james burke

• "my guess is that first effects of open access when it really hits, that period of transition i told about will show themselves in 2 or 3 negative ways. i mean at the artistic level, in this transition, will it be a world of home videos and illiterate scribblings and the kind of rock-bottom untrained junk that the so-called empowerment of the individual would allow the ordinary citizen to bring to the world of the arts.
  
  and in sciences, how can the average person today with access the global databases make an intelligent contribution to the political decision about how many billions of dollars to spend into research on invertebrate paleozoology.
  
  in other words, will open access and the closing of the gulf between the ordinary person and the world of information also bring with it a whelter of mediocrity, instability, mindlessness and self gratification the light of which has never been before, because the ordinary person has been excluded from these processes.
  
  the only answer to that question is "yes" in the short term. this side of the educative things the technology will be able to do. meanwhile perhaps you should try a few short term moves: relax the division of labor rules, become more flexible, maybe construct the virtual versions of an institution and let the people try and get in there and try to change it the way they think it should change, without damaging the real one. realize that any organization satisfied by the way it's doing things, is probably dead and doesn't know it. see that if as an organization or an individual, you stand still for too long now, then just as in the jungle, sooner or later, <caps>something will eat you.</caps>
  
  recognize that in the virtual-mobile-individualistic-demanding marketplace of tomorrow, there will be so many alternatives washing around out there in the sea of information, that the newly enfranchised individual will be like admiral showel, you remember: in desperate need of a lighthouse.
  
  searching for a trustworthy solution to their individual problem, and the kind of education tailor-made to suit them and noone else.
  
  our brains.. quintessential examples of innovative convergence at work have always been able to handle those kinds of issues and now thanks to the technology, our institutions will be able to do so also.. if we don't use the technology at least to open a crack in the reductionist box descartes put us in to, we will not be ready for coming upheaval as we shift from a culture of scarcity to the free-for-all. it will be the first "free-for-all" in the history."