What’s your PoV of Digital Paradigm Shift?

We are at the dawn of the digital transformation - the change from one era to another is often called, "PARADIGM SHIFT." 

We are experiencing the major societal TRANSFORMATION from the industrial machine age to the post-industrial information/ knowledge /insight/ digital age. These changes and transformations are reshaping our thinking and recasting the way we view ourselves, the systems of which we are the part, the environments in which we live, and the way we view the world.




This "view of the world" (world-view) has many dimensions: The socio-cultural, the socio-technical, the socio-economic, the organizational, the scientific, and the philosophical, just to name a few. A world-view (window to the world) is like a lens through which we perceive the landscape of life that becomes our reality. Those who look through the lens of the previous era see their own reality very differently from those who use the lens that the new era has crafted. These dimensions interact and mutually influence each other expressing that interaction as an emergence of a new worldview very different from the previous era - the era of the industrial society. Because Digital means flow: the energy flow, the information flow, the idea flow, and the mind flow, so the view of the world needs to become more dynamic, more adjustable and more colorful.

The world is a holistic ecosystem: Nature, World, or the ecosystem sometimes are used interchangeably. It is all the products of a physically, chemically, biologically, cognologically, linguistically, technologically evolving Nature, in that sequence. In the ancient human history, the wholeness was the focal point of either Eastern or Western philosophy; in the modern era, the pendulum swung toward scientific analysis and reductionistic separations throughout the scientific era until as recently as the early 1920s, when the notion of wholeness and organism was talked about again. By 1933, Holism, the whole greater than the sum of the parts, was entered into the Encyclopedia. The transformations of a system are located in its environment, observed initially from the classic developmental rates of change over time, identifying varying directions of regular proportional change. That succession begins with proportionally increasing and then decreasing steps of positive change, followed by the same increasing and decreasing progression of rates of change in a negative direction. Hence, the progression of human society is not linear straight up, but a cursive spiral.

Framing the new mind to see the ever-changing world via the multi-dimensional lenses: Over the last couple of decades, we have been faced with increasingly more complex and pressing problem-situations, embedded in interconnected systems operating in dynamically changing environments. In addressing these problem situations and working with their relevant systems, we have learned to recognize the limitations of the perspectives, methods, and tools of the traditional scientific orientation. Every serious problem we face today as a species has been caused by human dysfunction or destructiveness. And human dysfunction and destructiveness are caused by the interaction of hidden (intangible and invisible) human affective, cognitive, imaginative and connotative functions and content. In other words, the wrong focus, the wrong values, the wrong assumptions, the wrong ends, and the wrong means. When these hidden human functions and content are wrong, humans do the wrong things, and this impacts the rest of nature in ways that put our survival at ever-increasing risk. When a new stage emerges in the progression of society and advance of the technology, the continued use of the old paradigm, the old-world-view-lens, creates ever-increasing problems. So people have to frame a new mindset, learn to use the new lens of the new era, and acquire new thinking, knowing, and doing based on the new worldview.

Insight is the most wanted vision to see the world holistically and intimately. From the point of the new system of view, knowledge is a part of the process of life, of a dialogue between subject and object. Classical science defined complexity in terms of the multiple parts of a system while systems science defines it based on multiple interactions with the environment and the interactions among parts within the ecosystem. The social system can be perceived through the lenses of sociology, psychology, the economics of education, the anthropology of cultures, economics, organizational and communication sciences, poetical science, and so on. And such knowledge insight should lead us not only understanding, but also predicting; not just managing problems, but also pursuing solution and purpose seeking, as a mode of thinking and action. So with such digital paradigm shift, knowledge is not less important, but more important, but knowledge alone is not sufficient, the insight is the most wanted vision to see the world in the holistic and intimate way.

So the digital paradigm shift is inevitable. The worldview implied by modern physics is inconsistent with today’s hyper-connected, over-complex and interdependent society, it does not reflect the interrelatedness we observe in nature. To achieve such a state of dynamic balance, a radically different social and economic structure will be needed; a digital revolution in the true sense of the word. The survival of our whole civilization may depend on whether we can bring about such a shift -from mind shift to structure shift to behavior shift. It will depend ultimately, on our ability to experience the wholeness of nature and the art of living in harmony.

Digitalization is like a flywheel, and Digital Masters are the one riding above it. Surf more Information about Digital Master:

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