Homo Zappiens and its consequences for learning, working and social life by Alexander Viess

Studies for Innovation in a Modern Working Environment Edited by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus Henning RWTH Aachen University Center of Learning and Knowledge Management and Department of Information Management in Mechanical Engineering International Monitoring Germany

Wim Veen & Ben Vrakking Homo Zappiens and its consequences for learning, working and social life

Delft University of Technology Faculty Technology, Policy and Management Section Education & Technology The Netherlands

Preface �� 6 Summary �� 8 Part I: The World Around Us ��12 1. Characteristics of a New Generation ��14 Iconic preferences · Technology is air · Inversed education · Networking is their lifestyle · Cooperation · Virtual is real · Multiple identities · Multitasking · Critical evaluation · Zapping · Instant pay-off · Self-confidence through self-direction · Outlook

2. Core Competences of Homo Zappiens ��23 Dynamic Experimenting · Modelling · Imagining identities for multi perspective enquiry · Prosuming · Multitasking · Networking · Outlook

3. Major Trends in Technology ��32 Networked Devices, Networked Applications · Open Source, Open Everything · Convergence · Tools · Outlook

Part 2: New Frameworks �� 40 1. The Age of Reconnection �� 41 The Empire · The Faith · New ideals · New structures · The End of the Line? · Main trends

2. The Dynamic Problem ��47 The World is not 2D · Solve problems instead of fixing solutions · Fear leads to aggression, paralysis or hiding · Society can relax · Afterthought

3. Get back in the Network ��62 Possible scenarios · Life is Play · Quad-Core society · Power to the user

Bibliography ��72 Imprint �� 75

Preface you are currently holdInG a document which is popularly named a ›Trend study‹. In it, you are supposed to read about trends in the world around you, possibly some predictions about where these trends are going and what you could or should do about them. That is one of the things that you will find contained herein as you might have rightly expected. Trends are progressions of concepts. We identify something as starting at some point in time and then through a series of successive time points, a trend tells the story of how something has evolved. We look for them to have an inkling of a clue as to where the world around us is going, where these trends might be evolving to. This gives us the confidence that we can not only survive in the present, but in the foreseeable future as well, excluding of course some catastrophe. We cannot predict catastrophes so in the interest of certainty we expect one and then forget all about them. Until it hits us. If you are expecting to read in this trend study about where the world is going, you are wrong. The world is not going anywhere. There. We have said it. That might have been all you were looking for. Now, to answer the question that just popped into your head: yes, there is a lot of change; we can see a lot of change happening in the world around us and we all have an imminent feeling of great big things about to happen. Exactly! »we see«. The world is not changing, we are. The frameworks we have imposed upon the world to make it neat and tidy, manageable and predictable, at least or so we thought, are failing us. The dust that we had so carefully swept under the rug is coming through. What we did not allow ourselves to

notice for the past four centuries is now coming back into view, seemingly with an attitude. Or is it just that it has always been there and some part of us and our society is now no longer willing to go without it? What we are about to give you in this trend study is a new set of glasses. The world is fine and you are fine, but the frames through which you look at the world are failing you. Now, we are not saying that there is something wrong with you; not at all. You are just as much a part of the world around you as anything and that world just Is. You might be looking at yourself through the same dirty glasses though. So, if by now you think that the authors of this publication are crazy and you don’t need new glasses, save yourself the time reading this. Put it away. In the very near future this book will call out to you, to pick it up and read it. Until then: goodbye. Good! You are still interested. Beware though: we may have just said that the world just is and that maybe all that you need is a new set of ›glasses‹. That does not mean that we are going to be reassuring you that everything is alright. Your world (and ours) IS about to change profoundly and the last thing we would want to do is reassure you. We don’t want you to find new ways to take back your grasp on the world you have so comfortably lived in. We want you to experience chaos. Experience a turning over of everything you believed was fi xed and certain. We want you to participate in turning the whole world upside down, because only then can you discover what is solid, true and real. Be still and let go! See the changes and then be ready to play!

Mapping infrastructure and traffic of the internet: Courtesy of Bill Cheswick, Lumeta

Summary Prominent characteristics of Homo Zappiens include their preference for images and symbols as an enrichment of plain text, their seemingly effortless adoption of technology and their cooperation and sharing in networks. They use technology in a functional manner, not touching what they canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t use, and increasingly, this generation seems to take exploration and learning, discovering the world, into their own hands. This can be seen when we see Homo Zappiens gaming, zapping television, or handling multiple tasks at the same time: they choose their own frameworks for developing themselves and structuring the information that technology is making ever more pervasive. Underlying these characteristics are a few competences which they have noticeably made more of a priority than any previous generation to this scale. This generation seems to be challenging every framework offered to them, not accepting any limits on their experimentation and lear-

Homo Zappiens is the new generation that is growing up with modern communication technologies shaping their views on the world around them. Through these technologies they are learning to develop new skills and exhibiting new behavior that may show us a way how future society will be organized and dealing with technology.

ning. They learn to model their own experiences and structures early on in childhood, when they must make sense of the myriad of apparently different ways in which various media offer their abundant information. As they become fluent in the meta-language of each medium, they pro-actively demonstrate these skills by sampling and remixing content or producing content themselves, no longer being the passive consumers that many older genera-

tions became used to. Homo Zappiens learns to participate in society through networks, anticipating that different situations may require different roles and developing the competence to quickly switch between roles just as they switch between streams of information The technology that is allowing this generation to demonstrate such differences from previous generations has three main trends responsible for this contribution. First, technology is linking everything; many devices are converging and functionality is being transferred from traditionally separate devices into combined single units. Secondly, technology is increasingly organized in a distributed, parallel network, relying on the contribution of many different parts to increase its usefulness and addition to our lives. Lastly, technology is becoming ever more open sourced; in the true sense of sharing many new and emerging technologies are being developed by the community instead

of being patented and protected, subject to development in small teams behind closed doors. These trends in technology are driving society to mirror the same trends. Of the many possible scenarios that can be extracted from these visible changes in society, this trend study chooses to follow a trend of continued innovation, whereby these changes are not seen as the upward phase of a sinusoidal wave, but rather the start of an exponential change process. We see technology being developed through its potential benefits, rather than as a means to more efficiently maintaining a status quo; we see old power structures being torn down and replaced by new emerging forms of organization; as we se society slowly comes to loose its fear of technology, we expect technology to be embraced for its opportunities, offering new possibilities for exploration and development. At some point in time, through a demonstration of effectiveness, a structure of hierarchical control came to dominate our view on creating order in the complex world around us. It has through various changes been with us for the past two millennia, never truly being shown as the limiting form of compartmentalization that it is in essence. Although hierarchical structure as an ideal seemed to work for a long time, there were three trends in society that make it inevitable that at some point in time, hierarchy must make place for a more natural form of coordination. First, every opportunity to reach across a barrier and create a connection between separate parts of society is embraced. Second, we have always had to maintain a precarious balance with technology, both trusting the provision of many of our basic accomplishments to technology as well as using technology to reach those accomplishments. Third, the individual has maintained a similar balance with society to such an extent that each time society became to much of a restriction to individual freedom, individuals tended to disconnect from society leading to its change. Realizing that we need a flexible structure for organizing ourselves and the world around us, we can look at Homo Zappiens for a clue. They show us that our structure for attributing value to concepts is too limited; employees are not determined by their education, politicians are not their political party and roles are not static. In many of our efforts these last two decennia, we have been aimed at combating symptoms, looking at external sources of threat rather than relying on internal sources of opportunity. We have come to dig in our heels when we noticed the opportunity of technology and this has set us at a disadvantage. By embracing opportunity and exploring the essence of technology, as we should with our educational and business

organizations, we can come to again determine what makes them most valuable to us. Much of our current reluctance to embrace the changes occurring in society can be attributed to fear. By clinging to something we think we have, rather than relying on our ability to continuously find better things of value, we are holding to a ghost of the past; a ghost that is being caught up by the spirit of innovation. When we operate on a basic instinct of fear, we are limiting ourselves to scan for threats, where we should be out hunting for opportunity. Homo Zappiens shows us that the time for society to cling to the accomplished status quo is dying, because we can increasingly rely on technology to connect us and allow us to organize and preserve our society as a group. In a networked society, the individual has more room for contributing its unique value and innovation and knowledge reside in a network, rather than in each separate individual. As we perceive that we must change to a more networked view on organization of our learning, work and society, it is important to single out a few of the discerning aspects that will help us implement this new view on organization. Realizing that essentially every experience in our lives may be a source of learning, we can choose three of the most important aspects for redesigning our educational settings. Most importantly, we should depart from the setting of goals up front, because essentially these limit our experimentation that ultimately leads to increased competences. We should stimulate exaggerative, playful learning, realizing that all learning is essentially a continued refinement of more basic skills and understanding. We must also, rather than seeing learning as a means towards an end, encourage learning as a continuous process, stimulating increases in skill and competence with a decrease in structure and an increase in complexity, tailored to each individuals level of mastery. Businesses and other forms of establishing economic value would do well to compare the changes in society to those occurring in the development of multi-core computer processors. As the creation of value is becoming more networked and distributed, we should not cling to a logic code for structuring and organizing work that is linear and thus creates the potential for waiting. Businesses should invest in their platforms for communication and sharing for their human assets, share with every employee the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s purpose and allow them to contribute as they see fit. Instead of trying to control their process and market, clinging to their current offering, businesses should come to rely more on innovation for sustained existence. For society as a whole and each individual trying to incorporate these changes into their lives, it will be important to realize that everything that makes one unique is a source of potential value to the network. With a networked view on organization, we

may come to see similarities on different levels of scale in the world around us and this provides us with the opportunity of transferring lessons learned between levels and from one situation to another. As it is increasingly important to advertise individual abilities, we also see society shifting from guarding privacy to competing for attention. Actively participating in society, work and learning, by taking charge of your own knowledge and development is precisely what makes Homo Zappiens so interesting.

Part I: The World Around Us This part of the study will describe major changes in social behaviour of those who have grown up in a digital world; a world in which scarcity of communications and scarcity of access to information is vanishing to a large extent for all of us. Across Europe high rates of Internet access using broad bandwidth connections have become a commodity for all, fading away former concerns about a digital divide between the poor and the rich.

Major trends in society often relate to slow or sudden changes in social behaviour. The above-mentioned quotation marks the time when adults started to notice particular children’s behaviour and publications on a digital generation first appeared in books and studies (Tapscott, Gee, Lindstrom). Ever since numerous studies has been describing the very characteristics of the generation that has never known a world

»›All of a sudden, children coming into our school that year showed a quite different behaviour: direct, active, impatient, unbridled and somewhat undisciplined; it seemed to me something had happened over summer. It frightened and excited me at the same time.‹ This is how a Swedish teacher described her feelings when she started a new school year in the outskirts of Stockholm in the mid-1990s when six-year-old children came back to school after the summer holidays.« Veen & Vrakking, 2006, p. 27

without a variety of electronic devices and the Internet. Today, as the early wave of this new generation has aged, the changes they bring about become ever more apparent to society. Homo Zappiens is1 ›the first generation born with a mouse in their hands and a computer screen as their window on the world.‹ (Lindström & Seybold, 2003); they had access to a computer at age 5 and a mobile phone before they turned 10 years old. Technology is no stranger to them, and they do not fear pushing buttons on a Dora computer2 at the age of four. Marc Prensky called them the digital natives (Prensky, 2002) and they exhibit all kinds of exciting new behaviour that should be useful at school and at the workplace.

The OECD started a research programme on this generation called The New Millennium Learner in 2006. The PEW studies on the uses of ICT and its role in American Life have been extended by a 50 million dollar research programme on the characteristics and competencies of the net generation. More recently studies have also been published indicating some negative sides of the Internet generation or describing the same

phenomenon from the dark side (Keen, 2007). The net generation should bring a culture of mediocrity and shallowness; expert knowledge should disappear as page ranking technologies do not bring up what is true or extremely relevant, but what masses have frequently clicked on. However, characteristics or functionalities of technology are not the main issue in the discussion on the pros, cons, concerns and dangers of recent developments of Internet uses of people. It is recognized that not technology but people are most important when trying to understand what is going on (Jenkins, Purushotma, Clinton, Weigel & Robison, 2006). Their uses of technology matter more how future trends in our society will evolve than technology itself. In order to give meaning to what we may observe as major trends in social behaviour of nowadaysâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; youngsters, this first part of the trend study will describe the characteristics of the net generation as they act in their daily lives. Consequently, these characteristics will be described in terms of competences that might be relevant for schooling, learning, working and life as a whole. And finally, in order to better understand the way technology is being currently embraced by todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s young people, enabling them to do what they want to do; we will indicate the most important trends in technology.

1. Characteristics of a New Generation Trying to describe the characteristics of a specific generation is tricky. First of all a generation never is a homogeneous entity and so it is impossible to make statements for all of its constituent parts. Secondly, there are many ways to define a cohort of people as a generation varying from cohorts of 15 years to 25 years. Having said this, for the purpose of this trend study, it might not be crucial to define exactly the boundaries of the ages of the net generation nor the exact percentage of young people showing the characteristics described below. It might be sufficient to say that in this study Homo Zappiens is the generation that was born in the mid nineties of the 20th century when the Internet took off being a commodity in many households of Western Europe. This study wants to highlight trends in society as a whole which by definition cannot encompass one hundred percent of the generation involved. Rather than a percentage the authors prefer to adopt the point of view that the characteristics and competences that will be described below will have an important impact on future social systems and institutions. This study describes a vision on what the authors think as relevant for future schooling, working and society as a whole. Other visions might well be drawn from the very same observations such those that Andrew Keen (2007) has drawn in his book on the culture of the amateur. We give a more positive meaning to the behaviour of young people and draw conclusions that focus more on opportunities than on threads. Below, we will go into detail on the characteristics of the Homo Zappiens and specifically what we see them doing differently from previous generations.

