Blog
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This Thursday: 21st Century Enlightenment Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Helen Davis Johnson is Co-Founder and Creative Strategist at CreateHere. She brings us this announcement of an important opportunity for learning how to better receive and communicate information in the 21st century.
Never in history has there been such a proliferation of information available to so much of the world’s population. With access to so much information, the challenge is set before us to engage it in meaningful ways. Without engagement, information exists only as a busy backdrop.
It’s true: the Internet is actually rewiring our brains, making it harder to focus. That’s a difficult and urgent issue, particularly when we’re presented with information that can feel simultaneously essential and out-of-reach.
But focus we must. While we can (and undoubtedly should) develop a global perspective, the value we can add to the big conversation starts at home. If we want to turn information into knowledge and put it to the test, we need to do it in ways that are big-picture oriented and place-based in execution.
Each of us must decide to contribute information that is relevant to our neighborhoods and community. The great designer Charles Eames said that “Beyond the age of information is the age of choices.” Charles Eames and his wife Ray chose to solve problems through design. They understood that the creative process enables change-focused participation in outcome-based and proactive culture.
We can choose what we learn about and how creatively we participate in it, but how do we ensure that we’re digesting information in a productive way? In our knowledge-based economy, the challenge lies in our ability to process information resourcefully, make ethical choices, and deploy the tools we have to make our world a better place.
With the 18th century came the Age of Enlightenment, during which a collision of culture and science developed a set of values that have historically underscored progress in many places. These values determined to stomp out tyranny and prejudice for the betterment of society. Because of this knowledge-based movement, both France and England developed as hotbeds of intellectual correspondence and deft facilitation of idea and information exchange.
England revives this tradition of enlightenment conversation this Thursday at 1:00 pm when Matthew Taylor will discuss how he thinks we might go about the development of a 21st Century brand of enlightenment. Matthew Taylor is Chief Executive of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), headquartered in London. Prior to this appointment, he was Chief Adviser on Political Strategy to Prime Minister Tony Blair.
As RSA Chief Executive, Taylor provides an annual lecture. This Thursday, he will explore what is meant by the idea of 21st century enlightenment and why he thinks the original enlightenment period was not just about new ideas, but was concerned with a more fundamental shift in consciousness.
Matthew will discuss whether another such a shift is required for us to meet the challenges we face today—climate change, achieving human security and dignity on a global scale, promoting human fulfillment and well-being—and the role played by institutions such as the RSA.
We’ll be live streaming the talk at CreateHere and invite you to join the conversation in person. We’ll have a screen set up and plenty of coffee to boot. If you would like to follow the talk on Twitter, the hashtag is #21CE.
