Keynote Address

Social Futures in an On-line World

Barbara Lepani
Lateral Solutions (Aust) Pty Ltd and
The Australian Centre for Innovation, The University of Sydney

Introduction

  We can look at the emerging future of our society through the lens of three possible scenarios:

• A comfortable Australia with a large secure middle class based on well paid employment in secure jobs, home ownership and high levels of education, with just a small percentage of the population able to accumulate above average wealth due to circumstances of birth or talent, and just a small percentage of the population living below the poverty line due to their inability to participate in the workforce or failure to accumulate savings to augment the pension in old age. Western Euro-American culture continues to define the pinnacle of human evolution in terms of knowledge and political and economic authority and power. Adequate funds are invested in adult literacy programs and remedial literacy is a regular part of school education.

We do this by looking beneath the iceberg of news and events that dominate the media headlines. On the one hand we seek to identify the main structural drivers, and on the other hand we seek to identity recurring patterns and themes. In a complex system (a characteristic of human society), such patterns show a fractal structure. That is, we can expect to see similar patterns, such as networking, occurring at many levels of the system, as an ordering principle.

Figure 1: Beneath the Iceberg of news and events

Structural Drivers

While a major underlying driver is undoubtedly technological change, the structure is being shaped by globalisation of the economy and the new informational mode of production.

As dramatic as the technological changes of the late 20th century have been, we face an even more transformative future. The technological revolutions of the 20th century which gave rise to quantum physics and nuclear technology, to information technology (computers, fibre optics, satellites, television), and to biotechnology which enables us to splice genes, artificially fertilise reproductive cells and clone animals, will begin to converge to generate a whole new range of technological innovations.

During the past ten years we have seen how the convergence between computers and telecommunications, to produce the network society of the globalised knowledge economy, has transformed the way we work, learn, play and live. Whole industries have been transformed. The revolution began with the manufacturing sector and quickly spread to the services sector. The first industry to transform itself in the services sector was the Financial Services industry, as it globalised to meet the needs of the global corporations and networks which formed to capture new patterns of strategic advantage. The staid and stable world of banks and insurance companies has gradually morphed into a speculative world of "casino capitalism" where information is leveraged against market fluctuations in currencies and stocks. The Financial Services industry operates 24 hours a day, rolling from one stock market to another around the globe. Shift work is no longer the province of the manufacturing worker.

Other service industries followed. These have included most notably the travel industry and the retail sector, and more recently public utilities and government services. With the convergence of computers and telecommunications, together with the dramatic reduction in the cost, and improvement in the performance of these technologies, the Internet and its World Wide Web migrated from servicing the arcane needs of university researchers to becoming the information superhighway of commerce.

E-commerce is set to turn many of the principles of comparative economic advantage on their heads. Old forms of market mediation will become redundant, and new forms will emerge. Industries most likely to be considerably affected are financial services, travel, retail, marketing and education and training.

Alvin Toffler coined the term, the Third Wave, to refer to the transformation from an industrial economy (the Second Wave) to an informational economy. The First Wave being the agricultural revolution that enabled the development of cities and skills specialisation. When we look at the continued pace of technological change, the Fourth Wave is likely to be shaped by the bio-technologies and their convergence with information technologies, to produce the nano technologies or molecular engineering. With the successful mapping of the Human Genome, the DNA (or information code) of biological life will have been achieved and human beings will become the designers of their universe. The consequences of the mis-use of technology will move from the pollution of the biosphere to the pollution of evolution itself.

