying vocation
• Developing critical and constructive thinking habits

These were ways in which higher education was expected to contribute to the quality of life in American society that went beyond simple preparation for a career (Kennedy, 1952, pp. 25-30).

By the time the Truman Commission had finished its work, the roots of the Information Revolution had already taken hold.  While the Industrial Revolution began as a transportation revolution—steam-powered ships and railroads—the Information Revolution began as a communication revolution.  The first television station went on the air as early as 1928, and the first computer came in 1938.  However, the real revolution was sparked by the ability to network media.  The Soviet Union launched Sputnik—an experimental communications satellite that sent radio signals back to earth—in 1957; cable television, which first emerged in 1950, had moved to microwave networks by the early 1970s; public television and other national media networks moved to satellite in 1979.  When Mosaic, the first web browser, was developed at the University of Illinois in 1992, the old industrial society was already being transformed into a global information society.

In 2000, Thomas Friedman published an expanded edition of his 1998 book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which looked at the ways in which globalization was replacing the Cold War as the dominant organizing principal of international politics, economics, and culture.  Writing two decades ago, Friedman described an emerging new world order.  “Globalization,” he wrote, “is not just some economic fad, and it is not just a passing trend.  It is an international system—the dominant international system that replaced the Cold War system after the fall of the Berlin Wall” (Friedman, 2000, p. 7).  Friedman defined “globalization” this way:

“. . . it is the inexorable integration of markets, nation-states and technologies to a degree never witnessed before—in a way that is enabling individuals, corporations and nation-states to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper and cheaper than ever before, and in a way that is enabling the world to reach into individuals, corporations and nation-states farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before” (p. 9).

Globalization is different from the old Cold War era in several ways.  Friedman noted that, while the most frequent question in the Cold War era was “Whose side are you on?” the most frequently asked question in the global world is, “To what extent are you connected to everyone?” (p. 10).  Innovation replaces tradition.  The present/future replaces the past.  “Nothing matters so much as what will come next, and what will come next can only arrive if what is here now gets overturned” (p. 11).

Friedman paraphrased German political theorist Carl Schmitt, writing, “the Cold War was a war of ‘friends’ and ‘enemies.’ The globalization world, by contrast, tends to turn all friends and enemies into ‘competitors’” (Friedman, 2000, p. 12).  During the Cold War, influence and security were based on the power of the nation state.  In this new age, however, the power of nation states has been replaced by the power of association.  Friedman argued that the new society was powered by three ‘balances’:

• The traditional balance of power between nation states.
• The balance between nation states and global markets.
• The balance between individuals and nation states.

Friedman saw the last of these balances as the key:

“Because globalization has brought down many of the walls that limited the movement and reach of people, and because it has simultaneously wired the world into networks, it gives more power to individuals to influence both markets and nation-states than at any time in history” (p. 14).

Almost two decades later, Friedman took a fresh look at the ongoing social revolution. In 2016’s Thank You for Being Late, he explored how both technological change and social change had influenced society since the 1990s.  He observed that technological change evolves rapidly, doubling its power and reach every few years.  The result is “a tremendous release of energy into the hands of human beings to compete, design, think, imagine, connect, and collaborate with anyone anywhere” (Friedman, 2016, p. 83).  However, Friedman also noted that social change takes place at a much slower pace than technological change.  At some point, the speed of technological change outpaces our ability to adapt to it, creating social disruption and leaving some people behind as others race to catch up.

Another perspective on the impact of technology was expressed in 2009 by William Irwin Thompson.  In Transforming History (2009), Thompson’s book about revising the high school history curriculum, he wrote,

A technological innovation is itself deeply embedded in various systems of values and symbols; a new tool can emerge synchronous with a new form of polity, as well as with a new form of spirituality.  Cultural history, as opposed to the more linear history of technology, is concerned with the complex dynamical system in which biological natural drive, ecological constraints, and systems of communication and social organization all interact in a process of “dependent co-origination” (p. 16).

In short, cultural history is inherently interdisciplinary and must address the impact of events on multiple aspects of culture at different periods of history in order to be effective.

Elements of the New Environment

Several aspects of social change brought on by the Information Revolution need to be considered as we look at the role of General Education in this new era:

Acceleration  Accelerating change can be seen as a fundamental characteristic of the new age.  “Acceleration,” Alvin Toffler wrote in 1970’s Future Shock, “is one of the most important and least understood of all social forces” (Toffler, 1970, p. 32).  For Toffler, acceleration is not just a technological or social force, but a psychological force.  “The rising rate of change in the world around us,” he wrote, “disturbs our inner equilibrium, altering the very way in which we experience life.  Acceleration without translates into acceleration within” (ibid.).  Noting that the faster rate of change creates a new kind of information system in society—one that gives smaller groups more power to affect change—Toffler argued that “to master change, we shall therefore need both a clarification of important long-range social goals and a democratization of the way in which we arrive at them” (Toffler, 1970, pp. 476-77).

As Friedman observed, the gap between technological change and social adaptation to that change is always increasing.  In order to keep pace with technology-related change, he noted, we need to innovate “in everything other than technology.”  That involves a dramatic re-thinking of the social environment:

“It is reimagining and redesigning your society’s workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and community—in ways that will enable more citizens on more days in more ways to keep pace with how these accelerations are reshaping their lives and generate more stability as we shoot through these rapids” (2016, p. 199).