Iconic preferences Using television and computers from an early age on, children are confronted with a multitude of icons and images. Iconic skills relate to the ability to understand the meaning of a picture or icon without using words. Iconic skills belong to the language of images, and images play an important role in the childrens’ life today. Computer software contain many icons, ads rely on images much more than on text, and films and documentaries and strips represent typically a language of images. Homo Zappiens’ preference for images can be said to be the result of their exposure to visual cues. Lindstrom and Seybold (2003) counted that children are confronted with 8000 brands a day, most of them being logos. Television offering mainly visual cues helps children to exercise and interpret the meaning of an image even when there is no text explaining what the child should understand from the image. Iconic preferences are at the same time a very necessary attitude to survive in an era where older generations complain about ›information overload‹. Homo Zappiens never complains about this phenomenon (Veen&Vrakking, 2006). Older generations are trained in semantic cues as can

be seen when invariably they start searching a webpage for textual cues, starting in the upper left corner. This training is the result of years of education in reading books and newspapers. Children nowadays train themselves to understand icons and images and include these in their searching for and processing of information. Icons can be encountered across different media and thus allow easy recognizing of a particular type of information or environment. In its communications with peers Homo Zappiens is increasingly using icons and abbreviations as well. In part, because they are used to the speed of communication and a symbol may say as much as a whole sentence; in part because the mobile devices they use are getting smaller are not suited for fast typing of large sentences. In addition to the iconic language, Veen and Jacobs (2005) mention the rise of an entire new most textual language, the SMS language, including icons as well. There appear to develop a multitude of ›dialects‹ in SMS language, no standardization yet to be agreed. Lindström and Seybold (2003) have labelled this language of shortcuts ›TweenSpeak‹. In spoken conversations this generation may have the tendency to communicate only the core of a message, making it seem to older generations as if they were speaking in telegram-style. When children explain to their parents what a certain game is about, often their parents lose attention, because it is hard to follow the concentrated information in their children’s sentences.

technoloGy IS aIr Technology and new media are a natural part of the lives of this new generation. They are hardly fascinated by them and consider them just tools for a certain purto their elders who are almost obsessed

pose.

Contrary

with learning how

the technology works and thus how it

could best be applied to their daily

lives, the Homo Zappiens is merely in-

terested in technology if it works

and will just as easily pick up soneeds better. They often have little

mething else if that suits their understanding

the fundamentals of the technology they are using, yet they can explain the functions that make a tool useful. Technology to this generation should be intuitive, just as it is invisible. Tapscott (1998) formulates this perception of technology as: »It doesn’t exist. It’s like the air«. Oblinger and Oblinger (2005) take note of this phenomenon where technology is taken for granted and mention: »Technology is only technology if it was invented after they were born«. They pose that this holds true for any generation.

Inversed education Up to about the age of five, children seem to ask their parents how to use a personal computer. Most children start using the parent’s computer at the age of three, playing around with CD games suitable for their age. But more and more children now have a children’s computer on top of their anniversary wish list, and these computers do not require instructions from parents anymore. They are self explaining. From the age of six most children have learned how to use the personal computer and will often first resort to asking friends, before they will ask their parents. From the age of eight upwards, typically this generation is educating their parents on how to use the technologies and tools that are available, such as email, chats, and online banking, to name a few (Veen & Jacobs, 2005). This ›inverse education‹ is typical for this generation. Previously, elder people knew more than young people in practically every field. Nowadays, this distinction in expertise by age no longer holds. Through the use of the Internet, with many available sources, Homo Zappiens has learned to educate itself. Nowadays, it is more frequently true that anyone can be an expert in certain topics, while being new to other concepts. The example comes to mind of 14 year old Blake Ross, being hired by Netscape for a summer internship and less than five years later aiding in the design of the new Firefox web browser after being frustrated by corporate decision making at Netscape (McHugh (2005) in: Jenkins et al., 2006) The examples of children knowing more on topics than their elder generations do not restrict to technology. When making decisions on whether information is true or false, where to buy certain products as well as what to buy and where, children may be better educated than their parents. They have often learned where to find the comparisons that will give them the information they need to base these decisions on (Veen & Jacobs, 2005). This self-education does not restrict itself to knowledge and concepts; it extends to norms and values as well. Because the Internet is full of values, norms, and opinions, You cannot go around them. Veen and Jacobs (2005) argue, this generation has learned to be critical of the information they partake as they get to choose from various

sources; parents may notice this increase in critical stance at an earlier age than was common to previous generations.

Networking is their lifestyle To the net generation, living in networks is as normal as breathing. Although this might be true for any generation, Homo Zappiens’ networks include both virtual and physical networks. Through the many technologies available at their fingertips, they are almost constantly connected to electronic networks, through which they stay in contact with their friends and a wide source of information available. Combined with mobile devices, these technological networks allow them to communicate, to game, learn and be productive, irrespective of their geographical location.

Cooperation Homo Zappiens has made the use of networks a lifestyle. Where former generations might go looking for the answer to a problem in books, manuals or in online repositories, for this generation, the first option for finding answers is asking a friend; they actively know. They use their network of contacts to provide them with the information they need and if this network does not suffice, they ask an online community consisting of many individuals they do not know but who are willing to help. Knowledge sharing is common even with those who you do not know at all. A cooperative attitude also occurs when young people meet others who are looking for the same answers; they often team up. Just as they expect others to be available for them, they will share their knowledge when a friend is looking for something they know about.

Virtual is real Youth today does not make the same distinction between the ›real‹ world and the ›virtual‹ world that so much of society still does. To them, when they communicate with a friend through chat or in a game, this communication is not less real than a physical meeting. They also apply this attitude to persons they meet online but who they do not know in physical life. They consider them as if they were friends although they realize that they have never met them physically. They do not seem to bother, a virtual friend being as real as real. When for instance a gamer has agreed upon meeting his online friends at ten o’clock and someone passes by (physically), they will not hesitate to say they are busy; virtual friendships being just as valuable to them. Dunkels (2007) notes that it is always hard to describe new phenomena and therefore understandable, though unfortunate, that pioneers of modern technologies chose the word ›virtual‹;

it almost certainly delayed the development of our thoughts, because it was hard for people to move past the notion that virtual is opposed to real. Not only are online friends just as valuable to this generation, frequently they tend to communicate with their real-life friends through electronic means as well. Communities and social networks appear to be physical, virtual and hybrid at the same time. (Oblinger & Oblinger, 2005). Contact through email, sms or MSN is not necessarily less; it is just different. Surveying heavy users of Second Life (Attema, 2007) on this issue they say that their virtual life is just an extension of their physical life, it is not different. Dunkels (2007) describes an online interview with a young girl: »I asked a child about the difference between chatting and talking and she told me that in real life she is rather shy. I wanted to encourage her and said that it does not show at which she replied: Well, that’s exactly my point.«

Multiple identities Homo Zappiens has online and face-to-face identities as is illustrated by a boy describing a friend: »Online he is okay, but at school he is a nerd«. (Veen & Jacobs, 2005). Multiple identities also occur in many online games where players might have up to eight or more characters. In the World of Warcraft gamers choose to play with an avatar or character. The game offers many different types of them and gamers can choose from two main categories of characters: those from the horde and from the alliance. You can choose to be a dwarf hunter, a priest or a warrior for example, and many gamers try all of them. Young people are accustomed to play with different characters or roles and feel the consequences of these different roles as other gamers react on them. In fact, gamers are experimenting with social roles much more than they could do in ›real‹ life. Experimenting with social roles in virtual worlds does not have the same consequences as playing a role in physical life. There, negative consequences might be difficult to repair, whereas in games it is just game over or if death is at stake, it is just a matter of walking back to your body. Okay, you do not want to invest much time to do so, but it cannot be done in real life. Through developing different identities children learn within different worlds and in different circumstances you might have different roles. It makes it easier to be a leader somewhere and a follower somewhere else. You choose the most appropriate role according to your needs and you have learned to appreciate performing in different roles.

Multitasking One of the most frightening characteristics of this net generation is their ability to multitask: the ability to perform multiple tasks more or less at the same time. Parents and teachers are alarmed by their apparent lack of attention and focus. These young people seem to be online, watch TV, talk on the phone, listen to the radio and write a document, apparently all at the same time. (Oblinger & Oblinger, 2005). They are capable of switching fast between tasks and ignoring the things they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t find interesting. They will hear the television only on those moments that something of importance to them is being displayed. It further seems that they can use this ability on both audio and visual streams of information (Veen & Jacobs, 2005). Although research does not show yet clear findings on how multitasking works in our brains, by observing children it seems that they do not process the information flows all at the same time. They seem share their attention across the different information flows, focusing only on one, but keeping a lower level of attention on the others. It might well be that multitasking is rather a way of leveling attention and flexible switching of attention than fully processing all information flows at a time. However it may be, multitasking requires a lot of attention, and elder people get tired soon after trying to imitate their children. By using their attention flexibly, Homo Zappiens seems capable of handling much more information than generations before them. We can consider this as a very useful strategy for dealing with the large amounts of information available today through the Internet. By keeping track of different flows of information, Homo Zappiens may actually process information streams three to four times faster (Veen & Vrakking, 2006).

Critical evaluation Critical evaluation of information what children must do when selecting and filtering information flows. In fact, this activity is related to multitasking or â&#x20AC;şfast switching serial task completionâ&#x20AC;š (Veen & Vrakking, 2006). Processing more information is only part of multitasking. By learning how to raise and lower their attention levels, this generation has trained itself in handling multiple tasks. As a consequence, they instantly and almost subconsciously value different streams of information to decide where to place their attention. Homo Zappiens is confronted with a lot of information, not all of it to be taken at face value. They have learned that people may represent themselves differently on the Internet and may have hidden motives. They have also learned to distinguish between advertising and objective information. Children are keen on the trustworthiness of information as long as they are motivated to search. When visiting a website of a 14 years old girl profiling her with pictures or clips of her room, children

might quickly notice that the whole site is an advert, as they see cans of a specific drink in different places. They immediately consider this as a commercial expression and click away. In a future, where knowledge workers will often have to decide on complex problems in situations of incomplete information, having learned how to select the right information or how to judge the accuracy, source and intent of a particular media stream, this selecting and judging of information is an important skill.

ZaPPInG Ever since the television got the option of switching between multiple channels, zapping, or the selecting of channels of information, has been a known concept. Today, with access available to almost any channel in the world, from Dubai television to National Geographic, selecting which sources you would like to watch is not only an option, it has become a custom to many: with hundreds of different sports channels, almost anyone who watches sports on television, for example, has learned to tune in to the specific channels that transmit a high volume of the sports they prefer to see at the times they prefer to see it. But Homo Zappiens does not zap channels just because there are so many of them. Homo Zappiens seems to show a zapping behaviour that is specifically aiming at fi ltering information from different programmes at a time. The purpose is to get the message in order to understand. It allows them to select only those bits of information from each channel that are critical for understanding what the fi lm is all about. This way of zapping involves more than just selecting channels; it requires some basic knowledge about the structures and formats in which information is delivered on the various channels. Veen and Vrakking (2006) describe how young people can zap between different channels, sometimes keeping track of four or five channels at a time. To someone else, not holding the remote, zapping seems erratic behaviour. Yet often, Homo Zappiens is able to summarize all five separate channels after having watched only bit and pieces of each channel. Apparently, Homo acquired skills in processing discontinuous informaon, making up a meaningful whole out of them by connecting them. By doing so it seems they search for visual cues rather than searching for spoken words in a fi lm. They interpret the meaning of an image or sequence of images, understanding the principle of a fi lm being a pictorial story rather than a traditional stage play.

Zappiens has ti-

InStant Pay-off This generation has little patience and short attention spans. Their skills are aimed at processing various flows of different information quickly, but they have also come to expect this kind of high-density information streaming; anything less and they will become bored. Youth today are looking for almost instant gratification in many of the things they do, which has made Lindström and Seybold (2003) also label them the ›instant generation‹. They have difficulty in following a complete sequential storyline, expressing a preference to make their own choices and choose their own order. They have the technology to hop between applications, which allows them to switch between information sources and learning environments. Oblinger and Oblinger (2005) mention that this generation is developing ›hypertext minds‹, just as in 1962 Douglas Engelbart predicted that computers would liberate people from linear thinking through, for instance, the use of hypertext (Veen & Jacobs, 2005).

Self-confIdence throuGh Self-dIrectIon The Internet, the remote control for a television decoder, and many other

de-

vices; it is the user that decides what information is consumed, for how long and why (Veen & Jacobs, 2005). ICT offers youth control over, not just devices, but communication, networks and situations as well; situations which they will often have to master as adults (Tapscott, 1998). Through the use of technology, this generation has added options for exploring their own individualism. Virtual environments allow the creation of online identities through which Homo Zappiens can experiment with the different roles they may need to assume in life. The added value of games is that they allow any gamer an infinite number of tries to attempt to reach certain goals; games don’t pass negative judgment or punish the gamer and this stimulates learning and discovery (Veen & Jacobs, 2005). Games help children to master levels of performance, each of them providing an experience of ›Yes, I made it!‹ Positive support help people to better perform and make them think to be able to achieve goals that set to themselves. But even if the next level is very hard to achieve children feel challenged and show considerable time on task. If you have experienced that you can master levels, it might well be that young people transfer similar attitudes to different situations, such as mastering applications, information flows and even mastering social interactions. Being able to find and choose the information needed, making a choice on how they represent themselves and knowing the frameworks in which information is presented are all invaluable skills in today’s knowledge economy.