Technological advances over the next 10 years are likely to see the following:

• DVD flat screens which hang on the wall like a painting, replacing the present plastic boxes of television sets and computers
• The development of Intelligent Agents, customised software programs, your own personal information retriever dog, which undertake a vast array of research tasks for you on the Internet, enabling you to concentrate on higher order thinking and strategic tasks
• Wearable technology - my coat will be a personal area network, woven from combinatorial materials, and powered by batteries in my shoes which re-charge through walking
• Microbots - networks of small robots which resemble insects will find many uses from housework, to environmental repair, to surveillance and to industrial espionage
• Information technology will be so ubiquitous that it will be invisible, receding into the background, and activated by voice and visual cues, rather than the keyboard and mouse of today
• Desktop virtual reality systems will enable a wide variety of simulations to considerably enhance all forms of learning and entertainment
• Sophisticated clothing, capable of changing its thermal properties and colours, and networked to other ‘smarts’ associated with, for example, medical treatment
• Renewable organs grown from tissue will replace the present reliance on donated organs from other bodies

Given the scope and pace of this technological change, the Fifth Wave will be focused on the human mind. Combining new understanding of the brain and the mind, the way we work with the mind and how we learn will change significantly. We already see the beginnings of this, for example:

• the establishment of the Centre for the Mind at the ANU
• the intensified search for machine intelligence and automation
• the rapid diffusion of Buddhist philosophy (a psychology of the mind) into western culture, and the developing world interest in ancient environment-focused spiritual cultures, like Aboriginal Australia
• the challenge to western allopathic (bio-mechanical) medicine from eastern (holistic mind-body) medicine and the fusion of both systems
• attempts to understand high performance in individuals
• concentration of research on neurology and brain function
• experimentation at the Media Lab, MIT, on ways of using the mind-body’s own electric field to drive information technology - a form of mind direct control
• the search for mind performance enhancement drugs, a possible side-benefit of controlling diseases like Alzheimer’s
• the increasing significance of mental illnesses, such as depression, as a major health issue as we confront the psychic intensification of work, and increasing stressors in our socio-physical environment (pollution, impact of chemicals on the food chain, loss of personal sense of security in the neighbourhood, loss of employment security, increasing fragility of marital and social relationships).

Thus the waves of revolutionary change, already visible on our horizon, will see the maturation of dramatically new technologies of learning, thinking and emotional management.

Flowing from this we can identify several powerful forces (ordering principles) shaping our society:

• Complexity - nothing is as simple or as obvious as it appears to be
• Connectivity - everything is connected to everything else, the principle of inter-dependency
• Convergence - increasing connectivity drives fusion of ideas, technologies, institutions and cultures
• Collaboration - an underlying principle of ecological systems and evolutionary survival
• Customisation - adaptive flexibility between individual and/or group needs and systems
• Competition - the play between individual and society
• Conviviality - a move from the cowboy mindset of conquering new territory to the astronaut mindset of living on spaceship Earth, based on the principles of ecological sustainability, economic viability and aesthetic, ethical and social engagement
• Cognitive Capacity - new tools for the development of shared intelligence.

(These principles are based on the ideas of Hames and Oka, 1998 and Ellyard, 1998).

Already the arrival of cyberspace is having a significant effect on our traditional concept of identity and space. Virtual environments which are no longer governed by the law of physics, in terms of space and time, are new domains of human experience. People can now explore interactive communication with others through ‘avatars’ virtual identities constructed from their imagination. In the immediate future we will no longer assume that anything we see or hear is ‘real’.

As Turkle notes, people explicitly turn to computers for experiences that they hope will change their ways of thinking or will affect their social and emotional lives.

With the diffusion of the Internet to the general community, we are seeing the rapid emergence of global communities of interest, ranging from hate groups to environmental activists and a rich variety of self-help groups. The Internet has also emerged as a Social Web, a new ‘place’ to search for and find people - for friendship, fun and marriage. Virtual relationships may become physical, or they may stay forever in mental space.

When we think about social futures in our emerging on-line world, we can think "wide" and "deep" by tracking "fractal patterns" across a number of dimensions of the socio-economic "eco-system", looking for evolutionary trends in society. In a feasibility study I undertook for Ryde City Council, on redesigning Ryde, a middle suburb of Sydney, as a network of urban villages in the global knowledge economy, I worked with Garry Glazebrook, a transport planner and mathematician, to look for sets of patterns which might link habitat to work and transport, and to then link these to the social-psychological level of human organisation. Later, I added patterns which might match this in the education sphere. This could be extended in any number of activity domains.

