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Zusatztext "Marina has just published a compelling, provocative, and grounded book about how technology is enabling individuals to connect with one another to follow their passions and get stuff done, outside of large corporations, governments, and the other institutions that typically rule our lives. Marina calls it "socialstructing." I call it making the future better than the present." Informationen zum Autor Marina Gorbis is Executive Director of Institute for the Future, a nonprofit research and consulting organization based in Silicon Valley. She has consulted to hundreds of organizations in business, education, government, and philanthropy. She has been a repeated guest blogger on BoingBoing.net and is a frequent speaker on future organizational, technology, and social issues. She holds a masters degree from the Graduate School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Klappentext A leading futurist offers an inspiring portrayal of how new technologies are giving individuals so much power to connect and share resources that networks of individuals! not big organizations! will solve a host of problems by reinventing business! education! medicine! banking! government! and scientific research. Leseprobe The Nature of the Future 1 Putting the Social Back into Our Economy My mother never heard the term social capital, but she knew its value well. In the Soviet Union, where she lived and where I grew up, no one could survive without it, and she leveraged her social capital on a daily basis. It enabled her to provide a decent life for her family, even though she was a widow without much money, excluded from the privileged class of the Communist Party. We never worried about having enough food. My sister and I always wore fashionable clothes (at least by Soviet standards). We took music and dance lessons. We went to the symphony, attended good schools, and spent summers by the Black Sea. In short, we enjoyed a lifestyle that seemed well beyond our means. How was my mother able to provide all these things on the meager salary of a physician in a government-run clinic in Odessa, Ukraine? Social connections were a powerful currency that flowed through her network of friends and acquaintances, giving her access to many goods and services and enabling our comfortable, if not luxurious, lifestyle. Even when no meat could be found in any store in the city, my mother was able to get it, along with a wealth of other hard-to-find foods, from the director of the supermarket who was the husband of a close colleague of hers. I was accepted into music school because my mother treated the director of the school in her off-hours. We were able to get Western medicines because a friend was the head of a large local pharmacy. Our apartment was always filled with people my mother was counseling, diagnosing, treating, and prescribing medicines for. No money ever changed hands; that was too risky. She had lived through the era of Stalin’s purges, and the memory of his fabricated charges against Jewish doctors, who he claimed were trying to poison the Soviet leadership, was still vivid in her mind. She was too afraid to build a private underground medical practice. “With my luck, I would be the first to be caught,” she would say with a nervous laugh. All those people who regularly visited us, or whose houses she visited to provide care, were my mom’s substitute for money, providing not only food, medicines, and clothes but also intangibles of information, services, and emotional support. When my mother died shortly after emigrating to the United States in 1990, the only material possessions she left me and my sister were her wedding ring, some books, and a few pieces of clothing. But she also left thousands of grateful ...