Outlook Having described some of the behaviour of children growing up in a digital age, we now will try to understand this behaviour in terms of competences. By doing this we aim at formulating behaviour in terms of abilities that may be applied not only in playful environments of computer games or online environments but also in day-today life in general. The assumption that these competences of playful and online behaviour will be transferred to daily life is still to be proved by research as there is still little evidence how this transfer is taking place. However, from frequent conversations with representatives from industry and public organizations we have indications that young people coming into the labour market do show similar behaviour as described in this chapter. They ask for unlimited access to the Internet, for the use of tools for communication such as MSN, and other means to work to way they have been doing as teenagers. If their behaviour can be defined in terms of general competencies or abilities, these abilities might well be social building blocks for our future society. In the next chapter we will first analyse Homo Zappiens behaviour and define the competences. We will deal with a future vision on societal consequences in chapter 3.

2. Core Competences of Homo Zappiens We have identified twelve characteristics that are typical for Homo Zappiensâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; behaviour. This chapter aims at giving meaning to these characteristics in terms of competences. Competences are abilities describing a combination of skills, attitudes and knowledge. A competence is something people acquire by practicing and training both in unintended and intended learning situations. The characteristics that have been presented in Chapter 1 stem from unintended learning situations such as computer games and online environments. Games and the Internet have in common that they immerse users, interact with them, and in the case of multiplayer games, engage them into communication with others. As a gamer you are immersed in situations where you have to act and to make choices continuously, each of these choices leading to feedback from both the system and other gamers. Surfing the Internet is similar in that sense that it demands acting and choices to be made by the user, and as a consequence, users get feedback from both the system and peers. Immersion, interactivity, and communication are critical characteristics of the technologies Homo Zappiens has been using from early childhood on. What we try to say here is that technologies have induced forms of behaviour that will last in our future society and will further evolve as long as technologies will continue to offer new opportunities and windows for societies to use them in ways that are very hard to predict as they depend on choices societies make adopting or rejecting technologies. Let us now try to define the competences of what we have seen in chapter 1.

Dynamic Experimenting Huizinga (1948) published his book on the Homo Ludens far before computer games were invented. He stated that most activities in life can be described as play, both in childhood as in professional life. He described professions such as engineers, lawyers, scientists and architects as playful professions in which participants acted as gamers facing problems to be solved. We may conclude from his illuminating study that preparing for professional life should include exercising solving problems in a way that allows for mistakes and failure from which the student can learn. This is exactly what playing computer games is about. Playing is an important method for learning when children are young. It embeds the various concepts of trying, fun, immersion, exploration and manipulation of resources. In essence, it is a state of mind that allows for unhindered exploration and discovery with a passion, dedication and engagement that is not often seen in the learning activities that are set for us in regular educational institutions and unfortunately rare in many jobs as well. Where we see this competence of dynamic experimenting expresses itself best is when people are playing games. It is through the completely imaginary and thus

interestingly new game world that people who play hone their skills in particular areas, possibly those for which this game world was created. Through exploring the boundaries and limitations of virtual playing fields, gamers find the limitations of their intentions or the expectations of the game developer. That is where playing may touch of on cross-boundary interest. In gaming, Homo Zappiens often engage in discussions with the developers of the games they play, after having invested a certain amount of time in the game and thus become knowledgeable about the virtual world and its rules. They often comment on how the game rules are flawed or how the game may be made more interesting. Gamers may also come to discover concepts previously unknown to them such as architecture, history or military strategy in a game such as Age of Empires; this may then set them off seeking more information on the subject. This learning of related cross-boundary topics should seem to be a coincidence to you, as it is, but nonetheless, we may pile a game world full of coincidences for a wide range of people to have an epiphany. Games teach gamers to explore, to learn the rules of the world, to reflect on the consequences of their actions. They allow them to scout the world with a safety net, simulating results before we need them for real. Like children playing â&#x20AC;şhide and seekâ&#x20AC;š, or lion cubs in a mock hunt, playing is the first style of learning we are born with. It is our most basic and thus most effective style of learning. And learning, after all, is at the core of our being as humans.

Modelling When we imagine the likely outcomes of a particular approach or envision an alternate reality, we are using our brains to simulate and create imaginary models. We let go of normal conscious restrictions and fall back on our brainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s natural ability and tendency to link every piece of experience. Models are based upon facts and relations that we know from previous experience and are structured using the rules and hypotheses that we want to test (Jenkins et al., 2006). Models allow us to explore parts of our knowledge in detail and, in a structured and engaging way, to learn the implications of our assumptions. Animations allow abstract concepts and formulas to come to life, allowing us to reflect on them using a different mental set of tools. Both are dynamic representations of models. Games are a special form of animated simulation with a high degree of interactivity. Models allow us to capture part of reality in a framework in order to reduce the complexity and allow closer examination. The building, testing and refining of models is at the core of our current scientific practice. There is consequently a thin line between reading and understanding models and (re)designing them. The use of models

in digital simulations has significantly increased with the emergence of systems-based thinking in science (Jenkins et al., 2006); system-based thinking is a way of modelling that will try to analyze data by compartmentalizing it into systems and subsystems, yet at the same time, studying the behaviour of the system as a whole. Learning from simulations happens through a process of trial and error, whereby the model is constantly refined or variables adjusted to test different options. Through the use of simulations, students may learn concepts much more thorough than from textbooks or lectures; they engage in a simulation, come to understand the concepts and end up feeling that the discoveries they made are their own. Looking at computer games as a highly playful way of offering often very complex interactive simulations, computer games foster procedural literacy: capacity to restructure and reconfigure knowledge (Jenkins et al., 2006).

Imagining identities for multi perspective enquiry When playing a game, as was said in Chapter 1, gamers assume the identity of an in-game persona; they may well play many different persona, and sometimes simultaneously, depending on the game. While interacting with the game world through their character they will come to identify with their character and they will also invest something of their own in their character. Gee (2003) discusses â&#x20AC;şprojective identityâ&#x20AC;š in both senses of the word project; the gamer both projects himself into the game world through the avatar or character, and makes the building of the characters persona his project. This can be seen in strategy games, where aggressive children tend to adopt aggressive playing styles, whereas quiet children may well adopt a strategy of growth and deterioration. In role playing games, gamers do not control abstract representations such as nations or armies, but rather they may choose an individual character; this choice of a characters strengths and abilities matches closely with the choice of playing style and thus the personality traits that the gamer intends to invest in the character. Assuming identities is a form of bringing the world around you, or at least the modelled and simulated world, to life; it allows you to animate the concepts and models that are part of your understanding of a character. It is a fundamental method for using multiple forms of expression to look at a concept from as many sides as possible. Animation often draws on all sources that may have relation with the models, structures or concepts being animated, thus often opening paths of association that were not actively sought; associating through enactment may bring information to the conscious forefront that often surprises even the developers of a model. This may be you, when you both grasp a concept and model it and then enact it, as children do.

When you see children playing out their favourite movies, books, stories or when you see them adopting the role and attitudes of their in-game characters, they are similarly enacting what they have understood, integrating it with their own experiences and reproducing it augmented with their own vision or preferences. Their play is valuable in many ways: it allows them to add their new models to their existing knowledge, test it and adapt it if necessary; it also allows parents or educators to see a part of their core identity as children will exaggerate certain aspects of a character and omit others. It is however necessary to have an equally good grasp of the model being represented to probe this identity and separate it from the concept generally understood.

Prosuming Prosuming is the mix between two words: Increasingly, we can see Homo Zappiens producing digital content. Software tools enable them to remix MP3 files and video clips. Lenhardt & Madden (2005) show that 57% of American teenagers created digital content in weblogs, webpages, pictures, stories or videos. Veen (2008) surveying 570 children in the age of 10â&#x20AC;&#x201C;11 years, shows similar results; 57% produced a website, 53% created profiling sites or weblogs, 13% produced videoclips, cartoons or animations, 68% downloaded MP3 files, and 33% downloaded videoclips from the Internet. When children produce content, they do not often create out of thin air; they will use exis-

ting media, text, imagery or sounds to experiment on and develop their skills. They will not bother with such aspects as copyright. One of the basic ways in which we learn to be creative is by building on the work of others, often picking it apart and refiguring the pieces. Children in preschool do this when they are asked to make collages, designers do this when they want to present the results of a brainstorm, DJs do this when they are performing live for an audience and artists do this when they are making use of accepted imagery to reform it and surprise people. Dissembling pieces of our culture, experiences and media and then reassembling them, is how our creative expression works best. When we use existing formats or examples to shape our own creation, it is often because we may not want to change everything. A music producer making a contemporary version of a hitsong by the band ABBA, might just want to change the tempo and drumbeats, leaving the vocals and instrumental track intact. A teacher directing the new school play, might just want to teach children to act and build stage props, so he might consequently want to borrow an existing play and just enrich it visually. Working with existing cultural traditions and breaking conventions, however small, has always been the work of artists (Jenkins et al., 2006). Many of the stories and authors we read have sampled from Biblical, ancient Greek or folkloristic tellings to create their own story around a few recognizable themes. The creation of fan fiction nowadays, where fans of a particular book, series or writer use characters or plot from the work to spin off their own stories, often augmenting the created world, is building on the same competence to produce adapted expression as a vehicle for creativity. Homo Zappiens is increasingly using content from the Internet to create parody or fan fiction or exaggerations. Children may piece together video recording from a dozen different concerts, where the artist is singing the same song in each of them, just to create a richer visual composition. Teen magazines piece together photos of different celebrities all wearing a pink dress to express their perception of current fashion. Through the technologies offered nowadays it is much easier to use and restyle multimedia, audio, images and video, whereas before we mostly had written texts available. Children put (remixed) content massively on YouTube or Flickr and reach a worldwide audience that will value their content by number of views and ratings. This generation might have been called the â&#x20AC;şNapster Generationâ&#x20AC;š (Jenkins et al., 2006), because of their perceived massive ignoring of copyright, yet we have allowed children to cut out clippings from magazines and newspapers and glue them to pieces of paper for decades.

Producing involves active analysis of what the content being used means in a cultural context, how it can be changed to produce different meaning and how it is formatted. Producing is the competence of expressing oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s creativity within the frameworks of the culture and traditions of the audience. What Homo Zappiens is doing differently from previous generations is that they simultaneously learn to distribute their creations to a wider audience for sharing and feedback; they thereby infringe on the capacity of traditionally structured media production businesses to hold a monopoly on particular content for the purpose of increasing its economic value. Yet, although expressing creativity is a process of recombination and partial substitution, valuable creativity is only expressed if it is distributed to a large enough group, so that it can be valued.

Multitasking Homo Zappiens is a multitasker. They have learned to navigate the various different flows of information and understand how these are formatted. Through using these technologies they come to understand the different contexts, cultures, values and assumptions. Media provide us with a wide variety of information, often intended for a specific audience and purpose or coming from biased sources. Being able to select information as valuable, based on critical assessment of the context in which it is presented, is a very important ability. Since the Internet has created the possibility of connecting to many different communities, we can see that this filtering of information is increasingly taking place in social communities, where the users alert each other through various mechanisms of the most interesting or useful information. Still, Homo Zappiens needs to navigate the various communities to select, aggregate, and filter information. Multitasking is also the ability to follow storylines through different media or process different storylines simultaneously through discontinuous absorption of information. Here again, the skill of multitasking relies mostly on the individualâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ability to keep a framework or map; the individual must know the relation of the different flows of information to each other and must be able to understand how these different flows usually format information; the individual must thus know the contexts in which information is offered in order to select the most important parts and skip over what is less relevant, as time is limited and many flows of information seek attention. Multitasking is an ability having a negative connotation and conflicting with focused attention, where the ideal is to have an individual focus on one task only. Howe-

ver good this ideal might have been though, there are two main objections to be made in favor of multitasking. For one, in a society as networked and connected as it is nowadays, individuals must be able to switch very quickly between performing the task at hand and communicating either results or questions with the community they are involved in. Not only is this a prerequisite for teamwork, it is often necessary to team up in order to complete the task, because the individual does not hold a complete overview of all relevant information. In knowledge intensive industries professionals often face complex problems where more than one discipline is required to cooperate. It is just at the conjunction of disciplines that new ideas can flourish. Secondly, by our very nature we are multitaskers. We have been biologically programmed as hunters to be able to scan our surroundings, constantly being vigilant for either threats or food. Only when we perceive either of these do we focus most of our attention on the target to the exclusion of all else. Multitasking thus involves the ability to keep an overview of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s surroundings while being able to judge and select which part of your surroundings requires immediate attention. Multitasking and focusing attention are complementary competences (Jenkins et al., 2006), where both work together to control the flows of information being processed. Attention works as an internal gatekeeper for short-term memory, allowing only relevant information to enter the brainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s consciousness. Multitasking works as a retrieval mechanism that keeps track of external sources of information and how to acquire them.

Networking In his book Knowing Knowledge, Siemens (2006) discusses how knowledge is increasingly in the network; how knowledge is no longer a product, but rather a process of interaction and negotiation. As we see society becoming more connected and thus creating all sorts of subdivisions such as Communities of Practice, Communities of Interest and Communities of Participation, it is not hard to see why being able to select, filter, share, and disseminate information through networks is one of the main discerning competences of Homo Zappiens. Networks offer a means of distributed processing, allowing a search for information to be aided by a community of like-minded and similarly interested people; these distributed processes include association and filtering, with community members judging the accuracy and value of information as well as bringing new information to the attention of the group. Distributed processing can also be seen as dividing a work in tasks, where each member can perform part of a complex operation.