We chose the metaphor of the Mandelbrot set, known as a fractal, in the mathematics of chaos, non linear systems to explore the idea of these synergistic patterns. Fractals are the brilliant paisley patterns that repeat at the macro and the micro, and give nature its rich variety and self similarity. When one detects a "pattern" of socio-economic organisation occurring at many different levels of society, then it is possible to detect the emergence of a new possible paradigm.

The move from the industrial society, organised around the nation state, to the global knowledge economy, based on an informational mode of production, parallels the transition in habitat from the conflictual model of the congested city, to one based on networks of local villages which provide a sense of community and "hearth" in a global world. Paralleling this are the emergence of new transport modes challenging the dominance of the private motor car with its associated diseconomies of pollution, congestion, traffic accidents and theft. Smart technologies will not only revolutionise the combustion engine, they will revolutionise the division between private and public transport. On the socio-psychological domain we see the shift in values from the pursuit of individual rights and special interest groups, and the competitive ethic rewarding "winners" and punishing "losers". We dream of escape. The resulting increasing levels of stress in individuals and the community gives way to a new value around "community" and appreciation of the truths of inter-dependence that are required to sustain both human communities and our relationship with our natural environment. The value of stewardship replaces that of competition. We yearn for a sense of reconnection, to our own inner selves, to one another and to our natural environment.

Paralleling this we see a similar pattern in the field of education. The previous concern with student rights and parent rights, the development of a skills-based economy driving mass participation in tertiary education, evolves into a lifelong learning culture that combines both hi touch (personalised) elements and hi tech (use of information technologies). No longer restricted to the resources and skills of the local school, students of all ages are able to access global resources, while participating in local learning communities that link the "school" with home, local libraries, community organisations and workplaces in a rich variety of learning partnerships.

Mind is the universal ordering principle. To navigate from the future, we need to challenge our mindsets. Learning is central to human adaptability and takes many forms, both informal and formal, and is deeply embedded in cultural context. As educationalists, informed by the theory of constructivism, we understand that we see the world as we think it - perception as well as cognitive reflection is an active cognitive process, although much of what informs it may be unconscious. No matter how intelligent we are, or how much formal education we have acquired, there are two forms of "ignorance" which learning requires us to continually transcend.

The first refers to our inherent tendency to defend our personal identity and territory, to look for some sense of certainty and ground in a world that is characterised by continual change, right down to the molecular and atomic processes of our bodies. The older we get, the more a greater proportion of our energy can be taken up in defending our ideas about who we are, thus increasing our personal levels of stress and rigidity. For example, when we think of life, do we think of it as a river, of continuous flow, which we learn to navigate, or do we think of it as the banks of the river where we can keep safe and dry? Learning is about how to navigate the river, not how to keep dry on the bank and watch the river flow past. To challenge our mental models is to profoundly engage with the art and meaning of learning.

The second type of "ignorance" that gets in the way of learning is our culturally informed "world view", encoded in language, values and assumptions. Again and again from our history we learn the painful lesson that actions engaged in as righteous and sensible turned out to be heartless and evil, or just wrong-headed. Right now in Australia we are still trying to come to grips with the reality of the "Stolen Children" programs which have so devastated Aboriginal families in our community over the last 100 years. All over the world, peoples face similar challenges to their world views. As wonderful as the richness of culture is, it is a prism on the world which can all too easily become a prison. This is as true for organisations and professions as it is for ethnic groups.

As a result of living in an information-saturated environment, through print and visual media, we may often think we know more than we do. This may conversely include a failure to realise how little of the information we gain from "the world I know about" we have brought into our personal experience. This can lead to an arrogance, a failure to realise that because we seem to know so much about the world, there is vastly more that we could know.

