Long Live The Infoperneur Essay

In the wildly popular 1960’s American television series Star Trek, Captain James T. Kirk would often turn to his engineer, Officer ‘Scotty’ Montgomery and direct him to take the spaceship into a fascinating new realm called ‘warp speed’. With commanding confidence he would turn to Scotty and say â€Å"Warp speed ahead†. â€Å"Aye Aye Captain† the Scottish officer would reply, at which point millions of ‘Trekie’ fans around the world would simply gasp with unparalleled excitement as the international crew was suddenly thrown back against their seats, as the spacecraft instantly hurled itself at an unprecedented speed through an unknown galaxy. Over just the last few years, we have witnessed a moment when art in a sense, has shown itself to imitate life, as tomorrow’s future has been rapidly hurled into the lap of our present; so to speak. The entrepreneurial spirit of old has been overtaken by a new spirit of innovative ‘inforperneural’ dynamism. At the very same time the â€Å"technology of yesterday†, as the Black Eye Pea’s will. i. am says, has been replaced by the â€Å"technology of tomorrow† (Huffington, 2008). The actual technology favoring this dynamic â€Å"exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth† (Williams 2008) has been casually lounging on the desktops of tech savvy innovators for years now. However, over just the last few years we have seen how the motive forces of Globalism have actually worked to push this insipient new reality into the forefront of technological advance. In just the past year alone, the exponential growth of social networking and SMS technology with websites like Twitter, Delicious, Digg, and a host of others, which have seen an amazing growth in popularity, has simply leveled the playing field between the mulit-national corporation and the individual; in the delivery of news and information. For the first time, in a large way the internet, has trumped the corporate media in determining just what the content of the new 24 hour news cycle should contain. Often throughout this process of evolution we have seen independent internet news sites that have gathered first hand information well before the networks were ever aware its existence. Then, all of a sudden, there emerged a whole new group of independent reporters; information consultants if you will: â€Å"[The] [T]echie-types †¦ began to discover the power of the power of the Internet to amplify a single voice †¦ suddenly [they] gave this voice substance †¦ authority †¦ reach †¦ and influence like never before. In fact †¦ we have witnessed the rise of a whole new class of video journalists †¦ armed only with mobile phones †¦ who are changing the way we see the world †¦ from the violence in Tibet †¦ to gaffs on the [American] campaign trail †¦ Seemingly overnight †¦ [BBC] †¦ CNN †¦ Fox News and others †¦ have hundreds †¦ if not thousands †¦ of would-be colleagues and competitors across the globe. † (Sansalone, 2008) Completely independent of political tradition, it has suddenly become the internet that has often had the last word. The Beijing Olympics and the Presidential campaign overseas can now be seen as significant milestones that have helped to bridge the gap from the old to the new. Gone is the old school entrepreneur, pushing their way into the forefront of innovation, begging for a seat at table, the Infoperneur had come of age. If ever there was a time when you were not quite sure that you were actually living in The Information Age, today there should be little doubt in your mind. Make no mistake about it; this is the mega high-speed information world that they were telling us about. Thirty eight years after anthropologist Alvin Toffler prophesized the rapid insurgency of what was ultimately to become, a kind of post / super-industrial world, that was sure to leave most Western nations disconnected and suffering from a kind of â€Å"shattering stress and disorientation†, namely from something he called â€Å"future shock†, his vision of the world is now somewhat front and center and once again on full blast (Toffler, 1970). Toffler feared that we would not be able to adapt to the enormous mega-trends that were coming in the wake of an entirely New Age. He seemed to think that we would all somehow break down under the pressure of a kind of dystopian totalitarian rule, just like the characters in the James McTeigue political thriller V for Vendetta. Unable to reconcile the fascinating pace of the New Age, while we all wandered about Westminster Abbey in a daze, shuttering simply at the thought of having those dammed black bags thrown over our faces if we did not behave as the government wanted us to; this was a world that he believed was rapidly coming towards us. It was to present us with far too many choices than the average individual or family could ever withstand. Although he may have missed the mark a little on just how well the West would adapt, one thing is sure to have a potentially damaging effect upon us in the not too distant future. The foods that we are now consuming are not as fresh as they were back when Toffler wrote Future Shock nearly forty years ago. As a consequence, at some point, with the ever-increasing corporatization of the British diet, and with food standards growing more and more lax everyday, we are sure to pay a heavy price. Perhaps the time is at hand when the masses will seek out qualified ‘Infoperneurs’ online to help provide them with the knowledge of how to maintain a healthy diet; while living in an increasingly unhealthy environment. Nevertheless, Toffler was aware way back then that computers would have an enormous, if not ubiquitous impact upon shaping all of our lives. Even as he watched these trends develop, still he maintained an uncanny awareness that we had only touched upon what was the tip of a nearly unfathomable iceberg, â€Å"We have scarcely touche the computer revolu-tion and the far-ramifying changes that must follow churning in its wake† (Toffler, 1970). It is