Working in networks requires the individual to be able to keep track of the external activities and resources taking place. These may be the interactions one has with technology, whereby part of the processing is done by machines; think for example of children using calculators to solve math problems. External resources are also the members of a community; keeping track of the values, interests and contexts of different communities is similar to handling multiple resources. Where society is becoming ever more one condensed network, mapping subgroups as clusters based on relative distance, using the selective competence of multitasking is also becoming crucial to working in networks. If technical networks enable masses to communicate and collaborate, human networks appear to bring new dimensions of knowledge creation. In his work The Wisdom of Crowds, Surowiecki (2004) explains the surplus value of crowds working together in a loosely coupled system. He defines four elements that make a crowd wise: a crowd must be diverse, decentralized, organized and fostering independence. A crowd must consist of independently operating individuals, contributing diverse information based on their own values and frameworks, without someone dictating these contributions while the crowd combines the contributions of each member. In fact, a network offers the opportunity that the whole of its constituent parts is more than the sum of its parts. Just as our brains create from uninhibited association, so may networks. Example abound where large groups of interested people manage to unravel information that controlling media would rather have kept contained and secret. To be able to work in a network, one must be able to outsource some of the tasks to be completed. One must also be able to keep a map of all the connected resources and retrieve them when needed. Furthermore, one must be able to value information, context and sources. Most of all, however, one must be able to combine with others, making the most efficient use of each part of the network, being the knowledge of an expert or the computing power of a laptop or the communicative ability of an artist, while rising up to the occasion of contributing what one as an individual does best.

Outlook We have now described six competences that we consider critical in a networked society that is service oriented and knowledge intensive. We have derived these competences from observations of behaviour of young people who have adopted technology without fear and who seem to apply these competences when coming into the labour market. Young employees presume that their working place will look just like their homes: unlimited access to the Internet and a variety of applications for social networking. As more young people will enter the labour market more pressure organiza-

tions will experience for these requests. However, these requests are not merely about technology, they are about a different way of organizing information, knowledge, knowledge sharing and collaboration. In fact, they touch upon the very organizational structures of companies. We already can see companies realizing these Web 2.0 integrations into the organization. cIsco is one of these companies which has recently started to implement a Web 2.0 infrastructure and applications in its organization. Technology in itself is not the driving factor for organizational changes. Nor are the functionalities of tools and technical systems decisive for future developments in societies. What matters are the interpretations of people making use of the technologies at hand. It took decades before the steam engine was used for purposes other than a train, and it took about 40 years before the telefax became a commodity for many. Nevertheless, technology is an enabling catalyst and this is the reason that we should take a quick tour on the major trends currently taking place in technology. We will describe these major trends focusing on the meaning they might have for people to use technology.

3� major trendS In technoloGy When lookInG at the technological developments of the last decades, a few trends can be discerned. Obviously, the speed of development of IcT, both quantitatively and qualitatively, has been a catalyst in the changes that we see in today’s society. Seely Brown and Duguid (2001) note that computers and other technical systems seem to obey four growth-laws; the processing power of chips doubles every 18 months (Moore’s law), storage size doubles every year (disk law), the bandwidth of networks doubles every 9 months (Gilder’s law) and the value of a network increases by a factor of 2n, whereby n is the number of people connected (Metcalfe’s law). Below we want to focus on three specific trends in technology that have great influence on the behaviour of Homo Zappiens and which have inversely also been influenced by this new generation.

netWorked devIceS, netWorked aPPlIcatIonS The first trend that can be seen is that technology is increasingly networked. We already had the telephone system and the cable networks, national mail delivery and transportation networks. With the Internet we have a global spanning network of computers that function as a platform for many different services. Mobile telecommunications and fibre optics also add to our possibilities. Devices become interconnected and multifunctional, providing possibilities to do tap into multiple networks for different uses. Not just in hardware do we see the increase of networking technology. Soft ware applications such as instant messaging and online gaming also are networking applications, and many others are emerging. For instance, the application you use to scan you computer for viruses is nowadays connected to an online network of servers and possibly other users to provide an early warning in case a dangerous virus is discovered. The mobile satellite navigation device that you may have in your car now comes equipped with technology to automatically send back the routes you have travelled to the provider of the mapping soft ware so they may continuously update their maps and routing algorithm. Your camera may come equipped with technology to link it wirelessly to a photo printer and in some countries, new passports will be equipped with chips to make them electronically verifiable and readable. Users of smart phones and personal digital assistants already had the ability to link their device to a corporate Microsoft Exchange server, thereby getting

access to their email, but recently Microsoft announced that it would be launching â&#x20AC;şLive Meshâ&#x20AC;š, a platform that would allow sharing for photos, instantly between a mobile phone or camera and a digital picture frame. Google and other soft ware firms already offer or are working on similar initiatives.

oPen Source, oPen everythInG A second trend occurring in technology is that of Open Source. Where inventors previously tried to keep new inventions to themselves, the last few decades have seen a rise in the number of collaborative, shared and open developments of, especially, soft ware. The operating system Linux is a good example that has drawn media attention worldwide. Developed loosely on the same logic as the operating system Unix, it was in part because of the

need for ever more computer users to take control of the very basics of their

computer that made the initiative take flight. The dominant desktop operating system Microsoft Windows does not release its source code, making it inherently less safe, say Linux enthusiasts. Linux by contrast releases all its source code, making it easy for computer users to select only those functions that they want for their computer; also, should a vulnerability be found, openly available source code allows for potentially anyone to contribute a solution, instead of just a handful or even an army of employed programmers. Another interesting example of open source is Project Wonderland, an initiative by Sun Microsystems to create a development kit for building your own virtual worlds. After the media hype and success surrounding Second Life, this initiative aims to allow for a more secure, robust and scalable platform for individuals and organizations to build virtual working environments worlds and design their virtual presence. Second Life is a virtual 3D world, where users are represented by avatars. The world itself as well as the avatars is highly customizable, making it possible to do virtually anything in virtual 3D that you would want to imagine. One of the main drawbacks was that the systems it ran on were, until recently, proprietary software and in order to buy plots of land or virtual goods, one had to convert real currency to virtual currency. Many other open source applications are emerging and worldwide communities of users and developers help to develop the software, Ubuntu, Moodle, Drupal, just to name a few. The essence of the Open Source movement is not the technical side of it. It is the social side of it which is the availability for users and developers to collaborate. By making an application available when it is not yet finished and without aiming for big profits, every application which has merits and uses, will soon find a team of volunteers, developing it. Open source allows for self-direction, interactive collaboration and personal customization, making it an ideally suited initiative for the net generation who is willing to share and cooperate on issues and artefacts of interest. Large corporations such as Sun, HP, and IBM have recognized the importance of this Open Source movement and are already supporting open source initiatives free of profit, expecting the services they can deliver to clients to be more profitable than the selling fee of a single application platform. The implications of Open Source initiatives for businesses are huge, traditional business models no longer hold. Companies have to reinvent themselves and redesign their business models.

Convergence A third major trend in technology is convergence. Just a few decades ago, we had a video recorder, a television, a telephone, possibly a pager all as separate devices. Nowadays there are laptops and even mobile devices no larger than the palm of your

hand which can offer the same functionality. Where we used to have mostly receiving devices, designed for broadcasting networks, most new devices now have transmission capabilities; transforming the networks they connect to into multicast networks, where anyone may be a source of information. In software we see applications combining functionality as well. Messaging applications include video-telephony, email software includes your agenda, tasks and contacts and video editing software allows you to instantly upload the results to a webpage. Other examples include: websites offering banking software integration, mobile phones used to authenticate users through SMS, and automobile windshields being developed with an integrated see-through display for assisted navigation. Not only is technology converging, it is also disappearing. Devices are shrinking and an increasing number of devices and functions are becoming mobile as engineers find ways for producing smaller microchips and longer lasting batteries. Examples of foldable ›digital paper‹, foldable computer screens and computers the size of a credit card, are already being prototyped. In British airports, engineers are working on automatic face recognition through the camera surveillance system they already have in place. Biometric scans are removing the need for keys and cards. Computer technology is finding its way into everything we see around us, often in a way that does not attract that much attention. This makes technology more easily accessible for playful discovery and natural use, ideally suited to the Homo Zappiens’ expectations and way of working. The above mentioned trends of networks, open source and convergence are revealing in numerous applications that are freely available on the net. Some of them have proved to be that omnipresent among young people that we would like to shortly describe them below.

Tools All tools described below have one aspect in common: interactivity. Homo Zappiens prefers technology that allows for interactivity. It seems to be at the core of their culture. (Veen & Jacobs, 2005). Ramaley and Zia (2005) propose seeing the concept of interactivity broader than just pushing buttons and find four distinct type of interaction: between humans and humans, tools, concepts and contexts. Indeed, when Homo Zappiens surf the Net they are actively engaging with the technology they use. As Tapscott (1998) says it: »Time spent on the Net is not passive time, it’s active time. It’s reading time. It’s investigation time. It’s skill development and problem solving time. It’s time analyzing, evaluating. It’s composing your thoughts time. It’s writing time.«

By creating their own weblogs and publishing their own music, photos and videos, these youngsters interact with each other. They interact within the contexts of society, but also within the contexts of a new emerging virtual society or within the worlds of games. Instant messaging Instant messaging is the ability to send messages to your contacts instantly. Messages can contain text, but also audio, images, video and even files can be transferred. Rather than email, which is relayed through server and stored to be picked up at the readers’ discretion, instant messaging requires that both sides of the communication, or at least their computers or other devices of choice, are connected to a network. MSN is one of the most well known and widely used services for instant messaging. When trying to understand MSN, one might best compare it to a modern version of the telephone. Of course, we have added text, video and file-sharing, making it a much more versatile tool, but the basics of being able to connect with your friends and acquaintances on a personal basis remains. It has been augmented with links to several online games that you can play against each other and also contains the option of sharing a background for the text to be displayed upon. In short, it is a personal tool for communicating with others one-on-one or for setting up a conference. You can be listed in a public directory or can choose to just be visible to people who specifically add your contact-email to their MSN Messenger. The program shows whether you are online or offline, but you can also indicate ›away‹ or ›busy‹. This is displayed to others who may see your status. Typically, MSN is very popular among teens. Veen and Vrakking (2006) cite a national Microsoft study showing that a typical MSN user may have up to ten ›message windows‹ open simultaneously. A typical ›contact list‹ will contain between 200 and up to more than 400 contacts. As of 2004 there were 4 million users of MSN in the Netherlands sending 22 million messages a day (Veen & Vrakking, 2006). Blogging A weblog, blog for short, is an Internet-based application that allows you to write thoughts, ideas, stories or opinions and share them with others. Blogs are used as newsletters, personal diaries, discussion tools and magazines. One might best compare blogs to the modern version of the newspaper column. A website can offer many of these threads and so blogging is also well described as the modern newspaper. A blog allows for text to include hyperlinks to other webpages or sources such as video, audio or photos. Most weblog software, which is installed on the webserver it is

hosted on, will allow for pictures to be displayed besides the text. What makes blogs more than a mere electronic upgrade of the newspaper is that they include the option, at the writerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s discretion, for viewers to directly contribute their comments and for these comments to then also be viewable to anyone reading the blog. The software will allow you to keep your blog a one-way communication medium or enable it to serve as a collaborative experience. Blogs can be accessible only to members who log on with a username and password or they can be open to the public. There can be more than one writer contributing to one single blog. Blogging is very popular among the net generation. Blogs are used for publishing small stories or an online account of activities; for instance, when on vacation, a Homo Zappiens is increasingly using a blog to keep interested friends and relatives updated. They are not only efficient in that a blog allows for writing once to many readers, you can now show pictures of the places you visit while you are still abroad, simply by uploading them. Social profiling Another popular tool among todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s young generation are the various sites for social profiling and networking. Sites like Hyves, Myspace, Facebook, Plaxo Pulse, and LinkedIn allow for the user to detail a profile containing personal information, hobbies, interests, etc. They also allow for the user to have small gadgets, a blog, links to favourite websites, and music or videos. Typically these sites revolve around networks. You add friends to your profile and may allow them to see more than an anonymous user can. By adding friends you can then also see who they have added to their profile and how many shared friends you have or, for instance, how many hops you need in your network to be connected to someone you are interested in. Games Playing games is one of the favorite activities of Homo Zappiens. There are many types of games, including adventures where the user will have to complete a main quest, roleplaying games, where the gamer develops a character in a fictional gameworld, and first-person shooters, where the gamer can play combat missions seen through the eyes of the character. Also, games are available for all ages from the age of two upwards. For the very young, there are games where you can use the mouse pointer to target balloon, training basic motor-skills. As kids grow up, the complexity of games tend to grow with them. The results are noticeable: in preschool, children of this generation demonstrate that they have already learned about basic shapes (circles, tri-

angles, squares) and through games they have also learned the elementary principles of sorting, ranking and the value of money. (Veen & Jacobs, 2005). A particular form of gaming that is very popular nowadays is Multiplayer Online Gaming, often in the form of roleplaying. World of Warcraft is such a game. It mainly revolves around solving quests and developing your character. In the early stages, the players can solve these quests on their own, but as their character grows stronger, so do the quests. From a certain level quests become so difficult that they cannot be solved by one player alone and thus require the cooperation of a team of players with their respective characters. Preferably, a team consists of different characters, each with their special abilities, like healing, strength, mysticism, spell casting or others. Through these team quests, gamers learn to cooperate and negotiate with other players to form a team with the right mix of skills. Often, gamers do not just play one character. They may have three, four or even higher numbers of different characters with which they play. This way, they get to experiment with different roles and may express different parts of their personality through different characters. Games are mainly played for relaxation, but at the same time they immerse you into a game world that is often very complex. They challenge you to seek an understanding of the game world. They also force you to reflect on your own actions even including the feedback of others when, for instance, you commit a serious mistake during a quest and the team dies as a result. Games stimulate cooperation and thus offer a platform for learning from your peers. Homo Zappiens is known for starting a game without reading the manual (Veen & Vrakking, 2006), yet they often make use of ›walkthroughs‹ or ›cheat guides‹, written by other players, to get them further along in the game. Apparently they still make use of a sort of manual, just from different sources and with different purposes. Every popular game has its own robust community where gamers discuss the game, share tips and criticize the designers (Oblinger & Oblinger, 2005). The games themselves, such as EverQuest, Ultima Online and the afore mentioned World of Warcraft are not finished; they are continuously being modified and expanded, often in cooperation with enthusiastic gamers, to keep the game challenging and refreshing even when one has played a long time and the virtual characters have accumulated a lot of skills.

