at the intersection of technology, business, and society
When I started this blog, I wanted to investigate how innovation works at the intersection of society, business, and technology. More than four years later, after 132 post and over 130,000 words, it’s time to think about depicting this intersection, or at least giving a visual impression of what it’s like.
Innovation breads new technologies. But what about the opposite interaction: Does technology have an impact on innovation? Does the Digital Revolution affect our innovation skills, our inventiveness, our creative thinking? Triggered by the recent debate on negative impacts of social media, I’ll try to scratch the surface today in order to frame a few questions for further discussion in 2018.
Our values shape our views of life, of good and bad, of right and wrong. We hold our values dear as guiding stars that give us fundamental orientation. They are the long-standing core of our cultures, traditions, and beliefs. And over time, we have constructed our social, economic and legal institutions on the foundation of shared values.
However, our values have changed drastically in the historic past. And I’ll argue that they will morph again in the near future as the Digital Revolution is in full swing.
We are engulfed in technology in our homes, at our workplaces, in our spare time: every moment of our everyday lives. We rely on technology such much that the question whether we trust it doesn’t easily come to our minds. And there was little need to ask that question – until recently. But with information technology pervading literally every aspect of our lives today, we cannot evade that question any longer.
Trust is the essential currency in human interaction, it is the indispensible basis for the many unwritten contracts we enter every single day. Trust is the glue that keeps social groups together and the grease that lets these groups act, and interact, smoothly. Trust is so foundational to human society that we take it as just that: the eternal fundament of our culture. I’ll argue that digital technologies are gradually eroding that fundament, causing cracks in the foundation of our society.
