How will members of human society interact with each other in the new millennium? Nothing less than that is the question that writer, teacher, scientist, and futurist Joseph Pelton takes on in this provocative, challenging new book. We have moved beyond the global village envisioned by Marshall McLuhan, and are living instead in an environment of rapid-fire, non-stop instantaneous global communication—the e-sphere. The result is that we no longer receive information passively; in order to survive we must create and share it—and it is this fact that defines the new non-linear paradigm of the world for Pelton's 21st Century. The impact will affect every aspect of our lives, from employment to education to sex to family life. The stakes in adapting successfully to this world are of the highest order: the survival of our species. All this he explores in clear, engaging prose, well buttressed by research and his lifetime of thought. A truly important, necessary study for people at all levels of today's organizations, and for those expecting to live in tomorrow's age of the World-wide Mind.
Among the unique features of Pelton's book are: It offers new cyberspace oriented strategies for getting and keeping a job in the 21st Century; outlines fundamental reforms to be expected in education and health care, examines how business will be restructured and its practices altered in a cybernetic world dominated by information systems and services. Pelton also explores the expected loss of privacy, information overload, techno-terrorism and other Teleshock aspects of living. He provides a new understanding of the social and economic discontinuities that come from shifting to a non-linear world, where change comes in jerks and surges. He then lays out the need for a fundamental shift in economic systems that can allow the reconnection of production to consumption, one that will refocus our efforts away from simple economic throughputs and force us to revalue and prioritize economic issues with survival of the species uppermost in mind. Not only organizational decision makers but people in the academic and health care community will find much to think about here, as we all attempt to understand what this new millennium actually has in store for us, at least during our own lifetimes and quite possibly in the lifetimes of others who will come after us.