In order to make sense of our world, we construct frameworks or patterns, often referred to as paradigms and we seek to make sense of new experience through these paradigms. When our paradigms are being challenged, we may experience this as very de-stabilising. This is particularly so when we experience this on a number of dimensions, affecting our working lives, our personal identity, our family relationships, our ways of knowing and making meaning. Learning is the process of opening to this challenge. The older we are, the more it usually involves as much un-learning as just acquiring new information and new skills, because it involves challenging our habitual lens of perception we have built around our sense of "me" and of "my experience".

Interdependency

Such learning involves the deliberate development of peripheral vision - going "wide", and that of pattern and structure, going "deep". This kind of learning is crucial to the development of strategic intelligence, not only at the level of the individual or group, but at the level of the organisation and the wider society.

The emergence of knowledge, translated into technological innovation, as a factor of production, has seen our scientific knowledge base doubling every ten years. Through technological innovation, social, economic, political and environmental relationships have acquired increasing levels of inter-dependency, requiring ever more sophisticated levels of strategic intelligence to achieve sustainable development. To understand interdependency and sustainability, we can think of our collective "wealth" as five forms of "capital" - finance, environment, social, spiritual and knowledge. Information technology has been spinning us into a global economy of information flows, where less than 10 per cent of financial transactions are about traded goods and direct services, the rest are flows of speculative perception that create and destroy wealth via the flickering screens of the financial trading houses, a network "casino" operating 24 hours a day across the globe.

As a result of these dynamics, the organisation of finance capital has overwhelmed the logic of other forms of capital, leading to the progressive loss of environmental, social and spiritual capital, creating a crisis of leadership in both the economic and political spheres.

Knowledge capital represents our ability to manage these interdependencies, including its encoding in technology. Creating, managing, storing and transforming information into strategic knowledge lies at the heart of this new informational mode of production that underpins the knowledge network economy.

New rules apply to the essentially Newtonian worldview of the old economy of bureaucratic functionalism which has shaped our education and training system. The whole edifice of three levels of government authority and responsibility within a nation state, and an array of functionally discrete activities administered as departments, is being shaken by the new rules of networking, ubiquitous computing and pervasive connectivity.

The SWERL Effect

The new rules of networking are having a SWERL effect - transforming services, work, entertainment, recreation and learning

Beginning with manufacturing, then progressing into the services sector, information technology has been associated with a significant reduction in the need for many traditional forms of work, and the creation of whole new areas of work. The Keynesian post war expectations of full employment, job security and the development of a lifestyle based on middle class values and consumption patterns, a constant improvement in lifestyle in terms of goods, services and working conditions, and the reduction of social inequality, have been shattered.

Services

The most dramatic shift in services began with the introduction of ATM’s, transforming banking transactions into a 24 hour service which could be located anywhere with reasonable security. ATM’s have migrated from bank branches to service stations, airports, post offices and service clubs. More recently EFTPOS has begun to challenge the role of ATM’s converting the humble cash register at retail outlets into a banking service. The internet and telephone have further transformed financial services with on-line banking, bill paying, invoicing and shopping.

With the development of individualised interactive Home Pages and video conferencing, we will soon have on-line consultations with doctors, insurance agents, accountants, lawyers and other professionals.

Transport consultants are busy tackling how to deliver personal public transport to overcome the choking effect of pollution and congestion from the increasing use of the private motor car. Using computer scheduling technology, consultants are developing systems which might enable the development of an integrated public transport system, linking trains, mini buses, maxi taxis and personal taxis with customers which will obviate the present preference for the private motor vehicle in order to meet customers’ needs for flexibility in time and destination of journeys.

With bar coding enabling governments to charge us for the amount of road we consume, much the same way we are charged for electricity and water consumption, our transport habits and patterns might be set for a revolution.

While the change from the industrial mode of production to the information mode of production has not had as dramatic an impact on work, as the shift from pre-industrial craft and agricultural modes of production, it has nevertheless resulted in transformative changes. Thousands of traditional jobs in manufacturing and commerce have been lost through technological change and associated downsizing and outsourcing. International competition and labour market deregulation associated with enterprise bargaining have dramatically affected the traditional role of trade unions and collective bargaining for industry-wide working conditions.

