Marshall McLuhan famously de-clared, “The medium is the mes-sage.” Watching a war on televisionis very different from reading aboutthe war in a newspaper.

Television began entering homesless than 60 years ago and swiftlychanged almost every aspect ofhuman life—from business and edu-cation to politics and sports. Now,digital communications—computers,PDAs, the Internet, Blackberries,etc.—are bringing another communi-cations revolution that is likely toproduce an even more radical trans-formation of our lives.

For clues to what may happen inthe years ahead, let’s look at whatoccurred as a result of two previousrevolutions in the dominant mediumof communications—the shift from

THE FUTURIST May-June 2005 www.wfs.org 31

PHOTOS.COM

As digital media become the dominant

means of communication, they will

usher in a new paradigm, transforming

how we think, behave, relate, and

create. A business consultant

and communications theorist

offers a method for understanding

the changes we will face—and for

better managing those changes.

By M. Rex Miller

The Digital DynamicHow Communications Media

Shape Our World

oral communications to printed me-dia in the fifteenth century and thevery recent shift from printed mediato broadcasting.

The Print and BroadcastRevolutions

When Johannes Gutenberg in-vented movable type about 1454 andprinted the Bible, he initiated a revo-lution in communications. Guten-berg’s Bible became a best-seller, andthe art of printing spread rapidly.Within 70 years, Europe had morethan 1,000 printers, and books werewidely available. Later, newspapersand magazines proliferated.

Printed words, unlike speech,remain fixed in space and motionlessover time. This permanence allowsreaders to return to the same wordsagain and again—a process that per-

mits thoughts to be examined andtested from many different perspec-tives.

The dominance of print communi-cation created more-analytic, ra-tional minds that see the world asparts assembled in an orderly whole,like the words in a sentence. Soprinted literature enabled linear, “ra-tional” thought to largely supplantthe “irrational” thought of the oralworld. Understanding throughanalysis began replacing under-standing through dialogue. Withprinting, the West exploded withnew discoveries. Books nourishedthe Renaissance, the Reformation,the Enlightenment, science, andmuch else.

Print continues to play a criticallyimportant role in communications—just as does speaking—but it lost itsdominance in about 1950 to televi-

sion, which now feedsmore information intopeople’s minds than doesprint.

Television showed theworld to itself. Hundredsof millions of people sit-ting at home could watchstirring events in farawayplaces and see theworld’s leaders more fre-quently and up closer

than their next-door neighbors. Tele-vision broke down barriers that hadseparated people from each other.Poor people now could see how richpeople actually lived. Whites andblacks could see the realities of racialsegregation. The American peoplecould see the horrors of the VietnamWar, and their government could notexplain away its failures.

Print had made reason king andstimulated reflective thinking, butnow broadcast elevated desire andemotion and encouraged reflexivethinking—the kind of thinking we dowhile driving a car. Television de-mands only our attention and re-action, requiring of us no analysis,no historical perspective, and noconnection to any other event.Printed words drive us towardreaching a conclusion or having aperspective, but TV images leave in-formation open to many meanings.They encourage us to keep our op-tions open and “go with the flow.”

The Print Era lasted for 400 years,coming to an end within the lifetimeof people still alive. The BroadcastEra will have a much shorter run.Already, broadcast’s dominance isyielding to the digital media, andthey will likely become the domi-nant media of communication byabout 2010.

32 THE FUTURIST May-June 2005 www.wfs.org

PHOTOS: PHOTOS.COM

The Emergence of A Digital Culture

Digital media combine text, graph-ics, sound, and data in such a waythat we experience things in a muchmore integrated format—multi-sensory, multimedia, and multi-networked. As a result, boundariesseparating disciplines, organizations,structures, and people begin to dis-solve. We see convergences of thingsthat once were sharply separated.The message and the messengerbecome a holographic reality capableof infinite change and complexity.

In a digital environment, thingsthat might take decades to surfacewithin natural systems can show upwithin minutes. The threat of a ter-rorist attack or an outbreak of adeadly disease reverberates globally,systemwide.

As a result of digital media, ourbasis of knowing and understandingis shifting to an interactive, global,anytime, anywhere, multimedia ex-perience with countless sources toexplore and test. This experience isquite different from the intellectuallypassive experience of watching tele-vision or the emotionally distant ex-perience of reading. Consequently,our minds and bodies will undergo arewiring to support this differentsensory experience.

