Sustainable Global Communities in the Information Age : Visions from Futures Studies

Because the Information Age is so extremely different from the Industrial Age, the socioeconomic systems that will evolve will be different as well. The systems based on capitalist market economies and socialist planned economies proved to be neither sustainable nor community based. The scholars who contributed to this volume, including Nobel Laureates and other leaders in diverse fields, consciously look to new socioeconomic systems that would be sustainable and would be community-based. The failure of the Industrial Age is partly due to the education system peculiar to that age, which only values highly fragmented specialists, without questioning the interrelationships of professions and fragmented viewpoints. In the emerging Information Age, a new type of higher-education system, one focused on holistic viewpoints, is needed to unify fragmented professions. This and other future-oriented visionary perspectives emerge from this collection—one that will be of great value to all researchers and thinkers concerned with the new opportunities arising from the emerging Information Age.