almost impossible to believe that anyone would have thought way back then that the number one currency for more than one billion people currently wired to the internet everyday, would simply be ‘information’. Twelve years after Toffler, another futurist published a book called Mega-Trends. This book by John Naisbitt remained on the Best Seller list for more than two years. Naisbitt was able to point his vision sharply into the future, and what he saw was a world of great transformation. He displayed a far greater sense than Toffler that the Western world would not only be able to weather the winds of change; but that we would for the most part welcome and embrace them. In 1982, Naisbitt predicted Ten Mega-Trends that he saw looming on the horizon. You tell me just how accurate he was. 1) He believed that we were becoming an information society after having been largely an industrial one. Looking at where we are today, it’s hard to believe that anybody could dispute that. 2) He believed that we were moving from technology being forced into use, to technology being pulled into use where it is appealing to people. Back then one could only imagine that the burden of having to use a computer at all was indeed challenging to some people; as I am sure it still is today. 3) Nesbitt predicted that globalization was quickly coming upon the horizon more than ten years before the word even came in vogue. He believed in 1982, that nations would evolve from predominantly national economies into a global marketplace. All of these changes would indeed develop shortly thereafter, and we must remember still, that this was relatively a short time ago. 4) He believed that we would move from short term to long term perspectives, and 5) from centralization in business and governance to decentralization. 6) Now this is where Nesbit predicted the emergence of Infopreneurship. He believed back then, that we would move away from getting help through institutions like government to self-help; and actually, 7) From representative to participative democracies. 8) Nesbit said that we would move from hierarchies to networking. He obviously saw the enormous trend towards social networking long before anyone seems to have thought about its full potential. 9) He said that our biases would dissipate. 10) Lastly, he predicted that we would evolve from seeing things as â€Å"either / or† to having a variety of choices. Now, who would have thought as much? The decade of the eighties would become a rich fertile ground for the emergence of a new intrapreneural boom that would begin to take shape by the mid 1990’s. However, the roots of many of the trends that both Toffler and Naisbitt wrote about actually began to take shape during the waning years of the Cold War. As Japan quietly began to re-emerge as a burgeoning economic powerhouse coming back upon the world scene more than 35years ago, they would carry with them a model of workplace innovation. It was common back then for Americans to comment that the Cold War was indeed over, and that it was actually the Japanese who had won it. In 1980, one out of every four cars in the U. S. market was Japanese. Japan started making better and cheaper cars than their American counterparts. They broke the back of the great American export leviathan and suddenly American businesses were forced to take a long hard look eastward at Japan. The world would take notice. This was to become an era that would give rise to a new emphasis upon developing a spirit of creative innovation within the workplace. Intrapreneurship was all of a sudden being greatly encouraged in the workplace. Gone was the marshal attitude of strict unquestionable control. The creative spirit was let loose to the point that a man named Art Fry at the 3M Company could gain inspiration from a co-worker, who invented an adhesive, yet could not find a thing to do with it. Fry had an epiphany after noticing that the book marks kept falling out of his church hymnals during choir practice. Lo and behold, Post-its stickers were born (Business Strategy 1988). During the same year that John Naisbitt was predicting the trends of the future, Norman Macrae was also speculating upon corporations discovering stimulating ways to develop creative ‘intrapreneurs’ within their firms. He believed that intrapreneural competition should be aggressively encouraged. Suddenly, in the face of declining sales in manufacturing, automobiles and electronics, due to the great efficiently of the burgeoning Japanese market (Japan is now the second largest economy in the world); other Western nations began to loosen their ties in the workplace. It was during that period as well that Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot would first begin to coin the term ‘intra-peneur. ’ Together they wrote passionately about the workplace and their concept of the emerging future of Infopreneurship would become a prominent aspect of the lexicon of their work for years to come. [â€Å"We will begin facing the challenges caused by expanding technological power and growing population when we change what we are striving for. We need a new definition of success† (Pinchot, 1995)]. Together they took pains to give full credit for their ideas to the earlier work of Norman Macrae. In 1985 after developing their methods in Sweden, they actually started a school for Intrapreneurship. One year later, John Naisbitt was speaking of Intrapreneurship and a means for American firms to find new markets. The development of the Macintosh computer was described by Steve Jobs as an ‘intrapreneural’ venture. India would also re-emerge upon the world stage over just the last decade and a half largely as a result of their embrace of the concept of intrapreneurship. Later, in 1990, Rosabeth Moss Kanter of Harvard Business School spoke of ‘intrapreneurship’ in her book â€Å"When Giants Learn to Dance. â€Å" [â€Å"†¦. coaching to stimulate and guide the creation of new ventures from within. These strategies [that] [come] from the core