Culture decoding online

The Great Gatsby got another round of remake, this time in 3-D.

With help of steady cam, we are invited into his mansion of many rooms.

This should give a feel for the place and Gatsby’s desire to revenge through success.

We too ,with IT 3.0-enabled, can take our “Monte Christo” acts online.

For years, we were passive recipients of others’ content via radio, Morse code, newspapers, magazines, text books, letters, phone calls, television, record players, juke box and boombox, car radio, CB radio, telegram and fax , overhead projectors and film projectors. The list is long and crowding out the museum of invention, just like copies of content fill our home library.

Unless you are into retro and antiques, then be content with whatever current devices you are using.

But the narrative has shifted. We are to reinvent ourselves online, with new tools (mobile) and technologies (social media).

Any change will directly impact a few people at first, then the majority.

40 years ago, nobody got a cell phone. Now, almost everyone got one.

The laggards in this case are our parent’s generation, who experience both culture and digital divide.

Don Tapscott has kept a tap on this topic with his decade-long research.

Digital generation definitely are multi-taskers who live a double-life on and off-line.

Lecturers will have to double-check their notes to make sure they are up to date. (as of this edit, they just came out with a software to help teachers with grading, to concentrate more on face time with students).

Their values no longer stay in the realm of information transmission.

Instead, the best contribution a trainer can do is to zoom-out, to show historical trend, and to help bridge the analog-digital as well as technology-society divide. Leaders shouldn’t be curators or gate keepers.

They are meant to be Chief Knowledge/Culture decoder.

We have moved beyond the state of data-deprived to data-deluge.

No firewalls can stop data from hopping node to node. No network can claim exclusivity and monopoly of domain.

What we won’t find in life can now be found on-line e.g. self-reinvention, self-branding, self-fulfillment.

Gatsby had failed the first time to impress his lover. So he came back, in 3-D, right across the lake.

Whatever was missed in the first version will be self-correcting (e.g.Google translation algorithm.

While the writer is analog, what you are reading is digital.

And you might be reading this in 2050 and beyond. Try to decode that!