Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future is a just published book by MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito and author Jeff Howe. Might be considered a sequel to The Second Machine Age which was noted in several posts here at PSA site in 2014. Here’s the blub from Amazon on the new Ito book:
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Whiplash.tiff”]“The future,” as the author William Gibson once noted, “is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.” WHIPLASH is a postcard from that future.
The world is more complex and volatile today than at any other time in our history. The tools of our modern existence are getting faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate, just as billions of strangers around the world are suddenly just one click or tweet or post away from each other. When these two revolutions joined, an explosive force was unleashed that is transforming every aspect of society, from business to culture and from the public sphere to our most private moments.
Such periods of dramatic change have always produced winners and losers. The future will run on an entirely new operating system. It’s a major upgrade, but it comes with a steep learning curve. The logic of a faster future oversets the received wisdom of the past, and the people who succeed will be the ones who learn to think differently.
In WHIPLASH, Joi Ito and Jeff Howe distill that logic into nine organizing principles for navigating and surviving this tumultuous period. From strategically embracing risks rather than mitigating them (or preferring “risk over safety”) to drawing inspiration and innovative ideas from your existing networks (or supporting “pull over push”), this dynamic blueprint can help you rethink your approach to all facets of your organization.
And more on Ito and Howe here from the Amazon book page:
Joichi “Joi” Ito has been recognized for his work as an activist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and advocate of emergent democracy, privacy, and Internet freedom. As director of the MIT Media Lab, he is currently exploring how radical new approaches to science and technology can transform society in substantial and positive ways.
Jeff Howe is the program coordinator for Media Innovation at Northeastern, and an assistant professor at Northeastern University. A longtime contributing editor at Wired magazine, he coined the term crowdsourcing in a 2006 article for that magazine. In 2008 he published a book with Random House that looked more deeply at the phenomenon of massive online collaboration. Called Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, it has been translated into ten languages.
Of course, these books are very much in the vein of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, written back in 1970… which is now 46 years ago.
Toffler’s shortest definition for the term is “a personal perception of too much change in too short a period of time”. says Wikipedia.