Convergence is perhaps the keycharacteristic of the coming DigitalEra. Convergence is an inherentproperty of our digital medium ofinformation and communications,because all its many forms (text, im-age, data, sound) can exist on asingle medium, such as a disc, andreproduced through a common digi-tal language of bits and bytes. Digi-tal data makes no distinctionbetween Romeo and Juliet and thatsnapshot of your child on a pony,between geological calculations andthe sound of a Bach cantata. Theyare all merely sequences of zeros andones.

In the digital world, the bound-aries that once separated physics,poetry, metaphysics, and other disci-plines are beginning to blur. Nano-technology is emerging as a world-transforming science, bringingtogether physics, chemistry, andbiology. AT&T Broadband, AOL,

and Time Warner Inc. all began asseparate businesses—a phone com-pany, an Internet service provider,and a publisher; each was based ondifferent technologies (telephonewire, cybertechnologies, printingpress). But digital technologies pro-vided them all with a common plat-form, and they merged.

The new digital world is character-ized by seven qualities:

1. Interconnection: We used to livein a “domino world,” in which onechange logically caused the next.Now we have entered a chain-reaction world of exponential shifts.Interconnection means that ourproblems and opportunities are inti-mately linked. Emerging networks—virtual communities based on com-mon interests—have begun to levelour hierarchical organizations.

2. Complexity: Complex systemsbehave in complex ways. Simplychanging a line of computer codecan cause ripple effects that movethrough the systems in many differ-ent ways. Faced with such complex-ity, old analytical tools cannotanticipate the potential conse-quences of actions. A single wordfrom Federal Reserve Board Chair-man Alan Greenspan may cause fi-nancial markets to collapse and evengovernments to fall.

3. Acceleration: Each new technol-ogy and concept leads to fasterchange, so that change compoundsand accelerates the pace of human

life. The increasing speed of commu-nications accelerates business trans-actions, which accelerates produc-tion and marketing, which acceleratescapital growth, which accelerates in-vestment, which accelerates furtherthe development of new technologies.

4. Intangibility: In the new digitalenvironment, we have little or noconnection to the original sources ofinformation and things we buy, use,or believe. We’re moving away froma world we can touch and hold to aworld that operates on intangibleslike information and reputation.Arthur Andersen, the accountingfirm, offered some tangible servicessuch as accounting, but it also of-fered intangibles, such as its credibil-ity and reputation. When its clientEnron imploded in scandal, Ander-sen’s reputation went up in smoke.

5. Convergence: Print, graphics,sound, and data can all reside in adigital medium, such as a CD orDVD, in the form of bits and bytes ofzeros and ones. In digital media, thepast boundaries of knowledge andorganizations blur, crumble, andeventually integrate in new ways.

6. Immediacy: Digital media shrinkthe time allowed between questionand answer, request and fulfillment.We are now expected to respond tothe world with a speed similar tothat required of fighter pilots in com-bat. An F-16 pilot must master a dif-ferent set of rules for decision mak-

THE FUTURIST May-June 2005 www.wfs.org 33

Author M. Rex Miller has spent the last 25 years researchingsocial change through the lens of communications. Three of hispassions—communications, religion, and business—powerfullyshape his new book, Millennium Matrix: Reclaiming the Past, Re-framing the Future of the Church.

The book presents the matrix he developed to show how institu-tions transformed during the successive shifts in the main commu-nications media. Miller focuses primarily on applying the matrixto the Christian church and offers rich insights into how religionhas shifted through the centuries and is likely to shift in the future.

The Millennium Matrix (2004, 279 pages, cloth, $23.95) was pub-lished by Jossey-Bass and may be ordered through the FuturistBookshelf, www.wfs.org/bkshelf.htm.

About the Millennium Matrix

continued on page 36

34 THE FUTURIST May-June 2005 www.wfs.org

Four Communications Eras

Oral Era Print EraBard. Play, recitation, ritual, ceremony, family,elders, and genealogy provide continuity with thepast.

Book. History, indexing, encyclopedias, diction-aries, libraries, catalogs, museums, schools, andorganizations help preserve the past.

CollectiveMemory

Sense ofIdentity

ReasoningProcess

Perceptionof Reality

Learning

Work

BuildingWealth

Sense ofTime

Management

Value

ProductionMedium ofExchange

Art

Truth

Tribal village. Each person is a composite of the community. Inter-action is restricted to a small, localized population.

Independent individual. Concepts and principles inform character.People come in contact with a wider range of individuals through thethoughts and ideas of teachers and through books from around theworld. Individuals feel autonomous and can think private thoughts.

Relational. Truth’s credibility is tied to the messenger’s credibility,because message and messenger are tied together.

Principle. Truth is based on the content of the message alone, becausewritten language developed structure and rules (logic, history, analysis,expert opinion, and other tools of deduction) to determine meaning.