In response to firms’ desire for flexibility in their labour force to minimise costs and meet the needs of customers, Australia has experienced a significant increase in the proportion of jobs which are permanent part-time or casual (a rate second to that of Portugal in the OECD), reflecting our strong reliance on services and tourism.

The new informational global economy, characterised by international competition of labour and constant changes in skills required in the workforce, has created new patterns of social inequality. The traditional middle class has been hollowed out, with many now facing job insecurity, casualisation of employment and a lowering of working conditions in terms of income, leave conditions and hours of work. The informational economy has not produced a leisure society, but one characterised by the contradictory pattern of overwork among professional and semi professional people in commerce and government services, and underwork among those who are able to gain access only to part-time and casual employment, but desire full time permanent employment. The social groups most affected are young people without post compulsory vocational qualifications, and older workers who have been retrenched through the downsizing of their organisations.

The rapid changes in technology and work organisation have placed a new emphasis on skilling, leading to a culture of lifelong learning. Most people will change their career focus and skills base many times during their working lives. This emphasis on skills and learning has led to a much closer nexus between the world of work and the education sector.

Another significant trend in work has been the rapid growth in micro-businesses, with one or two person director companies providing a wide range of business and professional services to meet the outsourcing requirements of many large organisations, including government. Either through necessity or preference, individuals or groups have traded the relative security of organisational employment for the flexibility and entrepreneurialism of self employment, where the customer/client becomes the new "boss". Networks and project teams have replaced the traditional "job". Career paths now emphasise flexible employability, with workers having a constant eye to new skills requirements and opportunities in a rapidly changing employment market. The new challenge for workers has become securing a niche which ensures constant marketability of skills and experience, and escaping overwork in order to balance family life and work.

In the United States and Britain, job scarcity has resulted in an emphasis on labour market deregulation to drive down the cost of unskilled labour, making labour hire more attractive to the market. In Europe, on the other hand, because of the long tradition of a social compact between government, unions and industry, job scarcity is leading government to experiment with forced sharing of available work through forced reduction of working hours per worker. Australia has sought to follow the US lead, but modified by a continued commitment to minimum wage conditions.

While American culture and Hollywood continue to dominate world entertainment through television, film and music, entertainment and culture, linked to tourism have become big business in Australia. World music has begun to create a new language of cultural dialogue, with similar experiments in other art forms such as theatre, dance and the visual arts.

With technology firms in search of mass markets for new technology products based on the convergence of computers, television, telephony and audio systems, there is a major emphasis on home ‘entertainment centres’ which will enable new forms of interactive combinations of entertainment, commerce and learning.

Human beings are essential social animals. We require emotionally warm, nurturing and stable environment to grow from babies into healthy adults, environments which have been provided through families, organised into neighbourhoods and communities. The emphasis on individualism, rights and freedom which came with industrial culture and its concept of a free market and social mobility, saw the contraction of these relationships to the nuclear family. Further challenges to its patriarchal structure and the conflicting interests of men, women and children, have placed enormous strain on family life and community cohesion, with a significant loss of social capital in our communities.

While many high income households are characterised by having no children, (DINKS - double income, no kids), many children are living in households below the poverty level, with a significant proportion in single parent households, or blended families. This has resulted in a much greater demand on schools to provide social support to students in order to support their capacity to learn. These demographic shifts in reproduction, wealth and social support have major implications for not only the design of schools and the services they offer, but the nature of the future workforce and society.

On the other hand, the Internet has significantly expanded the ability of people to become members of virtual communities of interest, and the interactive connectivity of the Internet has widened the mating web beyond school, work and the local pub. Aware of the loss of social capital, many people have begun to redefine their attitudes to autonomy and communality. As children are forced into longer periods of economic dependency through the combination of demands for qualifications and deferment of government support, households are becoming multi-generational. At the same time the rapid ageing of the population has also resulted in a much greater demand for services to support older people, increasing this multi-generational connectivity.

