eCROP Blog

The revolutionary struggles in the Middle East, facilitated by the social networking tools of the Web, are one more sign of the titanic struggle between the growing power of Net collaborating and the heterarchical nature of the information versus the Web and the centralized power of the hierarchical forces that President Dwight D. Eisenhower (also commander in-chief of the free-world military in WWII) saw and warned about in his closing address to the nation in 1960 in regard to the industrial-military complex (and in his 1953 Chance for Peace speech). In the United States the next election might be defined as information systems vs. money and weapons systems, the Web vs Wall Street.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news , world news , and news about the economy The rapid growth of information provides a constant source of change and new opportunity. Information management can be divided into 3 major divisions, each evolving at their own unique pace: storing information (reaching across time, 23% growth per year); communicating iniformation (reaching across space, 28% growth per year); and computing information (composing or processing, 58% growth per year) (Hilbert & Lopez, 2011). The impact of that growth is continually revealed in a number of cultural changes whose implications are still being analyzed. One sign of the information age transformation from 1950 to 1980 was that manufacturing goods had been eclipsed by information management as the dominant economic activity in the world. The tipping point in information storage occurred in 2002 when more information was stored digitally than in analog format. In 2000, 75% of the world's information was still i...

The digital divide is becoming the new "Iron Curtain" of the 21st century. That is, there is a significant group of citizens even in the United States that are walled off from access to the rapidly growing Net by lack of knowledge and wealth to the technology and software of the 21st century. They are increasingly as restricted from participation in the economically and politically viable part of world culture as those left behind the Iron Curtain in the 20th century (left photo). The new digital wall is invisible. It is not created by powerful, nationally centralized and impersonal control from individuals, but by powerful globally decentralized and impersonal networks. In democracies, our vote on policies control access. To move national and global culture forward, citizens are re-examining the nature of the universal rights of citizenship and the value of questioning and communicating that digital access promotes. The digital divide, though the most significant, is just on...