Outlook Until now we have described major trends in the uses of technology, in technologies as such, and we have give meaning in terms of competences that young people are developing. We may notice here also that the phenomenon of Homo Zappiens is not a hype, a specific typical but unique generation. We believe that the trends and competences we have described are illustrative for a fundamental change going on in our societies as a whole. In fact, we see that our societies are in a process of change that is not directed by technology but by processes of individualization and globalization. We consider Homo Zappiens a metaphor and an expression of these change processes coming from inside our own communities. In the following chapters we would like to turn to the consequences of the observed behaviour and competences of Homo Zappiens for three main areas: learning, working, and social life.

Part 2: New Frameworks

In the previous three chapters we showed you how Homo Zappiens is a generation that will be doing many things differently from what we have been used to these past decades, or even centuries. The technology that is available to them has opened doors for new, more participative behaviour. We have mentioned a few of the main distinguishing competences of the Homo Zappiens and how this may enable them to contribute to a changing society. Overall, we have shown you that there is a lot of positive signals to be seen in this new generation and that most of the fears and negative valuations that we tend to heap upon them and their behaviour, may be unjust. In the following chapters we will take our analysis of this generation one step further. We will show you how their changes in behaviour may actually be a response to the changes happening in society; changes which may affect us all and which will not be exclusively beneficial to just this new generation. In this part we will be discussing how we have come to call our current time ÂťThe Age of ReconnectionÂŤ and how the changes it brings with it will affect the various aspects of learning, working and social life.

1. The Age of Reconnection Douglas Rushkoff (2005) writes of a new renaissance in his excellent book Get back in the Box. In it, he compares our current age to the last time when people on a mass scale were awakening to changes; changes that brought unrest, uncertainty and new opportunities; changes that have fundamentally influenced our thinking and frameworks for centuries since. The Renaissance was an Age that gave birth to a massive influx of new ideas, inventions and concepts. The Americas were discovered, corporations were invented to do so, some people slowly began to formulate the concept that the world was not flat and many great works of art originate from these times. The Renaissance gave rise to the concept of Homo Universalis, liberating man from the beliefs of the feudal system and the idea where each man was supposed to have a predestined place determined by birth. However, before the dust settled and these positive influences came to dominate our opinion of this time period, there was major unrest. Church-controlled society simply was not ready for ideas giving man greater influence over his own destiny, nor was it ready for the sciences to dilute its control over society by suggesting that man and evolution may have had a greater influence in shaping the perceived world than what was accepted doctrine. This period consequently also gave rise to such phenomena as the Spanish Inquisition; efforts by the established order to squash the opposition and return control of society to the elite. Looking back through history will show that any time of change has brough unrest and as a response saw established forces trying to restore simplicity, order and structure. Luckily, every period of change has eventually resulted in a critical mass of people embracing the changes, which has led to the overturning of old power.

The Empire Changes inevitably challenge the way we look at and think about the world around us, or else they would have been called improvements. During periods of change and enlightenment, society as a whole comes to realize that the framework that has up until then been accepted as a means of understanding the world, may no longer contain all our experiences and emerging insights. We then come to redefine our view of how the world might be and with it we come to formulate a new ideal for our active role in it. In democratic ancient Greece, nation-states were ruled by the people who elected the wisest or most able among them to perform the tasks of organizing collective action. Society imbued a large sense of responsibility in each citizen to contribute to his best ability and to accept responsibility if he or she was so called upon. This period gave rise to many of the philosophical fundamentals that still form the grounds for thinking in the western world.

It was only when Roman military organization came to dominate and control food resources that Greek society was slowly conquered, merged into the Roman Empire and subdued. Since then, the Roman military organization, which proved such an effective means of seizing control and power, has permeated all parts of society and has consequently been the basic framework through which we view any form of authority. Regardless of whether new forms of organization were thought of, since none could overcome the military efficiency of hierarchy, they were all ultimately rejected. Take note, however, that hierarchy was not invented by the Romans. The benefits of alpha dominance in a group to the structure and organization of that group are implicitly recognized throughout the animal kingdom. The Roman innovation of the concept was to remove the self-thinking ability of the individuals, making them largely obey a single voice, through a chain of command. The first crack in this scheme was provided by the Empire itself, which, in its final days, had become so large as to be unmanageable from a single, or even double, throne. The Roman Empire fell to its inability to provide pay to its military and its parallel inability to control taxes through the military. Having integrated too many different cultures and people, with too many different likes and thoughts into its Empire, the system, whereby one official set of worldviews was accepted, no longer sufficed. What actually killed the Roman Empire was its inability to give equal voice to its many multicultural groups. These many people, tribes and nations simply could no longer be convinced that what worked for the Romans in Italy would also work for everyone else.

the faIth The Renaissance brought a second crack to this framework of control. In its final days, the Roman empire, through the central authority of the emperor, accepted monolithic religion as the dominant framework for giving meaning to our existence on earth. It discarded with the diversity adopted from the ancient Greeks and further imposed hierarchy upon religion in an effort to solidify state control of the populace. Roman religion had until then known many different gods; each part of human society was ruled by a set of norms and values and a corresponding god. When the empire was threatened by a growing group of people flocking to new ideals of religion and, more importantly, this gave them a means of seeing themselves free from Roman authority, the empire sought to reestablish itself. In an attempt to reunite the empire, the emperor embraced the new faith and transferred his authority to the church. Although the demise of the empire was inevitable, the structure of power was preserved.

The symbols of power were broken and the illusion of freedom was given; the empire split into many different autonomous parts, each again embracing their own interests and beliefs. Yet the concepts of control had taken hold and no new structure had yet emerged that had demonstrated being able to directly improve upon the Roman concept of control. Over time, some nations again rose to power and the Roman Catholic faith rode to power with them. As it was becoming the dominantly accepted religion, it also grew in influence. The Church, through the monarchs of the most powerful nations, controlled the empire. Although nations might quarrel, the dominance of the church over the populace was such, that when the Pope chose sides, kings would tremble.

neW IdealS The time of the Renaissance brought a new wave of enlightenment and freedom to the individual; it was a time when part of the ideals of the ancient Greeks resurfaced. The self-direction and self-actuation of the individual troops, so inefficient in the Roman military command structure, was equally absent during the centuries of serfdom and feudal rule. Renaissance is the french word for rebirth. As Rushkoff says it (2006, p.12): ÂťFor what was reborn in het original renaissance were the high ideals of the Ancient Greeks. The Renaissance innovation in the arts and sciences allowed some very old, long suppressed idealism to rise back the surface.ÂŤ As the monolithic faith had done during the times of the Roman Empire, so did the concept of the Homo Universalis and the rapidly accepted belief that man should seek to make the best of himself, return to the people some hope that they were not completely relegated to mindless parts in a machine; in order for people to seek out their maximum potential, they must logically be able and thus have some say in their own destiny. The single most important contribution of the Renaissance was that it broke the power of the church. The second most important influence during the Renaissance was that it again transferred the structure of power, that had still not been overcome. People began to

see through the doctrine of the church and its influence has waned ever since. Yet people did not throw away their belief in hierarchical power as a natural concept; kings and nobles were still thought of as having the right to dole out power and influence. By focussing on the individual and its power to excel, intellectual freedom was retaken from the church, yet society was compartmentalized; there were many different fields of science and discovery where people could explore and master their abilities. This was seen as an efficient structure (of hierarchical organization) to keep discoveries and changes manageable. The paradox here is that in order for people to measure how they did, they would have to compare with other people and with other sciences and this required a judging authority. Who would be the judge of people if they each could be in control of their own exploration? That role came to those who had the control over food and value, the monarchs, merchants and nobles. Their means of giving power, influence and authority-by-proxy was still the same: money.

New structures The concept of hierarchical power thrived. During the golden age there was invention, exploration, discovery and colonization; there was, at least for some, an increase in freedom for individual contributions and creativity; each could see room within their life to improve and make a meaningful contribution and so there was relative peace and prosperity. Yet over time,

The fundamental flaw with a hierarchy is that a few come to decide the collective action for the many; they will invariably choose the best course of action to themselves and this is seldom the best course of action for all.

again the concept of control became constricting to people. Those in power reasserted their might and through increased taxation and unequal treatment of individuals, many came to feel again uneasy. The end of war and conquest brought back to the public eye the openly seen limits to individual creativity and exploration that was the Monarch, Nobility and Clergy.

So came to be the French Revolution and the American War for Independence and with them followed the Industrial Revolution. The control of power moved accordingly, from a system of genetic transfer to those who had in the previous two centuries created much of the actual value. While those in authority had kept the peace and judged value upon what would work for them, the tradesmen and merchants had increasingly been creating the real value and loaning money back to authority. Now, the pompous assumption of power was overtly overturned in another moment of Enlightenment.

Yet, the power structure prevailed, following money as the means of attributing power. With all the liberation of the individual from tried and failed systems of power, society still held firm to the notion that hierarchy was a proper way of organization.

The End of the Line? What may have caused us to adopt hierarchy and efficiency as leading principles was the competition for settlement locations and the uniformity of purpose that guarding our wealth required. At the same time, by adopting a view of hierarchical power as a good structure for organizing our lives and society, we implented a uni-directional purpose for the individual; if we were to be meaningful to society, there was only one way to go: up!

â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Laszlo, 2003

Places at the top of the hierarchy are scarce and so with a system of hierarchy, the individual will always be in competition with others, removing the possibility of genuine cooperation and mutual benefits from the equation; a valuable individual to society, was to be one at the top of the hierarchy of value and to get there the individual had to think of how to serve society. Our thinking has in this way brought pretty much everything in our lives under structured control; our belief-system and values are dominated by wanting to become as valuable as possible, maximizing your own contribution to society, conquering a spot at the top of the ladder to attain true freedom. Those at the top must have been valuable to society, so they are logically recognized as having authority. At the same time, many people feel useless because they cannot see for themselves a way up the ladder; they thus live with a continuing resentment. The fundamental flaw with a hierarchy is that a few come to decide the collective action for the many; they will invariably choose the best course of action to themselves and this is seldom the best course of action for all. Since the Industrial Revolution, our technological advancement has been rapidly increasing. Through these tools, we have enabled ourselves to evolve, as individuals and as a society. In the process, we have become more and more reliant on technology for our liberation of spirit. By automating many of the most basic tasks necessary for our survival and wealth, we have freed a large part of society to pursue higher goals. With the current technology of the Internet, we have allowed ourselves to start a global spanning society, but more importantly, we have created a new structure where, by relying on technology, we can finally see means for restoring essential democracy (Aristotle, 2000) as a form of organization and structuring the world around us.

Technology has become so abundant that we need no longer compete for it; similarly, technology has become so transparant and powerful, that we can rely on it to help us create and organize our own lives around us. We are finally ready to let go of hierarchy as a fundamental view on power and to begin experimenting with new and improved concepts.

Main trends There are three main trends to be discerned throughout history. Firstly, mankind has always sought to unite in as big a group as possible. Throughout the ages, every time an empire rose to power and came to fall, in its ashes the many different peoples it had conquered still retained a greater sense of connection, through common history, than before the Empire came to power. Secondly, every time the collective society became oppressing to the freedom of the individual, these individuals would be increasingly motivated to find ways to again express themselves freely, which ultimately led to the breaking of the oppressive structures. Third and last, our wealth and knowledge has increased and to ever higher extent we have captured our knowledge and understanding in tools and technology, time and again freeing ourselves to take on more complex tasks, while relying on technology to keep the basics provided for. History shows an upward trend along aforementioned three axes towards a society that is more connected, yet leaves more room for the individual; a society which at the same time maintains a delicate balance of power with the technology it has spawned and in turn became dependent on. It is not yet foreseeable how this changing balance will come to an end or if it even should. We will leave the debate to philosophy as to whether the tension between these axes creates a positive dynamic. What should be noted is that, although there are real and fundamental needs for balance and delineation, structures of power should always remain flexible enough to grow with the balance they serve. Should we cling to them too strongly, eventually counter forces will rise to bring them down and restore the balance of power.

2. The Dynamic Problem The previous chapter showed you how many of the innovations in society have had their roots in the fundamental struggle between community and individual and how the adopted structure of power, if held to rigidly, may defeat its own purpose of holding a balance and may itself become an obstacle to restoring that balance. In this chapter we will explore the many ways in which our beliefs about organization have shaped the way we do and see things and how these structures of power are conflicting with the emerging culture of the Homo Zappiens.

