In the future, nearly everyone will be connected to the Internet and to each other, claim Jared Cohen and Eric Schmidt in The New Digital Age.
Mass connectivity will transform our relationships, our governments, our work, our bodies and the objects around us. But even these dramatic transformations will not change the fact that we are corporeal creatures, and that we will still live lives grounded in ph
physical circumstances, whether those are urban or rural, rich or poor, lucky or unlucky.
We will also come into the world with a set of inherited stories about who we are, what our lives mean, and what the future looks like. These stories will have the same universal threads they always have: we will still have stories of love, stories of family, stories that try reconcile life’s fundamental unfairness. But they will also fail in important ways to explain the transformations of our lives, and the new ways in which we will do old things.
We need new stories
We need new stories. Creating them is of necessity not only a collective task, but a transnational one. As we grow even more connected, we also grow more capable of exporting our ideas about who we are and what is important on others, wherever they are. Yesterday, two Nigeria-descended men hacked a third to death on a London street, and then stayed on the scene to tell how they saw themselves in a world at war: “We must fight them as they fight us.” As we grow more connected, and more willing to share our selves with others, maybe pernicious forms of shame—that universal emotion—will be knocked out, and we’ll be more healthy.
It all depends on how we decide to tell our future. Here are seven of the areas where we will need new stories in the new digital age, as described by Schmidt and Cohen. Continue reading