of the post-entrepreneurial take entrepreneurial to the next step. †] (Kanter, 1990) While the concept of intrapreneurship was helping to develop the leaders of the near future internet technology boom in Silicon Valley; this would become yet another golden age of entrepreneurialship around the world. Within a relatively short period of time, Desktop Publishing had come into its own. In time, the home office, tele-commuting, Fed X Kinko’s Business Services, and private mailboxes would help to transform the face of small businesses all across the globe; making it more cost effective for ambitious individuals to strike out on their own as independent entrepreneurs. This era of innovation and enterprise roughly from the mid 1980’s to the turn of the New Century, would in turn help to plant the fertile seedlings for the Inforperneural Age of today. However first, the foundation of one great industry would appear on its way to becoming unhinged. While governments act to bail out banks during the economic downturn, and public sector funds are siphoned away from the till for the 2012 Olympics, Google is reporting a more than 25% third quarter jump in profit. Why, because the average Brit now gets their news at least three times a day from the internet. Those who are now taking advantage of the Web 2. 0 infrastructure, even while Web 3. 0 is on the launching pad, have become the new Infoperneurs. One might easily doubt that it could have been foreseen that the internet would actually force the worldwide restructuring of the newspaper industry. Job cuts are now being reported at the Cambridge News and The Independent, and overseas in just the last few years, a number of the most popular newspapers have been forced to cut their staffs, and many have eliminated whole sections from their papers altogether. In the wake of massive job cuts, the New York Times recently announced that its circulation was down 3. 9%. If that was not bad enough, on the heels of a deepening economic recession its advertising market has recently reported precipitous decline. Many other newspapers throughout the world are currently in the midst of perilous financial times. (The Economist, September 20, 2008) In March of this year the Newspaper Association of America admitted that the decline of newspapers across the country was actually happening more rapidly than it had been previously reported. At the same time online revenues for some papers were beginning to skyrocket. Total print revenues plummeted in 2007 down 9. 4% to $42 billion compared to the previous year. This reflects the single biggest drop in revenue since the year 1950, when the organization first started tracking quarterly revenue (Riley 2008). At the same time, we discover that: â€Å"Online [ traffic] [offered] some solace for the dead-tree business, with internet ad revenue growing 18. 8% to $3. 2 billion compared to 2006, but a rate significantly lower than the 31. 4% growth the year before, and not even close to replacing the losses from print. Online revenue now represents 7. 5% of total newspaper ad revenues† (Riley 2008). What is actually hidden behind the numbers is a totally new reality in the way that we view our world. The internet is now the single greatest marketplace for information. It is where people go the plug into any thought, concept, or idea that they may wish to learn more about. They press a button, and ‘poof’ there it is! Someone has to do all that research, post and retrieve all of those articles, and simply broker the non-stop flow of billions and billions of tiny little bits of information traveling across a seemingly endless world wide web. Gone are the days when a trusted source is a viable information consultant simply because he has graying hair (notice I said he! ) and sits behind a large oak desk. The internet is history’s greatest experiment in democratization; and that became evermore evident during the previous year than ever before. Recently, Google came out with a new browser named Chrome, which acts in direct competition with Microsoft’s internet browser, allowing for more individual manipulation and input of what amounts to an open source operating system (The Economist, September 6, 2008). The Universe is starting to bend towards individual will more and more each and everyday. No, the entrepreneur is not dead, nor will that great spirit of British ingenuity and drive ever disappear upon this planet as long as this nation survives. It is something that has always been ingrained within the spirit of the U. K. We could have never survived for so many centuries without it. Infoperneurs are just the latest breed of pioneers that’s all. They are not suffering during this economic downturn; you can believe that! They provide an invaluable service, because they are able to make use of the databases that make up the internet, as a way to actually leverage information by surveying and manipulating it in order to repackage and deliver it tailor-made towards the specificity of a variety of clients and or situations (Bouchard, 2000). This is what they do. It is the wave of the future. As the internet grows, the job of an Infoperneur promises to become evermore valuable; and oddly enough they will not even have to walk beyond their front door. Bibliography Author (s) Journal of Business Strategy (1988) Lessons From a Successful Intrapreneur: An Interview With Post-it Notes Inventor Art Fry:. MCB UP Ltd. Volume 9: Issue 2 Page: 20-24. Retrieved from: http://www. emeraldinsight. com/10. 1108/eb039208 Du Toit, Adeline (2000). Teaching Infopreneurship: Students’ Perspectives. Aslib Proceedings. Bradford: Feb 2000, vol. 52, Issue 2; pp. 83-91. The Economist. (September 20, 2008) Slim Hopes: Newspapers in America. A Billionaire Makes A Surprising Investment In the New York Times. Volume 388 Number 8598 78-79 The Economist. (September 6, 2008) Google’s New Web browser: The Second Browser War: Google’s New Web Browser is its most direct attack on Microsoft yet. Volume 388 Number 8596 72-73