Growing up we had the importance of place drilled into our psyche. First, it's the idea of "getting into" university. Second, it's knowing your place in the pecking order and acting accordingly. According to the received wisdom of the day, mastering the two aspects of sense of place would allow us to move up the ladder of success.
That was all fine and well in a hierarchical world. Life moved slowly and predictably. Sticking to a well thought out plan made sense.
Fortunately, those days are gone. The institutions that they spawned are still around, but they are either undergoing metamorphosis or going the way of the dinosaur.
Today, we live as nodes within multiple networks of information flows. Hierarchies have become less robust as people, information, and energy move dynamically, coalescing temporarily in discernible organizational patterns that quickly mutate into new and unexpected constellations.
In other words, our relationships are less enduring and the roles that we agree to assume are far less rigid and more apt to be negotiated. Yet, tradition still maintains its hold, often to the detriment of the realization of new possibilities that wired world now affords.
Increasingly, command and control control methods are being challenged. In education, the idea that we should be assembled into a shared physical space and learn en masse is making less and less sense with the rise of digital technologies. With a broadband Internet connection it doesn't matter where you are geographically if you want to participate in the production and consumption of knowledge. As a result, the question of having privileged access to information as is the case in academia is being hotly contested. More and more, universities and their research affiliates are turning towards open access methodologies that in effect push the pursuit of knowledge far beyond the hallowed halls of learning.
As this occurs, there is a marked transfer of power away from the campus that is dispersed across a global information resource network. Indeed, what is the value of being in close proximity to an information resource when the information is being made accessible in a ubiquitous digital network? In a wired world, "going" to the library or "attending" a lecture seems quaint.
As we would expect, this dematerialization of the exchange of information also impacts on the political economy, bringing about fundamental change to the both the market and those who would try to regulate its activities. For instance, commerce no longer respects international borders, which means that the political class is less and less able to control economic outcomes, which in turn means that one's affiliation to other citizens that share a geographic space is less important than one's affiliation to the flow of information and revenue from which one gains one's livelihood.
In this brave new world, the social architecture of hierarchy is obsolete. Regardless of the intelligence of those who occupy the privileged positions within the hierarchy, its limited information processing capabilities are maladapted to an environment fraught with dynamic change. An organization characterized by a predominantly top-down flow of information cannot compete with a complex network when the sheer volume of information that the organization needs to attend to overwhelms those at the top of the hierarchy.
Consequently, as the 21st century plays out, we will see hierarchy give way to the wiredarchy as organizations seek to leverage the gains that information resource networks bring about. Importantly, rank and privilege will give way to information value as the determining factor in which organizations will build their social architecture and those who create it will no longer be held or kept in their place by those who add little if anything to the organization.
