Typepad rejects some comments as spam for some kind of semantic reason. Jon Husband tried to comment in the thread that was discussing why it seems so hard for those in the Corporate world to let go and blog. I was wondering if we had a hope.
Here is his response
Where the Internet / Web is most advanced, there's also lots of industry lobbying, crony-and-colleague connections, generational mindsets and a substantive legal framework that will provide much change resistance for years yet.
That said, new business logic (for-profit organizations) and new mission-and-operations logic (for not-fot-profits. NGO's, governments, etc) are IMO inevitable in this networked and hyperlinked environment.
The bigger (or biggest ?) challenge remains "cultural" in terms of attitudinal .. about comfort and consumerism as a core purpose, about learned selfishness in an increasingly dog-eat-dog era, about whether younger generations will retrieve or extend, with this new medium / media, altruism and an orientation towards the collective rather than the individual.
Many suggest things look promising there, whilst others recognize that the younger generations have been marketed to, and introduced to the dynamics of credit, from an early age and suggest that the rejections of materialism and consumerism is a trend for almost any generation between the late teens and the mid-30's (not just this crop of digital natives).
I tend to think that at least in North America corporatism has a pretty tenacious grip on the wallets, and consequently minds (if not hearts) of a majority of people, and that ... looking to change theory ... it will require convincingly cataclysmic happenings to get people to go deep and commit to real and sustainable progressive change.
I also regularly watch the movie Pleasantville to remind myself not to lose heart or hope .. regardless of my current cynicism, it is abundantly clear that much has changed in the past five years due to these new digital media, and that there is now an infrastructure, an ecosystem and some considerable momentum that will support and enable the ongoing enracination of a "new" interconnected and interactive sociology.
I suspect that we'll see a gradual, fits-and-starts blending of traditional and new, and that increasingly much of it will be socio-culturally defined so that it "fits" into or with the structures, mores and practices of country A or B, or a culturally-defined region.
There are always wild cards and unexpected out-of-left-field events .. who saw MySpace coming ? Interesting stuff happening in China re: blogging these days. I will admit to seeing YouTube's web site on one of its first days up on the Web and saying to myself "this will be huge, game-changing".
I console myself by for the most part staying on the meta-level (wirearchy) where it's easier to connect generalizations ... easier but ultimately bland and not tangible for most people.
That we are "governed" by information systems, being wired and interconnected (for better and for worse) ... that I do not doubt at all.
Our lives being so governed, and the implications thereof .. that will only grow. It can't not.