Dialectic. Open-ended form of question and answer. This method doesnot aim for a fixed conclusion but attempts to reach equilibriumbetween two juxtaposed concepts.

Logic. Linear thought arrives at an either–or conclusion. Print reachesits destination with greater efficiency than open-ended conversation,and logic offers closure.

Revelation. Understanding comes from revelation, direct experience,and knowledge handed down over generations. Knowing something islinked to understanding the internal nature of a thing.

Law of identity. Understanding begins by recognizing the objectivereality of things. Knowing is linked to seeing external distinctions.

Process-centered. The search for truth and understanding comes bysitting at the feet of a master or guru. Learning is a preparatoryprocess, and the skills of learning and inquiry are often the focus of theteacher and his or her student(s).

Content-centered. The orientation is toward standardized learning.Students are batched according to age or learning level. The material istaught consistently to all, and students work to achieve tangible mile-stones.

Farm. Focus is on the land and the goal is to grow the crop. Harvest isthe reward.

Factory. Goal is to produce more at lower cost. Reducing things andlabor to their simplest components along with a logical process of as-sembly will lead to productivity.

Land. Acquiring land and developing its use. Capital and manufacturing. Wealth acquisition centers on the use ofcapital and labor to produce goods and services.

Present or presence. Time is a continuous present because we haveno recorded history, only retold stories. The retelling of experiencemakes past events seem current.

Past or objectification. The past is separated from the present. Printcreates a sense of passing time because we have the means of compar-ing past words and descriptions with current thought and reality. Timemarches on. A word read is a word in the past. The contrast betweenpast words and current thoughts creates a sensation of progress—moving forward from the permanent record.

Steward. A steward acts as a caretaker for the entire household, takingthe perspective of the owner and fulfilling not only his functions but hisintentions.

Manager. Economic entities are characterized by command and con-trol, division of labor, vertical integration (owning all the resources andmeans of production instead of outsourcing). Management is based onthe premise that people need to be structured and tightly supervised inorder to be effective.

Reliability. There is value in what is tried and true. Productivity. Productivity is valued. To get it, break work down into its small-est tasks and focus effort to accomplish each task as quickly as possible.

Meeting the need. People will take what they get. Improving standards. People take what they need.

Barter and trade. The ethic of reciprocity in one-on-one valuations. Currency. A rational means of standardizing valuation and providing aflexible, efficient means of exchange.

Symbolic. Art is a means of interpreting the meaning of life and thesacred. Intricate and disciplined symbolic language is developed toreveal the multidimensional reality behind the stories and characters offaith and lore.

Perspective. Art seeks to become visually true or accurate. Art also isexpressed from the artist’s perspective, whereas the symbolic languageof early art removed the vantage point of the artist in order to portray amystical reality.

The following chart by M. Rex Miller shows how shifts in communications media can affect other aspects of human life.

Broadcast Era Digital EraDocumentary. Excerpts from newspapers, maga-zines, television programs, news audiotape, andvideotape help viewers research and relive the past.

Database. Networking, user groups, FAQs (frequently askedquestions), search engines, databases, and virtual communi-ties help to examine the past and model it toward the future.

Crowded stranger. Image and impressions inform character in a fluid,ephemeral world. We interact with an even wider range of peoplethrough television and radio. These unattached and often unselectedsources aim at a broad audience. The individual as spectator partici-pates vicariously.

Cybersoul or anonymous intimacy. Individuals design separate iden-tities for different roles and contexts. Identity comes from the multitudeof interactions from around the globe. We can be a member of numer-ous communities and experiment with numerous identities.

Existential. Truth is validated through experience, the force of convic-tion, or some tangible outcome. The concrete reality of the momenttakes priority over distant and abstract concepts.

Contextual. Truth is malleable and relevant within particular contextsof meaning. Community (virtual or otherwise) tests and validatesreality.

Fluid logic. Thought is a process that flows like water, leading to manypossible outcomes. Conclusions are not fixed and will change, and theresults can take quantum leaps. So the answer to any logical questionis, “It depends.” Context and bias are part of the equation.

Systems thinking. Understanding how the parts of a particular sys-tem interrelate and how the system works over time leads to determin-ing probable outcomes. Reality is complex and interconnected. Individ-ual events appear random. Instead of a causal chain, multiple potentialoutcomes are measured by probability.

Uncertainty principle. Understanding reflects the unique and intimateinterplay between the observed and the observer and is no longer con-sidered fixed.

Chaos theory. Understanding reflects the fact that reality is fluid,highly complex, and interconnected. It behaves as a system rather thanas discrete events and is understandable by means of general patterns.

