NPR had the new editor of Newsweek on last Friday. Tina Brown made an interesting comment when she said we live in a world with "more information and less meaning."
This struck me.
To try and understand today's world one of the things you have to do is understand what's fundamentally different about us today versus a thousand years ago. By the way, politics is not one of the those things. Our connectivity is. The ability of anyone to communicate a message, is fundamentally different today.
The implications of "more information and less meaning" are profound. First and foremost, the people who are able to create meaning (be it at work or home) are going to be more valuable than those who don't. A corollary to this is that people will always be willing to pay for meaning (context) while they won't necessarily be willing to pay for information.
Secondly, the world has become noisier because there are more channels to listen to. This doesn't mean the world is becoming more complicated, people often confuse the two. Since there is so much information the people who are going to come out on top are the ones that know how to tune out and focus on the task at hand.
Third, people still matter. The fact that people still have feelings (both consciously and unconsciously) has not changed by the introduction of technology. Knowing how to interact with people will continue to be a winning skill.
Posts
