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Aleksandar Malečić
311 days ago |
The era of new economy, depending on the way you perceive the world, either began long time ago or it will never happen. It’s less economy of inputs (investments) and outputs (profit) and more economy of networks. Take for example this text. Well, maybe more representative text would be by someone more clever and interesting, but you understand the point. Anyone can read it. There is a hypothesis that you are separated from any other person in the world by six degrees of separation or less. The quality of connection between these six degrees varies, but the network like this one can drastically decrease this separation both quantitatively and qualitatively. If something is complex and difficult for you or any other individual brain to comprehend, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. The new economy is about interactivity, connections, fuzzy causes and effects and creativity. The first thing an economist, after hearing about creative scenes and industries, would probably do is to assess creativity in terms of economic growth and competition. The world for him is a black box hopefully with monetary outputs bigger than monetary inputs. If you also see things this way, you will ignore a big part of the world such as good manners, people’s enthusiasm and fulfilment. According to the monetary paradigm, you are aggressive and selfish. Are you? Animals can interact with other animals without obvious payoffs. Can you?
Some people are more active online than others. You can’t describe online networking to someone who doesn’t expose himself online. The only way to understand what it’s about is to feel it. Elizabeth Currid (The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City) and Richard Florida (Who’s Your City?) are right. People aren’t robots and their interactions can hardly be put into numbers and statistics that are supposed to describe the whole reality. I’ve learnt a lot of things by reading texts and watching and listening multimedia online. I can’t trace back the whole process, but my disability to do so doesn’t make this process nonexistent.
There are millions of people on online social network. The existence and survival of those networks depends heavily on a small number of people and investments and profit. The old economy of competition, aggressive behaviour, selfishness and envy might strangle the new one. Since the new economy is stubbornly indescribable, the tragedy of its death would be very difficult to understand if one looks at people, society and the environment as mechanisms.
The positive change will either happen here or it won’t happen at all. As long as I breathe I don’t have the right to be a passive observer. I shall never understand the chain of events caused by this text through degrees of separation. I can only hope that they will be positive.
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