The World is not 2D One of the first things that can be learned about how Homo Zappiens operates and organizes in their daily activities, is that cooperation and multiple roles are an integral part of human nature. We cannot complete the most complex and satisfying challenges on our own and thus we must cooperate with others. This cooperation requires coordination, communication and sharing, things we see Homo Zappiens doing naturally when they are, for instance, playing games. This principle of working on problems together is also used in teams and can thus be seen in the workplace, in educational settings, as a form of organization between businesses and even in the strict hierarchy of the military; joining forces and capabilities to tackle challenges is also fundamental to innovation and the progress of science. We build on the work of others and make use of theories developed by one set of individuals in one discipline to examine another discipline from a different point of view. We make use of the special skills of many to perform better in the projects we undertake. To this end, the individual has always had a very useful value for the community; by developing particular abilities, other individuals were free to develop other abilities, while at the same time, all abilities were available to the group. When we imposed hierarchy and structure to the way we live and organize ourselves, at first we captured these notions of diversity and explicitly recognized them as valuable. Because they were valuable to use, we sought to preserve them and thus fixed them. We gave tasks to individuals, making them a mason, an engineer, a doctor, a student, a teacher, an employee, a parent, each with a well-defined set of behaviour that we saw as valuable. By doing so we simplified the world. We still had to come to terms with the reality that one individual could have many different faces, being both a father and a mason for instance. So we codified the situations, places, times and processes when each of these faces would apply. A person would be a mason at work and a father at home.

Simplification of the world, or the capturing of reality in models (source?), can only happen by omitting parts of that reality; parts that we usually find insignificant or unwelcome. In the case of most of our labels and views on roles and contribution of the individual to society, what was omitted from the models was the uncertainty and dynamics that make the world complex. In our very simple example, we would not be able to explain how a person can also be a father at work, when his children come by. This simplification is still apparent when we look at many of the forms in which society has organized itself. Although the business world recognizes the importance of team work for its contribution of different skills to the solving of complex tasks, it does so through often too rigid structures. Often employees get labelled by their job descriptions and what they are expected to contribute, their value, is limited by this expectation. When teams are formed, we need a manager, an associate, an engineer and a financial expert for instance, so these are drawn from the different departments in the company. We lack to consider that the engineer may also be a father of three children and consequently has very valuable skills in leading and taking care of people; or that the associate has through previous experience a better knowledge of engineering than the engineer who has only recently graduated. Homo Zappiens has learned that they can have multiple roles in life, just as they may have different roles in different communities and not unlike how they play games with different characters, investing each with part of their identity. They have also learned that these roles are flexible and dynamic, to be applied when needed. They may have the same identity online as they do at school, when they are communicating with friends. Yet they may also adopt different identities within the same community, when at one time they can know something about a topic that others donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t, assuming the role of expert, while at other times being just as new to a concept and assuming the role of student. To Homo Zappiens the world is not linear; it is not delineated along the lines of high and low, many and few, skilled and unskilled. Although these observations may hold true at any particular point in time for a specific situation, they hardly ever hold true in a complex world where individuals communicate with many others in parallel. Looking at the way how teams are nowadays more often organized in an ad-hoc manner or how coalitions shift allegiance with the shifting of political tides, we can already see how society has been increasingly incorporating this concept of flexible structures to the organization of dynamic reality. Too often however, we still look at

organizations from a rigid perspective and this is the first lesson we can learn from Homo Zappiens.

Solve problems instead of fixing solutions Many of the changes that are happening in society have been enabled or in the very least aided by technology. Globalization of society and internationalization of markets have been able because our transport and communication technologies are such as to make borders transparant for most purposes. For those with a bit of entrepreneurial spirit there seem to be plenty of opportunities. Many businesses however have come to look at technology as a way to get an advantage on the competition or, in most cases, as something that they must incorporate into their processes if they are not to be at a disadvantage. They focus a lot of their attention in making the best use of the technologies available, often thinking entirely too much of how to use technology and not enough about whether they really need it to improve their business Rushkoff (2006). When looking at educational institutions, we can see the same external focus and difficulty with adopting to changes. These institutions have been designed to provide a firm basis for individual quality and standards and have remained fixed on this role too much to allow for new processes. Over the past decade, computers and the Internet have been adopted into curricula and courses as an instrument of increased efficiency, often taking the form of webquests or e-learning courses: computer-based material that is nothing more than a linear combination of reference material and possibly an electronically administered memory quiz. Very few electronic course formats included true interactivity, non-linearity or pre-tests of the users knowledge. The adoption of the calculator showed the same characteristics: schools could only cope with the added benefits of the calculator by increasing the quantity of the same subject material. Even then, only in cases where math was itself an auxiliary source of knowledge, were they initially accepted. Parents have also had a hard time accepting computers into their home. While many parents got experienced in working with a computer through their job, they had difficulty accepting the other uses of a computer that their children soon discovered; spending hours upon hours behind a computer, gaming or chatting, was something they simply could not imagine as being fun; at the same time they saw their children taking less time to go out and play or sit behind their books and study. As a result, many parents have placed restrictions for their children on the use of the computer. This was reinforced by the fact that they often had little grasp of the computer, besides the skills and applications that were necessary and useful to them in their work, whereas their children seemed to often be the ones explaining them how certain functions

worked. Frightened for the consequences of something they did not fully understand and could not completely control, many parents have, similar to large parts of society, clamped down on authority and control in a way that has only distanced them further from understanding the true benefits of the technology. We have been living in a marketing age for the past two decades. Realizing that we had all but exhausted our venues for traditional innovation and that there was large demand for service and personal value, we sought to control how people determined and responded to value and invested heavily in our understanding of how trust and brand-recognition was established and could be manipulated. This led entire industries to focus even more of their energy on appearance and the grooming of a customerbase that was being broken down into niches and target groups to do so. Mass media suddenly saw a huge rise in demand for their delivery platform while, in effect, the po-

Society has been slow in accepting technology as simply a tool. The great hype that was given to the personal computer and later the Internet has created such an external focus on possible benefits that everyone is out there looking for the latest advantage that they can draw out of a computer. This often makes them forget the uses that are already there.

pulace was being brainwashed. Homo Zappiens show us how our efforts have been misguided and disconnected from the purpose they were intended to serve. The focus on marketing brought us further from our customers. The focus on a strict curriculum has brought us further from the most important competences that we should be helping this generation to learn. By trying to limit our childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s use of technology, we have actually attempted to deprive them of valuable practice that will serve them well as

participants and shapers of tomorrowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s society. Our focus on the value of technology has brought us to look almost exclusively at those functions that are quickly and widely adopted and further from asking ourselves whether we truly need technology and what functions might actually serve to improve the processes we have in place. In order for our frameworks to still be effective in understanding and managing the complexity of todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reality, we downplay the importance of anything that does not fit, so we do not feel pressured to pay more attention to something we do not yet fully understand. This happened when certain genres of books became fun to read and we dubbed them lecture as opposed to higher-valued literature. Comic books have in our eyes never held a fully developed story, often being only around 50 pages long with 5 pages worth of text. The fact that they can similarly be construed such that meaning

and complex thought can be inferred from them, eludes us. Video games (Gee, 2003) are seen as a means of fun and relaxation, simply because we cannot yet understand how we may control the other benefits they can serve and since we do not understand them, we ignore them. What we see in schools is yet another form of disconnection, when we look at the teaching of creativity and reflection. Students writing reports are strictly forbidden from copying material from others or reputed sources. We want to focus so purely on fostering creativity and reflection with students that we forget that all creativity is grounded in cultural traditions and existing knowledge. For instance, we do allow children to make collages. Getting quoted is one of the fundamentally accepted means for scientific publications to gain recognition and one cannot even call a publication academic without including at least a dozen or so references to other reputed sources. In fact, the quality of the sources used for scientific work often determine in part the quality of the work itself, because scientists know that if the existing knowledgebase has been taken into account, then the contribution might have the biggest possibility of being a valuable contribution, be it a summary, a new insight or a critical rebuttal for existing views. While students making exams are not allowed to copy answers from other students at the risk of being punished, we recommend workers who manage to copy the most valuable processes from competitors and improve the business. Building on the work or knowledge of others is, in other parts of society, highly valued, as was shown in the example of team work. Yet, because of our incompetence to develop a form of testing whereby we are able to adequately provide feedback on each team memberâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s contribution to a team result, we have not yet been able to release our old framework of individual quality assurance. Schools focus on teaching children to develop their own creativity, their own opinions and their own values; they forget that it is through evaluating the opinions of others, from our parents, siblings and family to our teachers, bosses, co-workers and peers, that we come to pick those insights that we call our own. They are so focussed on looking for signs of these developments, that they disregard the process that in each of us precedes this. What these examples point out is that society has been slow in accepting technology as simply a tool. The great hype that was given to the personal computer and later the Internet has created such an external focus on possible benefits that everyone is out there looking for the latest advantage that they can draw out of a computer. This often makes them forget the uses that are already there. Society has taken a hypocritical view on technology, but also on processes and people; like a headless chicken we want to deny the obvious, while clinging to views and

expectations. We stare advantage in the face and go looking for its brother. Often, we even come to reject the very things that can benefit us, because they have not yet been discovered by others. It is important for us to learn from the Homo Zappiens that tools are just tools and what works, works. Time and again they are showing us that we are too focussed on external characteristics, images and frameworks, that we miss the texture underneath. When children can hand in issue papers, directly copied from sources on the internet, society cries murder and quickly tools are developed to test for plagiarism, whereas these children have only shown us what should have been obvious to anyone: when using technology we can do more, so we should have expected more. The same goes for jobs; when a mechanic can complete his round of chores for the day in only 3 hours, then the business employing him has a very valuable asset that should consequently be rewarded with either free time or an increase in valuation and challenges. Rather, by holding to the view that employees should be at their jobs between working hours, often eight to five, businesses are creating a drudge for those employees who find challenge in doing their jobs well. This same mechanic will consequently work at a lower pace in order to stay noticably busy, while loosing much of his job satisfaction. By holding too rigidly to our images, focussing on the means rather than those things of core importance to us, we shape the wrong frameworks and structures; we focus our attention on things of lesser importance. Thus we are loosing potential to disgruntlement and ignorance, where we could have been gaining through innovation.

Fear leads to aggression, paralysis or hiding The basic nature of every living organism on earth is to survive and reproduce. Basic behaviour is consequently aimed at seizing chances, avoiding threats and sustaining growth. Although humans have evolved a long way from needing to be concerned with basic survival, our current mechanisms for behaviour are still built upon our primitive instincts and reactions. To learn how to truly move forward as individuals and as a society, we must learn to recognize which of the fundamental mechanisms is driving our interpretations and actions. Many of our fears of technology and our drives for control stem from the perception of a threat. We interpret the emergence of new phenomena that do not fit our known worldview as an increase in chaos and uncertainty and this immediately makes us scan for threats: safety first. Consequently, we have always been very cautious in adopting new technology and very eager to focus most of our attention on debating whether there were possible downsides to our status quo. When the printing press was invented, one of our initial reactions was to fear for the benefits that we derived from

the storytellers of that age. As with the telephone, we fear we may be loosing personal touch when we allow the virtual communication of the Internet into our lives. People feared that part of their soul was being extracted when they first saw the workings of photography. Ancient cultures were only too eager to attribute seemingly magical phenomena to a deity and deliver some of their autonomy in the hands of the priests who seemed so capable of appeasing this deity. The war in Iraq was started by similarly playing on peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fear of nuclear catastrophe and immediately suggesting a solution through the use of the Âťall-powerful American militaryÂŤ. Now that it has become known that this might have all been a ruse, we see that fears are hard to banish once they have taken hold; many people are still not completely certain that what we rationally perceive as an error in intelligence or a deliberate act of misleading, was not in some part indeed a true threat. When looking at how Homo Zappiens adopt technology and how this is different from how previous generations adopt technology, we can see a difference in behavioural foundation. Older generations approach new technology with a fear of loosing the technology and benefits they currently have, whereas this new generation, that has known no other world but one wherein this technology is readily available, approaches modern ICT with eagerness and inquisitive mind. Homo Zappiens at the same time demonstrates that it is much more beneficial to approach innovation with exploration and inquisitive thought. Through their exploration they gain earlier experience of the workings and benefits of new technology and consequently gain the advantage that they are more free to pursue new innovation because of this technology. When other generations try to catch up, fearing that they might miss out on the benefits that technology seemingly has to offer, they frequently come to realize that they will never attain the same level of apparent ease that they see in this latest generation. What they fail to see, is that it is merely their own fear of going out there and experimenting, which is holding them back from using their larger experience to more quickly understand the full benefits of technology. When we see Homo Zappiens adopting new technology, we are sometimes amazed by their proficiency with new tools. At the same time we notice how they seem to be paying less attention to learning mathematical skills, grammar and memorization; rather, they rely on calculators, icons and search engines to provide them with the same information. We fear for a future time when they may not be able to rely on this technology and how they would then be at a disadvantage for not having learned the more basic skills preceding their current skills. This fear may be justified; we may, after all, arrive in a world where all electrical and mechanical energy sources besides animals and human