A further trend in relationships has been the increasing desire of people to nurture their inner world, the search for spirituality, and this is redefining and challenging traditional religious institutions and seeing the development of new forms of spiritual learning and community.

A new architecture of learning is requiring all learning services to be designed around a number of new principles. Learning is now lifelong, delivered just-in-time according to the needs of the student-learner. It is both individualised and collaborative, contextualised through real life or simulated experiences. Post compulsory students can now participate in a world on-line market of learning services, and mastery of print literacy is expanding to become information literacy. Learners are now knowledge navigators, able to search and find information from a variety of print and electronic sources and publish their findings in a variety of media. Multimedia is the major new player in this field, with a rapid growth of applications in the professional development and training field, especially associated with product use and development. Schools have become partners in distributed learning communities, with links to local business, community organisations, public libraries and international networks.

Recognising that the terms of trade had moved from commodity production (wealth created from natural resources) to highly innovative manufactured goods and services (wealth created through knowledge), back in the 1980s, Prime Minister Hawke and his Treasurer, Paul Keating, challenged Australia to become the Clever Country, with calls to dramatically increase public and private investment in both education and training, and in research and development. However as the knowledge economy has globalised and gathered pace, through the convergence of telecommunications and computerisation, and their transformation of every aspect of society, we have begun to realise that the real challenge of our transition to the new millennium is the getting of Wisdom.

The knowledge economy creates value by going up the hierarchy of knowledge, from data organised as information, then to different forms of understanding (fields of knowledge), then to systemic insight which extends this understanding, then to foresight, the ability to read emerging patterns across fields of knowledge, and finally to wisdom - the quality of dynamic mindfulness that rests on the deep inner awareness of clarity and compassion. As yet we have no established pedagogies for the development of either foresight or wisdom in our educational system.

Systemic insight requires more than comprehension and an ability to regurgitate information as presented. It requires higher order thinking skills which enable information to be subjected to critical analysis across different knowledge domains, in order to create insightful meaning. This is best done through learning communities which deliberately seek synergies across different domains of knowledge and professional/institutional experience. It involves seeking and cultivating the uncomfortable. We are also increasingly recognising that cleverness is not enough - the missing ingredient in the clever economy/country concept is wisdom.

Leadership in government, business and the community faces a crisis not of knowledge, but of wisdom. All around us a sense of fragmentation, a crisis of meaning:

Wisdom is inner awareness and dynamic mindfulness, the intelligence of the heart and mind, linked to appropriate action. Wisdom leadership involves centredness, clarity, compassion, community and courage:

• Centredness is the inner balance of equanimity and equality, the sense of personal spaciousness and mindfulness that enables us to care deeply while detaching from specific events and our emotional reactions long enough to see the larger patterns.
• Clarity is the ability to see what is truly needed in any given situation. It requires us to transcend self interest and cultural bias to achieve a deep understanding of the interdependence of individuals and community; wealth creation and social development; human culture and the biosphere in which we live. This may be realised in the small scale of home and community, or in the large scale of government, science and business.
• Compassion is the limitless power of human love to transform suffering and create well being in ourselves and others. Compassion enables us to transcend self protection to embrace our connection to others, to live from the space of respect, equality and a kind heart, to transform fear, frustration and anger.
• Community (communio) - is communion, the commitment to sharing, fellowship and participation, the deep recognition that social connectivity, relationship and support is essential to human well being, that other's happiness is our happiness, that other's suffering is our suffering, that independence and personal freedom rest on respect for the needs of others.
• Courage is wisdom in action, the ability to honour clarity and compassion in our thoughts and actions, to face our fears, to be open to our vulnerabilities but resolute in our commitment, to embrace the joy of the dynamic flow of life.

As public recognition of the importance and nature of wisdom as a domain of knowledge increases, we can expect to see it become an integral part of leadership development training in government, business and the community. It represents a radical challenge to present pre-occupations with shareholder value, as unavoidable as those have become in a very competitive capital market. The new "capitalists" are the large superannuation funds, and the growing number of individuals with a share portfolio. As the way wealth is created, amassed and distributed is assessed, the responsibility of shareholders will become more and more transparent and subject to scrutiny. Early stages of this are evident in the ethical investment movement.

