“Denver journalism students are writing Wikipedia entries as part of a curriculum that stresses online writing and content creation as readers move to the web en masse.”

“‘I see journalism as being completely online within the next two to five years,’ said a journalism instructor at the University of Denver. ‘If you’re not trained to expect that and write for that, then you’re not going to be ready for the work world.’”

Hm. Training for the next “work world” involves producing content for a site that runs on volunteer labor.

I expect journalism as a career path to more and more go the way of the fine arts. It will, like painting or creative writing, become much more a mostly unpaid pursuit of passion that occasionally blooms into something financially rewarding if your piece of work happens to raise enough interest (and you’re able to work incredibly hard and long without a promise of any monetary payment). It will go from holding down a position as a human factory of regular content to a floating freelance dance responding to requests or praying for a hit. From marketing to connecting. From telling to conversing. From self-expression to self-positioning. From performing to channeling. From exploiting to evolving. From audience to collaborator.

From the last setnence: “…reshaping our identities as part of a larger, interconnected whole.”

Here’s how I think the Internet is reshaping identity:

1) More acceptance and embrace of variation in personality because diverse skills are advantageous in problem-solving, and we have more problems to solve as our awareness of them increases due to the Web.

2) “Growing up” will be less about adapting to our cirumstances and more about finding circumstances which suit us, since searching and finding are immensely easier with the Internet.

3) Relationships will be overtly goal-oriented and of a more contractual, discrete nature.

4) Daily life more and more takes on the features and functions normally reserved for artistic performance as basic social and physical needs are instantly met, and more complex psychological and spiritual goals are then pursued to generate a sense of meaning.

My interpretation: Do not define goals and tactics. Do define a purpose for your business, organization or self. Create the cultural conditions where the construction, pursuit and achievement of goals arise naturally from the beliefs, systems and values that make you who you are.

Broader implications: We are moving toward a networked-era mindset of holistic integration. We are moving away from an industrial-era mindset of straight-line, conceptually autonomous paths to objectives.

Some examples of this trend:

1. In the medical field, the growing acceptance of naturopathy.
2. Products bought and sold with an accounting for their total life cycle and environmental legacy.
3. MBA students at Harvard responding to the financial crisis with an acknowledgment of ethics in an era of interconnectedness.

If you think of other examples, please share them in the comments.

Finally, the video:

In the most dramatically general sense, the human race is shifting from reality to virtual reality.

This is a shift from interactions based on scarcity to interactions based on abundance. From isolation to integration. From competition to cooperation — though no one seems to want to stop competing.

Of course, a virtual reality is supported and made possible by a real one. For example, the Internet would not exist without a physical infrastructure (the pipes) to move the oceans of data. Installation of such equipment takes real time and energy. And don’t forget that you need to plug in your computer. Someone had to dig up coal, make a solar panel, raise a windmill, collect natural gas, tame some nuclear processes and so on to make sure when you press the power button, the screen of your MacBook Pro lights up.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s just conceptually play in the virtual world — a digital world of replicable, shareable and malleable data that can be represented in various formats to make the information useful.

It’s a big switch going from a real-world culture based on limited resources to a virtual-world culture based on unlimited resources.

When anyone can have whatever they want, whenever they want it, what purpose does a race to stockpile resources serve?

None.

But without a race for resources, without competition with winners and losers, what do we have left?

A race for beliefs. For experiences. For questions. For transformation. For faith. For mental states. For evolution. For purpose.

But more on all of that will have to wait until the next post in this series, when I’ll go into the prime values and currencies of the virtual world, capitalism’s attempt to replicate scarcity in digital realms and the ultimate scarce resource governing all interactions.