beings have been rendered inaccessible or unusable; a world where we would again need to rely on ourselves. Yet, projecting this fear into Homo Zappiens apparent lack of learning more basic skills and competences, is withholding society from moving forward. If we do not allow technology to help us, we can never rise above the needs that we have now covered with technology and we will not free ourselves to increase our abilities as individuals and as a society. When we truly look at Homo Zappiens’ behaviour, we will not see an incapacity to learn grammar, math or memorization, but rather latent abilities, which have not sufficiently been stimulated by their surroundings. When you look at Homo Zappiens’ behaviour, you won’t see disinterest for ›old concepts‹, but much more often you will see a form of prioritization; they choose to learn the most important things first. In a world where technology is available, the most important skills are those that enable us to use that technology to enrich our lives. Would you take a group of Homo Zappiens into the woods and outside the reach of technology, they may at first feel ackward, but they would quickly transfer their inquisitive mind and procedural knowledge to discovering how to make the best use of their new surroundings, thereby opening themselves to learning more basic skills, for instance hunting, camping, fishing, making fire and acquiring a knowledge about plants and animals. They would still engage in an inquisitive and cooperative rather than consumptive and clueless manner, showing us that the basic competences, which they have been developing through technology, can be equally beneficially applied to other tasks not requiring technology. When we look at our economic and political systems, we can see that in many cases, fear seems to have a firm hold on interpretation and decision making. Politicians will, close to an election, do and say almost anything to gain voters’ favor and refrain from any action that might render them a bad reputation. Consequently, our political system grinds to a halt as elections approach. In determining which technology is more appropriate for large infrastructural projects, new digital security or communal transport payment, the political system will often very carefully weigh any known option. Yet, much more often, in such large scale projects, we see that once an option or means to a goal has been chosen, decision makers will refrain from any action that may reflect badly on their capacity to make these complex decisions, most notably including action in going back on their choice of technology once flaws become known. In business, we can see plenty of companies going after strategies that may put a halt to the decline of their customers; they react from a fear of loosing value. Rather than seeing a herd of prey decline and starting a hunt for fresh meat, fresh innovation,

they envision themselves under threat from their competitors, moving into a state of defense, that is as much cripling as it is immobilizing. When we approach the world through fear, we are in a state of limiting our exposure, seeking for cover, cautious in our approach of the unknown. This will not bring us to discover the unknown quite as fast as we would when hunting for new means for improving our lives. When we let go of our state of fear, we will experience more freedom to explore and partake of the many rich experiences that our surroundings and technologies still have to offer. We can approach any problem positively, with a care for making things better for ourselves, rather than holding on to something we think we had, but which was in fact never ours. When we fear the loss of customers, we fear for our ability to deliver value. We think that our competitors must logically be delivering more value, so we focus on trying to outdo our competitors in what they seem to be doing best. Often, we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t go looking

for ways to start a new product life cycle of emergence and growth, but we try to prolong the mature phase of a product in an attempt to extract maximum value from minimum effort. When we do this, we are motivated by our fears that we may not be capable of innovating in such a way that we will again provide true value to our customers. When we look at the system of law that we have installed in our society, it has for the last centuries been ever more focused on limiting damage and threatening consequences, instead of the repairing damages and enabling equal opportunity. Fear of legal claims now drives many businesses and organizations as well as individuals to implement measures that restrict their use of technology, products and services, just to ensure that they do not commit acts for which they may be sued. It should be apparent that by structuring our society this way, we are limiting our growth and innovation; by operating on a basic premise of fear, we preprogram our response to be inaction, avoiding or aggressive response, rather than the active engagement that it could be. A final example of how society has been operating from a basic behavior of reacting to threats is our need for privacy. Part of our individual competition, which has been part of our society for many centuries, is our need to protect our competitive advantage; our hard-earned position of certainty may be taken away or diminished by others discovering the same techniques and resources. So we created a shell of privacy around ourselves, to further delineate our individual identity and competences from the collective of which we are all a part. Although this has made distinctions much clearer and has allowed some individuals to rise to great prominence through a monopoly on a particular set of ideas or skills, this has deprived the collective of discovering how combining the different skills and competences of multiple individuals might have been better for all of us. What we can learn from childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s uninhibited exploration is that by adopting an inquisitive, eager approach to the unknown, we will much faster come to experience exactly what it may offer in terms of new experiences, new innovations, new frameworks and new threats. Only when we discover a true threat this way, is there a need to take action and fall back on our cautious approaches. Even though large parts of society have been fearful of losing gained status and advantage, rather protecting a threatened niche than building a new one, the most successful discoveries and advancements of the past centuries have been made by those who were, in a way, genuinely fearless. Now, an entire generation is showing us how to be fearless and inquisitive again, enabled by technology and only hindered by the rest of society that is still reluctant to aid them and see them, not as a threat but as an addition to our established way of life.

If we wish to add new technology, knowledge and abilities to our bag of tricks, we must not be afraid to open the bag in fear of letting something out.

Society can relax When we consider society as a network of individuals, then we need to consider that a network consists of two characteristics: nodes and connections. Individuals in a network represent the nodes and their relationships represent the connections. Every node and every connection in a network may be unique; even though there are similarities, the combination of priorities and values, competences and insights, strengths and proximities, may differ greatly. This makes every node and every connection valuable. Society has for centuries been focused on strengthening itself through strengthening the individuals. Furthermore, we have been trying to strengthen certain aspects of individuals to make our society better suited for a particular type of challenge and complexity. Through education and by demanding only particular types of intelligence, we have created a network that is rather unbalanced in its abilities to contain and share all of our capacities and interests as human beings. When we created jobs, we were asking people to improve their skills in performing certain tasks. By creating structures we encouraged people to develop analytical skills. Through competition, we stimulated a focus on performance, the realization of quick gains and the ability to present ourselves and our solutions. When we dubbed painting, music, spirituality and sports as hobbies or recreational activities, we relegated them to the personal sphere, giving off the signal that these skills and interests were of less value to the network as a whole. When we learned to raise a curtain of privacy around ourselves as individuals, these were the characteristics that we kept hidden. Creating a veil between the part of ourselves that we would share with society and the part that we could not share with many caused many people to feel disconnected. People with particular primary skills in the artistic or paranormal, were often forced to develop their secondary skills in order to create a living. People got disconnected from society. Workers doing their jobs only for the purpose of having some money so they could go home and spend time on what truly enthused them, are no exception. By trying to impose uniformity on the network, in effect putting stress on the connections and nodes to change, we destroyed part of its value. As a result, we now have plenty of employees who see work as a chore and are consequently hard-pressed to really give it their best effort. Still, many companies and human re-

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source departments try to push and educate their employees, ›empower‹ them so to say, to put their best efforts in their work. When a network is dynamic, relations will be formed and reformed and individuals will move in relation to one another. Both opposites and similarities attract, so on the one hand we would see groups of people forming around common interests and skills, common connections. On the other hand, we would see people contributing in places where their views are as opposing as they are refreshing. For example, connections would form between people who love golf, but consequently they might contribute to

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each others perspective on business; people who find each other through a shared love of music, might open each others eyes for different cultures. Through the Internet, many repressed groups and interests have found a venue for sharing and connection; a voice in society. This same reconnecting of the network is causing the veil of privacy to slowly come down. As people learn that there are others who share their dark desires or personal hobbies, their less valued but often equally defining characteristics, people are becoming more open towards eachI mother a g i n i n g c yabout berspace who they are at work as well as in their free time. The very concept of ›free time‹ implies that there is also time spent in captivity or service of others (Veen&Vrakking, 2006). Again, we see here the signs that we have taken autonomy out of the individual nodes. Homo Zappiens are leading society in reconnecting and rediscovering the fun and venue for sharing their complete selves. Consequently, we see emerging interests in eastern philosophy, feminine skills, arts and cultures arising in a mostly competitive and analytical western society. Suddenly, there is a huge rise in occurrences of paranormal abilities; alternative therapy has taken flight over the past decade; even the concept of empowerment and more self-decision for employees can be seen as a rediscovery of repressed qualities. Not that these characteristics where non-existent before,

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but rather, as a society we did not pay attention to them and thus we did not see them. We have yet to see how these emerging interests will change our views and beliefs as a society, but their emergence is striking. Not only are these concepts and competences crossing over from a personal into a societal sphere, from the individual into the valued domain; as a consequence of people now sharing more of themselves, we slowly see people getting back in touch with themselves. The mixing of sciences is bringing new insights to each discipline and has spawned innovation across domains, in such new fields as nanotechnology, biomechanical engineering and sustainable energy science. Employees are bringing ideas of relaxation and meditation into the workplace. We see more people preferring free time and fun over the relentless pursuit of money. Even though the traditional religions do not yet see a steep increase in their numbers of subscribers, it can be noticed that there is a huge increase in spiritual interest, especially among young people. What is also interesting to note is that because of our rediscovery of hidden talents and abilities and because we are slowly letting go of our need for privacy, we see a strengthening of connections. Homo Zappiens are communicating more about a wider range of topics with a larger group of contacts; they have released their fear of communication and sharing and our need for privacy is being replaced by their need for attention. All of a sudden, the last decade has seen a surge in reality television; people choosing to allow themselves and every aspect of their lives to be filmed. The cry for attention is also apparent in, for example, the explosion of marketing efforts or the competition for guests in prime-time talk-shows; shows and magazines are looking for exclusivity; brands are looking to buy into the established images of celebrities. Yet, while we see commerce responding with giving us more of the things we are already doing ourselves, we can also see the collective response, from a network of

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increasingly liberated individuals, that attention cannot be bought or forced. Where ever more sources are competing for attention, we see individuals preferring sources that fit with their particular skills and interests; sources that rather provide in-depth coverage of single issues, instead of the flash-bulletins that we call the evening news nowadays. Traditional society is at a loss how to deal with these changes. We can see doctors unable to explain how a cancer could have disappeared between two visits or how a blind man has suddenly regained his vision after using aspirin for two weeks. Patients, being increasingly knowledgeable, are encountering doctors who are increasingly vague and indirect about symptoms and the need for treatment. Politicians, who are still talking in general terms about their plans, ideas and opinions, have alienated voters who increasingly want specific issues to be addressed. Businesses, at a loss to continue innovation, are focusing much of their attention on the acquisition of competitors. Teachers, who see students in their classes with sometimes more knowledge, sometimes different interests, blame methods, books, curricula, management and politics for their inability to teach. In every aspect of society it is becoming apparent that those individuals and structures, businesses and organizations, that are retaining a structure of scarcity, privacy and not sharing, are missing out on the reconnection that this age seems to be bringing. Not only are they less connected, but as a consequence they miss understanding of what is truly going on around them. Their clinging to old frameworks is making them blind.

Innovation is not contained in structures, nor is it contained in individuals or in their relationships to others. Innovation is contained in the dynamics of a network; its ability to continuously form and reform is what makes society innovate and learn. Innovation is only limited by the boundaries that we place on a network, the space that it is allowed to possess. What Ăs contained in the networkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s connections and nodes is the knowledge and values that we accumulate as we innovate (Siemens, 2006). As we see in online computer games, a network derives it power through its users.

Afterthought We must be ready to let go of our notions that power and organization cannot be distributed. We must also let go of our fears that we must cling to what we have gained, because just as this may maintain for us a status quo, it is also holding us back from innovation. We must let go of our habits of compartmentalization and division, giving everything a label and a limited purpose. We must stop our focus on parts of the network, parts of the individuals and parts of their relationships. Once we do, we will see that we can reconnect with our more natural inclinations to seek value as we need it and provide value where it is asked. By reconnecting with the network of our species and releasing our fear of being absorbed by it, we open ourselves to a myriad of new possibilities for play and innovation. We will embrace uncertainty as a given constant and rise to the challenge that this dynamic playing field brings. By reconnecting with ourselves and the network, we open ourselves to again seeing the world as connected, freeing ourselves to explore its aspects that we previously ignored.

3ďż˝ Get back In the netWork In this final chapter, we intend to show you how to reconnect with a networked view on organizing our lives. As we saw in the previous chapter, many of the concepts that we use to organize our lives, learning, work and society have become obsolete from Homo Zappiensâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; point of view. Technology has taken dominance over society as a means of providing organization to our lives. This has cleared the way for the individual and society to become more intertwined. This chapter will attempt to provide you with new frameworks, a new set of glasses if you would, through which you may take a more positive look at the changes we see occurring. We will discuss how, through a new perspective, we can come to redesign society to match this networked view on organization.

PoSSIble ScenarIoS It should be noted that predicting the future is difficult at best, with any trend. When we try to draw conclusions from the past or present and say something about the future, we inevitably have to make assumptions. Looking at the possible scenarios for the future, we can discern three main axes or choices. We might develop different scenarios based on our assumption that technology will be embraced or rejected. Another deciding influence on future momentum for change is strong tance from established power factor of importance is rection of technological continue or consoli-

developments will be whether the enough to conquer resisstructures. A third whether the diinnovation will date.

At one extreme

we may find

a scenario whe-

re order is res-

tored as we

knew it and nothing much changes. Technology may be seen as continuous improvement of existing processes and will be adopted for known purposes only.

