Don Tapscott is chairman of the Alliance for Converging Technologies, a firm
which is currently conducting a multi-million dollar investigation into the
impact of the information highway and the new media on business, government
and society. He is also a noted author and president of the New Paradigm
Learning Corporation.
ER: You've got a new book out called The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril
in the Age of Network Intelligence Tell us something about it.
Tapscott: The basic idea is that we are moving into a new economy which is
very different from the old industrial economy that we've had for over a
century. And people glibly talk about a new economy, but nobody really asks
the question, What's so new about it? As it turns out, there are about a
dozen things that are very different. And one of the important things is
that this economy has a new infrastructure: the analogy may be imperfect
and, yes, there may be a lot of hype, but it is fundamentally true to say
that just as the electrical power grid in the highways and the roads were
the infrastructure for the old industrial economy, so these so-called
information highways are becoming the infrastructure for this new
knowledge-based economy.
And the role of this new infrastructure, these networks, is not to deliver
video-on-demand or more "Beavis and Butthead," but rather it will be the
basis for changing the way that we create wealth, the way that we deliver
government, the way that we sustain social development, and the way that we
do learning. It has far-reaching implications for the educational system. We
are really moving beyond the issue of information technology in the schools
to creating a new infrastructure overall for learning in the economy and the
society.
ER: Comment on your use of the term "digital economy."
Tapscott: In the old industrial economy, information and communication were
physical, and any one of your readers can quickly list two dozen physical
artifacts that contained information in the old economy. So we have books,
and memos, and letters, and bills of lading, and invoices, and cash, and
checks, and movies, and radio programs, and television broadcasts, and
photographs, and blueprints, and so on�face-to-face meetings, physical
exchanges of information in physical form. And all of this information is
now becoming charged particles of silicon; it's becoming bits racing through
networks of glass. And, more and more, the capacity of these networks is
growing from garden path to superhighway, and what is emerging is a whole
new medium of human communications, where more and more business
transactions, collaboration, commerce and learning come onto the Net and
become digital instead of physical.
And this is also leading to the transformation of the firm as we know it,
that the new Internet business (the term we use in the new book) is as
different from the corporation we have known for decades as that was from
the feudal craft shop. So companies that can figure out this new economy and
the role of information technology in the new economy and the huge
transformations that need to occur to the firm have a chance of succeeding,
and those that don't are basically lost.
ER: What about universities? Will they be under the same pressures and have
the same opportunities?
Tapscott: Well, the formal educational system is becoming a lightning rod in
many ways. Working and learning are becoming the same activity for many
people, in fact for the majority of people, because it is a knowledge-based
economy. When you are working at Microsoft, or developing a new strategy for
oil exploration at Shell, or working in a government department trying to
figure out how to change the way a program is delivered to cheaper, better
government, or doing research on the molecular basis for schizophrenia�you
are at one and the same time working and learning. And this is a big change.
In the old economy you went through that period of time when you learned:
you graduated from university, and you were set for life. Now you are set
for about 15 seconds. In fact, if it's a technical degree, at the end of
your four-year undergraduate program, half of what you learned in the first
year is obsolete. So this is really what is behind a lot of the talk about
life-long learning. Though much of it has been quite superficial: it hasn't
really linked back to the changes underway in the economy.
ER: So if all of that is true, how will learning occur?
Tapscott: Well, in the old economy it was performed largely by academic
institutions�schools, colleges, universities. In the new economy, more and
more learning is a function of work and therefore it is being performed, or
executed by the private sector�not because the private sector is best
equipped to do it, or oriented to do it, or understands the business
opportunity of doing it, or even socially is the best entity to do it.
In a book by Stan Davis, The Monster under the Bed, he talks about how the
l992-l993 increment of course days delivered by the private sector�in one
year alone�was equal to 15 Harvards. There hasn't been a full-scale
university in the United States for two decades now. So all of this is
placing severe pressure for transformation on the universities and all
educational institutions. They need to reinvent themselves for a new
economy. And while there are signs of progress in a number of institutions,
overall the rate of change is dismally slow, and I fear that many
universities are falling behind and will be sucked away, will become
irrelevant because they were unable to change.
ER: Do you see any change in society's attitudes about credentials?
Tapscott: Well, yeah. All kinds of stuff. You know, in the old economy you
evaluated the main factors of production and corporate assets; and they were
things like land and capital and plant and inventory. Well, when you are
thinking about the value of a company like Microsoft, you don't ask yourself
how much land do they own, how much inventory do they have, what is their
manufacturing capability and so on. You think about how knowledgeable are
their people and what are their intellectual assets. That's really what
counts. These are very fleeting things: they walk out the door at night or,
in the case of Microsoft, many of them walk out at 5:00 in the morning.
So how do we evaluate assets when they are intellectual instead of physical?
