Innovation + experience-minded design strategy. The pieces of a working model for understanding culture + change in an increasingly complex world.
One thing the last 30 years have taught us that the media is consistently terrible at identifying what's going to be important 30 years later. [see: Frank Gavin - Five Ways To Use History Well]
Watching the wikileaks conversation spread gets me thinking that I suppose in 30 years we'll see how much better "empowered networks of individuals" are at it. ('it' being the task of correctly assessing the chronologically proportional weight of events, in the present, without the advantage of historical perspective aka hindsight)
My initial response is to reflect on our characteristic short-sightedness and propensity to get excited about *seemingly* important things and think "probably not much better," but then I get to thinking what we'd be talking about would be an emergent display of social forecasting, and a key property of emergent behavior is in fact its unexpectedness.
Sort of like ants that correctly predict the oncoming of a flood and build barriers accordingly, that might be the quintessential example.
The above speaks to something I think about when I wonder about the Philosopher/Scientist/Entrepreneur/Artist balance: how does this balance shift back and forth (or alternatively: in one direction) over time?