In today’s environment of rapid change in organisational structure and technologies, the only security available to the workforce is their continued employability, through continued investment in skills and experience. This can only drive the demand for the flexible delivery of education and training services, and invite global competition into this market. We are all becoming knowledge navigators in a lifelong learning paradigm.

We will increasingly use a platform of integrated information technologies to pull a variety of media resources and personal networks, together with customised learning modules, to meet the particular demands of tasks. These tasks may be individual or group-based, either local or distributed in space. The two major developments which will enhance this platform are the development of Intelligent Agent software programs to assist learner/researchers, and the development of simulations technologies to enhance learning.

The call to wisdom will require a revolution of the mind, as well as pedagogy. It is not just about getting more and more "information". In traditional "tribal" societies, wisdom has been based on both a deep knowledge of the "law" as encoded in myth, song and social norms, and a personal ability to balance competing forces for the benefit of the group. It always paid attention to the spiritual dimension, the powerful forces of the human psyche which yearn for communion with the cosmos, to the enduring qualities of what it meant to be a fully realised human being, and to a deep and pervasive relationship with the natural world. The holders of such wisdom are regarded as elders, and this vision of the meaning and purpose of the third stage of our lifecycle will begin to inform our ageing society.

We recognise these qualities of wise eldership in many people in our community - among those in high places, like the present Governor General, Sir William Deane, the late Mum Shirl, an Aboriginal community leader in Redfern, and in Hazel Hawke, the previous wife of one of our Prime Minister’s. On a world stage we recognise this in people like Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama. But it is also a quality we find in many ordinary people in our communities, our church and extended families. These are the mentors to whom others turn for advice and support. As Bob Randall, an Aboriginal elder from Uluru explained to me, one becomes an elder through the quality of advice one gives to others, and the respect one gains by living your life by the values you espouse.

Aboriginal culture recognises four dimensions of being to which we must pay attention - mind, body, spirit and land. No only must we nurture the connectedness across these dimensions within ourselves, but between ourselves and all other forms of life. Failure to do this results in our becoming sick and today we see this sickness spreading across the land, despite the vast levels of material wealth we have created in modern society.

In order to think about wisdom and learning, then, we need to think about our mental model of mind. For some, mind is associated with "thinking". We see it as the activity of our brain, separate from our body - the so-called Cartesian split. But mind works through our body on many levels, our brain, our immune system, our hormones, and through our life force, the subtle energy pathways of our body which are more recognised in Eastern medicine than Western medicine.

Developing wisdom requires that we engage with all three levels of our mind - our ordinary rational, analytical and conceptual mind, our deeper poetic-symbolic mind, and our inner pure awareness. Mind (psyche, consciousness, soul) is experienced through its embodiment in the brain, the immune system and the whole psycho-physical complex of the human mind-body system.

To understand the whole pattern we can draw on a metaphor of the ocean:

• Waves - the surface conceptual level of mind, our thoughts, emotions, and habits of our persona (ego structure) are like waves on the ocean -
• Currents - the poetic-symbolic mind is like the deep currents of the ocean, that level of mind which is the source of creativity, intuitive insight, cultural archetypes.
• Ocean - the wisdom awareness level of mind is like the ocean itself - vast, encompassing all - the suchness.

This model of mind presents a number of challenges for both our current epistemology and our pedagogy. Learning can not just be all in the head. It must be embodied. It can not be just conceptual, it must connect with the deep currents of story. It must draw on all four quadrants of mind-body organisation - the analytical and the imagistic; the organising and the emotive. We see this clearly in the recent painful national debate about the referendum to change our constitution in order to become a republic, and in order to find a set of words in a preamble which expresses our vision of ourselves, particularly our relationship to our history with Aboriginal people. But even more importantly, our epistemology and pedagogy needs to engage with the hidden, deeper and pervasive quality of mind as wisdom awareness.

Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, member of the Ngangikurungkurr tribe of Daly River, and artist of the "Australian Stations of the Cross", talks of the importance of dadirri in Aboriginal culture (Compass Theology Review, No.1-2, 1988, p9-11), as the traditional Aboriginal method for cultivating this level of awareness mind.

How will we respond to this dimension of learning in our on-line world?

We are still searching for ways to understand and describe the new political economy of the late 20th century which is both global and local at the same time; both permeated by high technology and highly valuing high touch, the sensate and aesthetic. It is highly individualistic, yet yearns for community and connecting. It is dominated by the discourse of money and competition, yet the bookshops report that it is books on spirituality which are the major sellers. Hugh Mackay’s "Mind and Mood" survey research also reports this increasing interest in personal spirituality rather than the Institutional religions of old.

Already we are seeing a strong political demand for the recovery of "society" from the discourse of "economy", and the emergence of information-technology based barter economy challenging "money" as the means of exchange (Henderson, 1999). Perhaps in the next decade we will see another "cultural revolution" based on post materialism, sustainability and a search for the learning path of wisdom, such as that which saw the Baby Boomers challenge the values and priorities of the 1950s, during the late 1960s and 1970s. I find my own life been drawn into this pattern.

Three years ago I changed my status from employee to self employed, my office from the Engineering Faculty of the University of Sydney to the rain forest of Stanwell Park, looking out over the ocean. I continue to earn my living as a consultant knowledge worker, but an increasing proportion of my time is spent serving the learning path of wisdom.

For the past 14 years I have studied Tibetan Buddhism with the Tibetan teacher, Sogyal Rinpoche. This has aroused my interest in wisdom as the missing quality in our ideas about knowledge, and opened my mind to different methods of learning. Through an interest in exploring a wisdom in leadership program, I have recently begun working with Bob Randall, an Aboriginal elder from Uluru, to help him write his autobiography as a vehicle for sharing the vision of the wisdom culture of Aboriginal Australia. As part of this research we recently visited Central Australia and Arnhem Land. Meanwhile, for the past two years I have been the joint Australian National Study and Practice Director for an international program of study and practice which enables students to learn meditation and Buddhist philosophy in the Tibetan Nyingma tradition. This program operates in 9 countries (Australia, USA, Canada, France, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, UK, Ireland), with the international co-ordination function located in France. It is classically hi touch and hi tech in a very simple way. As Sogyal Rinpoche, and other Tibetan masters, travel around the world visiting his centres to run spiritual retreats, their teachings are recorded on digital video and audio tapes. These are edited and form the basis for the oral transmission and study of these teachings in the curriculum through local centres. Meanwhile senior students are trained as local instructors, playing a similar role to university tutors in helping students to understand the meaning of the teachings in their own lives, developing a sense of spiritual community (sangha) among the students, and giving instructions on how to meditate. Local centres provide a place for group practice and learning. In Australia we have such centres in Sydney, Newcastle, and Canberra, while in Brisbane, Lismore, Adelaide, Perth and Melbourne, groups of students hire space or meet in their houses. As well, we have the "Bush Telegraph", a network for distance learning by students who are too dispersed to form local groups. Every year we all meet at an annual retreat for 10 days with Sogyal Rinpoche, or other teachers, at Tiona Park in the Myall Lake system in New South Wales.

I have recently been asked to jointly lead (with a management consultant from Amsterdam) an international project to review the whole Study and Practice program, in the recognition that this program has now become one of the main vehicles for people in the west to study Tibetan Buddhism in the Nyingma tradition. I agreed to do this on the condition that my first priority is completing Bob’s book and that I could continue to live in Australia, using an international network of project researchers linked by email, with some face-to-face international meetings. I am about to go to France and Amsterdam for the first such meeting to set up the project. Both these projects are largely voluntary, so at the same time I must continue to earn my living in the mainstream economy as a knowledge consultant. Is this the face of post materialism, of possible social futures in an on-line world?