I think more and more the whole question of credentials broadly defined is
going to be more important as we look for ways to measure the value of
intellectual capital. I think I'll just leave it there. I'm not really an
authority on the issue of credentials in terms of graduating from
universities and so on. I'll tell you one thing for sure is that we do need
learning for the new economy. And, of course, learning for the new economy
and the new technology. We also need the new technology for learning.
You know, there's a school called River Oaks, K-6, where the kids got a
workstation and they networked into learning teams that integrated across
the school. They reinvented the whole curriculum and these learning teams
reach out to parents and local businesses and community groups and so on.
They also reach out to other students, so you've got kids in grade 4
collaborating with their colleagues in Tokyo on projects.
Now not far from them is a school where in an auto shop kids are learning
how to clean points in cars. Cars don't have points anymore, they have
electronic ignition. At River Oaks School, shop is CAD/CAM. You design your
class logo on a screen and you output it to an embroidering machine which
then stitches it on your tee shirt or your hat or whatever. They are
learning the kind of skills that are going to be required for the new
economy. It really addresses the issue of the curriculum�which is that much
of what kids learn today is relevant to an old economy and not to a new one.
So it is not just the delivery system of education that has got to change,
it is the content as well. And, flowing from that, the credentials.
ER: Speaking of content in that context makes me wonder how you feel about
the liberal arts and traditional education.
Tapscott: Well, my particular view is that the liberal arts are critical to
have a well-rounded human being and society, and I think it would be a
tragedy if we dropped all that in pursuit of purely having skills which are
appropriate for commercial success. Now there is a wonderful promise of this
new technology, but there is also a dark side. So I subtitled the book
"Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence."
ER: And the peril is . . .?
Tapscott: Well, there are many kinds of peril. Of course, there is peril for
companies and for organizations and institutions�for instance,
universities�that do not embrace the new technology and transform themselves
around it. So they will fall behind. And there is peril for individuals also
if they cannot change. But, more broadly, there is a real fear that I sense
in many hearts that some kind of market determinism or technological
imperative is going to confound our ability to use this technology in
responsible ways. And I find people everywhere essentially asking the
question: Will this smaller world our kids inherit be a better one? You
know, what about the haves and have-nots? It's a real big question if you
think about the skewing of income that is underway now in the United States,
which is arguably the most advanced country in the world in terms of
migration to this new economy.
Then there's the issue of privacy. I have another book coming out this fall,
which is entitled Who Knows? Safeguarding Privacy in the Networked World. As
human communications and transactions become digital, there's the potential
for an unprecedented and irreversible destruction of what we consider to be
a very basic human right. The whole question of quality of life�what will
the applications be? Is it true, as Neil Postman says, that we are all going
to be drowning in data, amusing ourselves to death watching more TV, or is
he fundamentally wrong? I think he is. But the potential is there�because
the technology is no longer broadcast, it's interactive�for people to gain
control and also for there to be a whole wealth of new applications that
dramatically improve quality of life in everything from health care to
entertainment.
But, again, there is a promise and there is a dark side. The question of the
future of democracy and the democratic process�will we have the electronic
mob (which I think is what Ross Perot's proposal of an electronic town hall
will turn into�you get to vote every night yes or no)? That is not what
democracy is all about. It is a much more complicated process. Or will we
have the opposite�the potential of the technology to dramatically improve
and enhance the involvement of citizens in having control over their lives
and then in collectively creating a better society? Will that promise be
fulfilled? And the whole issue of the gutters of the information
highway�there is a lot of sleaze and porn right now. Will this reach our
kids, will it provide a vehicle for pedophiles?
I thought the Oklahoma bombing kind of summed it all up. It was promise and
peril. People used the Net to respond to the crisis, to help the rescue, and
law enforcement agents used the net to find out who was responsible. On the
other hand, the Michigan Militia and others used the Net to organize their
response too. The bottom line, for me, in all of this is that there is no
technological imperative. There is nothing inherent in the technology that
means we will have promise fulfilled or we'll have peril, and we'll have the
dark side. Because the technology is interactive it's much more neutral than
the traditional technology of broadcast which was one-way, or data
processing which was hierarchical, and host-based commander-controlled-type
computing. The new technology is distributed. And whether or not as a
society we will see promise or the dark side really depends upon us.
ER: Are you optimistic or pessimistic?
Tapscott: Well my take on it is that the future is not something to be
predicted; it is something to be achieved. And my message to people is that
passive observation of things like this breeds paralysis and cynicism. And
our world is in transformation and if we get involved by the millions and
tens of millions and bring our values and ethics and legitimate aspirations
and growing expectations about what technology�and for that matter
society�ought to deliver to us, they will insure that we have promise
fulfilled and peril unrequited.
� 1995 Educom.