The Digital Age is upon us

I want to showcase three writers whose work intersects with this content and helps us think   differently. The common theme within all their writing is the presumption that the economic framework, morality, and organizations of our world are not scaling well to a new digital age.

Eli Pariser is the chief executive of Upworthy. He was also on the board of MoveOn.Org.  In his book, the Filter Bubble,  he examines how the internet is filtering out what we want to see and what we don’t want to see.  That is concerning as allows many of us to filter out views that are counter to our own. This can be very dangerous in a democracy.

Then there is Don Tapscott, who wrote, “Grown up Digital” and “Macrowikinomics”

Tapscott suggests that we really need to develop new frameworks and paradigms.

Here is a quote from a Forbes interview that he gave, “In one sense, the Internet is like the discovery of the printing press, only it’s very different. The printing press gave us access to recorded knowledge. The Internet gives us access not just to knowledge but to the intelligence contained in people’s crania, access to the intelligence of people on a global basis. This is not an information age. It’s an age of communication, of collective intelligence, of major collaboration, of major participation.”

And finally, Michael Sandel is a a writer for Atlantic and his book "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets," is an examination of how market based thinking so completely dominates that we assume we can “buy anything”. But we all know that you can’t buy love.  You can however, pay someone to stand in line for you and sell advertising space on your body if you live in Japan.  In the "Case Against Perfection," he continues this line of thought by pointing out that our morality is not evolving at the same pace as our technology.