Redefining Community Increasingly, the Information Revolution is minimizing the impact of geography as a defining factor in human interactions.  The web allows us to interact simultaneously with our next-door neighbor and colleagues around the world.  In the process, it is re-defining how we think about “community” and our role in it.  This has broad implications not only for how individuals relate to each other and their work, but to our ideas about fundamental aspects of how we identify ourselves as members of a community.  Wendell Berry has made this question a focus of his work for many years; in Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, he described the idea of community this way: “…community is a locally understood interdependence of local people, local culture, local economy, and local nature” (Berry, 1993, p. 120).  In It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lectures and Other Essays, he delved more deeply into the role of community in the lives of individuals:

For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it.  To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it.  By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it.  By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place.  By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of pre-emptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world.  As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection.  And in affection we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy. (Berry, 2012, pp. 13-14)

The challenge in the global information society is to achieve that same “affection” and identity in a society in which our ideas of community are no longer defined solely by geography.

Another way to think about the role of community in our lives is the “expanding communities” model of social development.  It assumes that, over the history of human existence, humans have had to expand their understanding of their relationship with the world.  It is a cultural process that mirrors what we all go through as we mature.  As small children, our immediate family is our community.  As we grow, that expands to our neighborhood, our school, our town, and, eventually, we become part of broader communities—our state, our nation, our region, etc.  With each step, we assume a broader public identity and personalize or privatize the older identity.  Increasingly, those broader communities also include international professional relationships, global supply chains, and other strategic relationships.  Our public identity is increasingly complex as a result.

This is a central issue in preparing individuals to be effective citizens in a globalized information society. The Information Revolution, by removing locality as a unique defining element of our individual identities, has created a new challenge for one’s sense of belonging to a community.

This, in turn, should have a significant impact on how we think about general education.  How, in this global economy, can we create affection—a “pre-emptive sympathy” – for our local community and the neighbors who live in it with us?  How do we do the same with non-local communities?  How should we imagine our “place” as individuals, professionals, and members of both virtual and location-based communities in this new environment?

A New Relationship with Time  Just as the Information Revolution eliminated space as a limitation to communication, it is dramatically changing our relationship to time.  For instance, the Internet gives individuals increased control over when and how we respond to communications.  Conversations can be “synchronous” or “asynchronous.”  In Present Shock (2013), Douglas Rushkoff noted that, when we use smart phones and other hand-held devices for email, “we turn a potentially empowering asynchronous technology into a falsely synchronous one” (Rushkoff, 2013, p. 99).  This reinforces the idea of “multi-tasking,” even though research suggests “the basic fact that human beings cannot do more than one thing at a time” (p.123).  Rushkoff adds:

Yet the more we use the Internet to conduct our work and lives, the more compelled we are to adopt its processor’s underlying strategy.  The more choices are on offer, the more windows remain open, and the more options lie waiting” (p. 124).

Shared Consciousness   In Future Shock, Alvin Toffler looked at the changes that were already looming as the Information Age reached its first maturity in the 1970s.  “As interdependency grows,” he wrote, “smaller and smaller groups within society achieve greater and greater power for critical disruption” (Toffler, 1970, p. 477).  Four decades further into the Information Age, Douglas Rushkoff observed in that, in this new environment, “thinking is no longer a personal activity, but a collective one” –something he called “the shared consciousness” (Rushkoff, 2013, p. 204).

In the same vein, Friedman argued that “our very notion of ‘community’ has to expand to the boundaries of the planet” (2016, p. 352).  He quoted author and businessman Dov Seidman that the goal must be “. . .  to forge healthy, deep, and enduring interdependencies—in our relationships, in our communities, between businesses, between countries—so that we rise, and not fall, together” (ibid.).  Understanding those interdependencies is a key to success in the new environment.

Educational Innovation in the New Environment

As educational institutions innovate to adapt to social and technological change, the results could also have an impact on how colleges and universities design their general education curricula.  One example is the gradually growing demand for universal K-14 education.  Just as the Industrial Revolution raised the educational norm to make high school graduation a general expectation by early in the twentieth century, the twenty-first century is seeing growing pressure that all young people should take at least two years beyond high school.  In 2017, New York State responded to this with the Excelsior Scholarship, which funds the costs of the first two years tuition in public colleges and universities for New York residents who live in households that earn less than $125,000 per year.  As Gary Rivlin noted in the New York Times Magazine:

Finishing high school might once have provided enough education to find employment that pays well. But globalization and automation are decimating those jobs. Even manufacturing work that remains in (or returns) to America requires knowing how to operate the computers that run today’s factory floors, at least if you expect to earn anything close to a living wage. . .  Making 14th grade the new 12th grade might be essential if the United States is to maintain its status as an economic powerhouse (Rivlin, 2017, para 4).

Virginia joined New York in this movement in 2019.  A “pre-K to 14” proposal was included in President Bieden’s 2021 infrastructure budget proposal.

A similar need has driven the “dual enrollment” movement, in which a student’s participation in a course simultaneously earns college credit as well as high school graduation credit.

Open Educational Resources One contributor to this movement to re-align curricula is the accelerating power of technology.  In recent years, institutions have begun to create—and, more importantly, to share—a wide variety of online course materials, from lectures and demonstrations to full textbooks as open educational resources (OERs).  Through OERs, faculty are able to reduce costs for students, share content across institutions, and give student a greater library of resources to use in courses focused more on application of knowledge to solve problems.

Micro-credentials Also called “badges,” micro-credentials allow institutions to formally recognized content learned after graduation or otherwise beyond the traditional curriculum.  They are becoming a means by which institutions can maintain a life-long relationship with students.  The growth of this movement suggests the potential for a post-graduate general education component.