As a result, the development of technology will aim less at the exploration of possibilities and more at satisfying the need for increased ease and efficiency. In this publication however, we will opt to describe another opposite, because we believe that, given the trends and characteristics we notice, society is ready for a change. In this chapter we will therefore assume a scenario where technology is readily adopted for its possibilities, creating opportunities for added benefits. We see established power structures slowly disappearing and a new, networked form of organization emerging. As a driving force behind continuous change, technology will increasingly be seen as an opportunity rather than a means to control.

lIfe IS Play Ever heard the expression: »Life is just one big game«? Looking at how Homo Zappiens playfully accepts technology, how they immerse in multiplayer gaming and how they deal with complex problems through a hands-on, self-directed approach of exploration and cooperation, one could easily imagine it so. Looking at little children and how they first learn to walk, talk or respond to signals from their parents, the word ›play‹ may come to mind more than once. It might be even more readily apparent when describing how lion cubs learn the first basics of hunting prey, by practicing on each other. See how the basics of sports are taught to children and one can see again the elements of playing being used to transfer the most elementary understanding of a sport, be it rowing, sailing, football, hockey, judo or any other form of personal exercise. Play offers to any living being a means to explore without the fear of mistakes or the blinding of expectations. When we play for winning instead, we call this competing. Playing in itself is not about the end result, but about the game itself (source?). Through playing we allow ourselves to experience any occurrence and respond to any experience, without our pre-determined judgment pushing us in any particular direction. People can explore different sides of themselves by playing a part, pretending to be someone they are not and completely immersing themselves in their role. Through this experience they may consciously learn more about their values, opinions and abilities than if they were to seek them in a pre-qualified manner. Learning any basic skill or competence often requires the continuous refining of crude abilities and notions. One starts with only

a very limited view of an ability and little to no control over it. Through practice and continued use, possibly aided by a teacher or the examples of others, one may come to improve and refine basic constructs, leading after possibly years of practice to the subtle mastery of an Olympic sportsman or lauded musician. Every person has a unique set of abilities and as a consequence may have greater difficulty or ease in learning specific things. Certainly there are many different ways to learn for equally many different people. Falling back on the basic premise of play is then the only natural way for exposing everyone to the richness of possible experiences free from preconceived notions of structure and order. The logical direction for education and learning to develop, as we see society ever more embracing the uniqueness of each individual, is for the process of learning to become more natural. By recognizing that people will learn from any new experience and what they learn may often not be predicted, we should be able to see that there is really no way in which we can reach the optimum level of development for each individual through structured education, as we have been trying to do. We will need forms of mass individualization, flexibility and playful exploration to allow children and adults to develop the necessary learning skills they need to deal with any new situation. When redesigning our educational systems, we should strive for a minimum of restrictive structure, so that as mush as possible, people may retain their natural ability to learn through play. No goals There are certain aspects that may be beneficial to creating an environment in which this more natural form of learning is better facilitated. First, we must realize that we cannot control the outcome of learning up front. Setting goals for education is therefore completely contradictory to natural learning. For example, suppose a lioness wanted to teach her cubs about hunting, but were to impose a goal whereby one cub had to ›win‹; the result could just as easily be an awkward situation with a dominant cub displaying unnatural ›prey‹ behavior as it could end up teaching both cubs to anticipate each other. A better approach would be to use increasing levels of difficulty for each cub as they demonstrate increased abilities. By siding with the weaker cub, the teacher in our example can restore a balance in challenge for all participants, leaving each to explore their skills at their own level.

Exaggeration Second, playful exploration is encouraged by a rich and unknown set of experiences. Actors playing a part, being assigned a role or pretending to be something they are not may have the positive effect of enhancing their range of experiences. Where the example of a lioness setting goals was counterproductive because it was not responsive enough to each individual, it may equally be beneficial for providing experiences that would otherwise be hard to come by, thus opening the way for new paths of discovery. A better method and example could be the process of exaggeration. Exaggeration is the process of exploring skills and abilities, experiences or concepts to their extremes, thereby more quickly defining the limits of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s scope for learning and improvement. By exaggerating the nuances of

Nowadays, too many businesses try to hold on to a state of maturity, often artificially prolonging the value of their products and services through artificial concepts such as marketing or target group differentiation.

speech, for instance, speaking either very slow or very fast, pronounced or with a purposeful accent, one may learn to sample the different flavors of speech, getting more of a feel for the limits within which one must operate and may encounter most of oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s experience. Exaggeration can be described as learning from the outside in, first practicing the most crude behavior, movements or abilities, before refining each towards the core of a mastered competence. Immersive challenge A third component for a naturally playful environment is the characteristic that challenges and experiences may become more complex and challenging as one learns. Rather than seeing a student coming ever closer to a targeted state of mastery of particular concepts or competences, a naturally playful environment should decrease its level of structure and organization, while allowing for the increased complexity of everyday life, in order to keep challenging a learning individual to test his or her increased abilities in a wider range of situations and connecting learned experiences to a wider range of associations. In a job-related training, as an individual learns more about a particular task or problem, an optimal learning environment would offer that individual an ever increasing chunk of the problem or task to handle. This would be the equivalent of functional promotion. As we live our lives we continuously learn. By harnessing our innate ability for learning playfully, without restrictions or fears and by shaping our environment to offer

support for this immersive, unrestricted and safe exploration, we can offer each individual the means for exploring their own unique set of abilities and preferences and developing an internally motivated drive for continuous improvement in areas of interest.

Quad-Core society When looking at the ways we have structured our economic value system, we can see that we have created businesses and organizations that serve a specific purpose and employ human assets as means to producing that effect. In essence, a business has a purpose that is valuable to mankind. Economists have described a product life cycle, which may be equally applied to any concept of value, describing 4 stages from birth through growth and maturity to and end-of-life state. This cycle in essence describes how every thing of value may be discovered, refined and ultimately distributed to everyone with a need for it, before it will eventually be replaced by something else. Nowadays, too many businesses try to hold on to a state of maturity, often artificially prolonging the value of their products and services through artificial concepts such as marketing or target group differentiation. While they may be creating new value from marketing or specialized attention, this does not detract from the fact that their basic value has eroded and should be replaced by something new. If we look at how Homo Zappiens is dealing with the monopoly of record companies and their restrictive copyright system, one can see a perfect example of how a true value, the distribution of music, is in dire need of innovation, while an entire branch of business is trying to hold on to a mature, yet hopelessly outdated and overpriced, scheme of delivery. In a previous chapter, we already made note of the fact that structures held too rigidly will increasingly give rise to forces aimed at taking them down. Connection The main trend in value that we see emerging in society is the creation of value through connection. Indeed, in many aspects of society, we can see initiatives taking flight that provide new value by adding a connection to a network of other individuals. Television has discovered this concept in its reality TV and sms-voting, creating a sense that the viewer has some interactivity; open source software is providing networked value by allowing the collective knowledge of an enormous potential in individual programming skills to contribute; Voice over IP is emerging as the new standard for voice communication, because it effectively lowers the cost-barrier for communication between people; smart devices such as set-top boxes, smartphones and integrated

ordering systems provide value through integration, linking and integrating several separate functions into one product. When designing a network organization for the delivery of value, a replacement for our current economic infrastructures, we can distinguish several essential elements. A true network is based on unique distinguishable elements, their relations and a distributed means of traversing, a means for any element to form relations with any other element without a preconceived format. To realize how people can create value together through a networked form of organization, one can best compare society to the emerging parallel processors that are being developed for computing applications. Parallel processing Comparing a networked society to a parallel processor, we need to explain concepts of communication, shared memory, bandwidth and specialized cores. By increasing the bandwidth of society through our increased means for communication, we have in effect opened the way for multiple parallel processing. We are continuously integrating the available memory and cache, because information is ever more pervasive and we are thus removing the need for hierarchical structuring and defined tasks. A network enables every separate unit to make the same decisions based on the same logical rules. More and more, because of our interconnectedness, we are joining to become one unit, one substitutable group of nodes, where each node may substitute another, each node may direct others and each node may take lead, keep track or process. The logical structure that allowed a hierarchical society to divide tasks between separate entities, will need to make way for a new form of code that allows for distributed coordination through communication. For example, programming for a single processor involves planning of tasks so that they may be completed in the right order, with the optimum use of active memory and a minimized number of logic steps. When programming for a parallel, distributed processing structure, the main distinction in how you structure codes and tasks is that you will need to make sure that as few tasks as possible will require waiting on another task. In effect, because each core has the ability to communicate with every other core at every possible moment, you will want to make optimum use of each cores abilities by reducing this number of interactions to a strict minimum. This may need a little explaining: the speed of the interactions is still slower than the internal processing speed of the core. (Translating this to humans: humans can still think and process information much faster and more complete, or, with a higher bandwidth (intensity), than they can communicate this with other humans)

Distributed logic The speed of processing of each single core is very high; in fact it is still much higher than the speed of communication between cores. What has changed is that the speed of communication between cores has been greatly improved whereby it is no longer impractical to use this communication and on top of that, the resources that the cores use to do their work are now shared, making it feasible if not interesting even to cooperate. However, because the cores still work best on their own internal processing, we will want to divide the total work into equal tasks, equal in number to the number of cores or a multiple thereof. Instead of the aforementioned optimizing of the order of the processing queue, which was the standard operating procedure for a single core programmer, we now have a new main focus in multi (parallel) core programming,

The new important competence is that we learn how to discern and filter between useful and useless sources. Instead of relying on someone else to filter information for us, we must learn how to filter it ourselves. This is where groups of people with similar interest or experience come in.

in that we want as few tasks as possible to require other tasks, thereby triggering a wait. Any dictated sequence of tasks will dictate waiting and cooperation, thereby slowing the speed of processing. Interesting from this development of parallel versus sequential linear programming and processing is that we see these same changes and challenges in society. The main problem comes from a bottleneck in the communication speed between cores, thereby prohi-

biting, for the moment, the creation of one single-core hive-mind. The mere fact that the coreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s internal processing is still faster than the speed of cooperation drives the necessity of tasks. Differences in cores (cpu, gpu, physix, etc.) drive the diversification of tasks and the specialization of coreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s processing or picking up of these tasks. But the huge increase in cooperation bandwidth and shared resources has enabled the current reconsideration of a share-oriented order and division structure, rather than a hierarchical, logical, linear/sequential structure. What we have been trying to point out by using the above example is that society has been given the opportunity of providing each individual with a better contribution to the group result, through an increase in communication and sharing. A better way for organizing such a networked single entity is a system of distributed tasks that minimized reliance. For businesses to increase their ability to provide for their human

assets an environment where networked problem solving and working is encouraged, they will need to invest in their platforms for communication and sharing and reduce their efforts at control. Instead, they should distribute to each individual the essence of the value they are trying to provide through cooperation and leave it to each individual to contribute to that shared purpose to the best of their abilities, through their own decisions.

Power to the user For the individual, these are exciting times. While we are still, and even increasingly so, dependant on each other for our survival and many of our experiences, we can now take a more active approach to shaping how we participate in this society. Where hierarchy dictated a competition for scarce resources, positions or complexity, a network offers to everyone an overwhelming opportunity to experience. To deal with this increased complexity, we need to prioritize a different set of skills. The sum of the parts One of the most striking emerging phenomena is that of group filters. Because information is no longer filtered for us by refereeing and trusted sources, such as television, newspapers, radio, politics, libraries, record companies or educational institutions, we no longer need the skills of knowing how these sources structure their information; we donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t need the skill of searching a library index or the knowledge of which page in a newspaper hold the financial information. Nowadays, anyone can produce and broadcast information to anyone else, without an intermediate referee. The new important competence is that we learn how to discern and filter between useful and useless sources. Instead of relying on someone else to filter information for us, we must learn how to filter it ourselves. This is where groups of people with similar interest or experience come in. Already, on the Internet, we can see such groups gathering information that is relevant to them and recommending it to others within the group. Through a form of internal recommendation, information is filtered based on perceived value and importance. Cooperation seems to provide an excellent mechanism for distributing this new increased load in determining for ourselves what is valuable.

Removing the veil Another notable change in skill is our ability to keep our most prized knowledge and competences private and thus scarce. In an organizational system that promoted competition, this skill made sense. Yet in a network, where negotiation and communication seem to be the key elements, privacy is an outdated concept. As we can already see Homo Zappiens doing, for the individual participating in the networked society of tomorrow, it is increasingly important to broadcast to everyone else what oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s abilities, interests and needs are so that anyone who may have something to offer or may be requiring your services is able to find you. The need for privacy is thus changing into its exact opposite, the need for attention. For us to Everything connected A final essential change for the individual as well as for the society of which we are all a part, will be the realization that everything is connected. As with a networked view on organization, creating value and learning through associative, exploratory play, we must also see ourselves and all our experiences as being a part of us, just as we are all an equal part of society. This means that not only is the need for privacy disappearing

and not only does our contribution in several groups of similar interest help both ourselves and the other group members, but also we may come to see that those parts, skills and interests of ourselves that defined our very uniqueness and which we often kept hidden, are the source for the most essential contributions we can make to society. Your personal life will become more important to organizations seeking to employ you than where you were educated; your previous job experience will become more important than your degree of education. More importantly however, the things you do in your personal life, the way you interact with your children and the things you do to organize your household are the same things you will be doing in your work and those are also the same processes you will see occurring between groups of people and networks on both larger and smaller scale. By embracing a networked view on life, we are returning to more basic, underlying views of natural organization and dynamics. Realizing how everything is connected and how one may learn from each level to implement this knowledge on other levels, is very valuable to any individual trying to reshape his life; it is also very valuable to a society that is still struggling with the fear of releasing control: we will be able to make sense of things.

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Photo Credits p. 6 / 7: Mapping infrastructure and traffic: Courtesy of Bill Cheswick, Lumeta. in: Martin Dodge & Rob Kitchin (2001): Atlas of Cyberspace. Harlow, London: Pearson Education Ltd. p. 15: piksel / StockXpert p. 20 / 21: Nadezhda Bolotina / StockXpert p. 26: Cathy Yeulet / StockXpert p. 31: Nessi / StockXpert p. 32 / 33: Hallgerd / StockXpert p. 42 / 43: Philip Date / StockXpert p. 55: Ella18 / StockXpert p. 58 / 59: Mapping the Cyberspace: Courtesy of Marcos Novak. in: Martin Dodge & Rob Kitchin (2001): Atlas of Cyberspace. Harlow, London: Pearson Education Ltd. p. 62 / 63: Iryna Shpulak / StockXpert

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