THE TIME FAMINE 

For decades we have been hearing about all the leisure time we are going to have in the new Communications Age. Well, perhaps for the techno-peasants but I want you to know that will not apply to those at the cutting edge. For they will be living in: "The Land of the Time Famine" - A place in time or space, (much like a farmer without water during a draught), finds a lack of available time for the tasks to be accomplished.

Even today, as we find ourselves plunging deeper into the Communications Age, those in the new sunrise industries are finding the rate of change is requiring them to spend almost one day a week learning what's new just to keep up. This is exceptionally true in computer companies like Apple, IBM or Cray. It also applies to biotech operations and those delivering advanced medical services like the MRI (Magnetic resonance Image) , PET (Positron Emission Tomographic) And QSI (Quantified Signal Image) scanners. For years to come people working with such equipment will have far more work to do than their skilled numbers can handle. Continuing advances in these fields will increase the pressure. This will also apply to operating room nurses (as the population ages), creative advertising agency personnel (as the differing cultures of those five billion people out there merge), New Age electronic learning navigators, stock brokers, financial analysts, communications workers and all those now getting plugged into the 24-hour global time clock.

They are the first entrants into "The Land of the Time Famine".

As one looks into this phenomenon it is easier to see why traditional governmental, educational and business institutions can not survive in a new environment where information travels at the speed of light. Never mind governments that are basically operating from manuals written in the thirties and sixties, let's take teachers: In times of little or slow change it was easy to keep up with that infrequent and minimal change. But, as change accelerated it changed the very environment itself. Where once educators had 130 years to learn about electricity (after the invention of the electric motor, for example) today they have just weeks to know the latest. The system isn't structured to handle rapid change. The students are aware of that. Their music tells them so.

Perhaps even more important is that those today at the cutting edge just don't have the time to drop out and become teachers or even to train teachers. By the time that would occur in the old format the very thing they dropped out to teach has itself become obsolete. Look at the speed at which we went from vacuum tubes to transistors to the microchip to intergrated circuits to fifth Generation artificial intelligence computers? Already biological and neural computers are pushing the frontiers of the sixth and seventh generation. Today knowledge is worthwhile only if it comes from the cutting edge. By the time it is passed on via any other method it itself is obsolete. Especially via print. Are you aware it takes about eight years today to get a textbook into the educational pipeline almost anywhere in North America? The book is obsolete the day it is written, yet we are supposedly training kids for the future with this material. I say we aren't even training them for the present but for a crumbling past!

Why some universities today are not even aware of the speed at which knowledge is doubling! The UBC President's mission statement titled "Toward the Pacific Century: The Presidents Report" published in 1988 by the largest institution of supposedly higher knowledge in western Canada, stated that knowledge was doubling every 15 years (without citing his reference). Well I have news for him: That may be the case in his school but the 50 percent of new knowledge that used to come from North America is now coming from the Orient and Southeast Asia. For years the changing figures have shown the knowledge time frame dropping to five, three then two years. Even this week the prestigious Futurist magazine, published in Bethesda, Maryland (Washington, D.C. suburb) said every 20 months. In the "Parent Advisory" column written by Marilyn Stusiak, referring to library resources in a story concerning Liz Austrom, Vancouver School District principal of curriculum resources, said "Projections are that scientific and technological information is growing so fast, known data will double every 20 months".

North American schools just aren't aware of what is happening to the degree that is necessary. Yes, there are minute pockets of awareness but they are minimal, have little opportunity of input to the rigid higher levels of academia where in most cases, the rulers are not willing to give up their cherished beliefs in the long gone educational dogma of yesterday.

Hence, my view that the present system will not evolve but collapse. Today if you can throw a switch for electricity and turn a tap for water you should be able to punch a button for knowledge !

It's a future where only those who learn to dance with electrons will thrive. Many others will not even survive. Would you, dear reader, be at your present level of influence and affluence today if you could not read or write? You needed to know the three "r's" of the Industrial Age, reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic. Today if you have not acquired the knowledge of the new three "r's", ram, rom and run, you are electronically as illiterate in the Communications Age as perhaps your great grand-parents were at the start of the Industrial Age.

* * *

< previous | chapter index | next >
back to Main Chapter Listing
back to Home Page