Experience-centered. Text learning is supplemented with movies andvideos. Group presentations, participation, and life experience are oftenfactored in. The focus is on individual students and their unique needs. Thiscreates a proliferation of curricula and services to address those needs.

Context-centered. Teachers create a collaborative learning commu-nity. The collective experience takes priority over individual and privateneeds.

Service. The goal becomes to use information about consumers tomake products they want or to create demand. This shifts the focus tocollecting and using information in the design, production, and deliveryof goods and services.

Federation. Work is organized in networks of independent producersthat collaborate in production. At the same time, the consumers andproducers collaborate in the production and delivery of goods.

Distribution and debt. These tools accelerate growth. The shiftingtastes of a culture shaped by broadcast create opportunities for compa-nies that can quickly respond to those tastes. This shifts the focustoward more efficient means of distribution.

Creativity and community. The intellectual content of product is nowmore valuable than the material itself. This creates volatile markets.Building a loyal and interactive following is the key to building long-term wealth.

Future or impermanence. History is dead, and the future does not ex-ist. A sound-image captures awareness but leaves nothing to connect itto. Broadcast media wipe out past references. There is no past—only afleeting present.

Virtual or time travel. The world is simultaneously seen, heard, felt,and experienced. The future as well as the past can be seen in the pres-ent due to highly realistic representations of past events and scenariosof possible future events.

Leader. Leadership becomes more important than management. Thefocus is on how to release the potential of individual workers as op-posed to how best to control them.

Interweaver. Networks, virtual teams, and virtual corporations charac-terize the new economic system. Managers become facilitators orweavers of networks. Management takes on a less definable structureand behaves more like a web of collaboration.

Quality. Quality of services is prized; both the process and the whole areimportant. Lower cost and improved performance are not contradictory.

Creativity. Creativity is valued in the interactive relationship of con-sumer and producer.

Creating want. People take what they want. Creating fulfillment. People design what they want.

Credit. Accelerates the cycle of transactions. Allows for local andglobal transactions to occur with equal ease.

Techno-barter. Different mediums of exchange are employed, includingforums such as eBay, standardization of the euro, frequent-user currency,affinity programs, reverse auctions.

Concept or process. The artist moves away from a focus on contentto a focus on process, approach, and medium. Familiar expressions aredeconstructed (as in Cubism) and irrational patterns of chance are ex-plored (as in Jackson Pollock’s work).

Interaction or participation. The observer must be drawn into theartistic experience and own the artist’s perspective through participa-tion in it. The line between artist and observer blurs. Art within a digitalmedium is completely malleable. The artist may become more of a facilitator of real-time experiments in altered perspectives stimulated by the content and the observer’s unique response, as in Camille Utterback’s installation art.

Source: Adapted from The Millennium Matrix by M. Rex Miller (Jossey-Bass, 2004).

ing, because there is little or no timefor reflection in an environment thatchanges at high speed in an irregu-lar, disorderly, and unpredictablemanner.

7. Unpredictability: Complex, highlyinteractive systems behave un-predictably. As a result , wel l -intentioned attempts to improve con-ditions may actually worsen them. Alegal system that heavily penalizesphysicians who make mistakes maycause the doctors to give up theirpractices, thus increasing the num-ber of people who are sick or in-capacitated.

Rethinking Our Institutions

The digital media require us to re-think our institutions. Our educa-tional institutions, for example, arelikely to rely increasingly on the dig-ital media—and for good reason. Somany of the challenges that schoolscurrently face—from rising costs andtextbook obsolescence to flexibleschedules and parental involve-ment—have solutions in the newtechnologies.

Today, children not yet in schoolare adeptly using computers to sendmessages to their friends and down-loading MP3 music files from theInternet. The kids soon learn how touse search engines such as Google toget information and put togethermultimedia presentations for classprojects. These digital kids are learn-ing to think and work differentlyfrom the TV kids a generation ago.

In the emerging digital culture,children do not grind out their les-sons by rote memorization. They nolonger sit passively in front of a tele-vision and say “Huh?” when askedwhat they learned. Children now areabsorbed in an interactive-game en-vironment, pursuing treasure huntsof knowledge over the Web. They in-tegrate what they learn, expand farbeyond the assignment, and retain ahigh level of enthusiasm.

Youngsters using digital media arepushing education toward self-learn-ing, and it’s likely that self-directedlearning will become more and morethe norm. Teachers will move awayfrom being grade specialists to be-coming general facilitators handling

several grades at a time. In a virtuallittle red schoolhouse, technologywill afford a shift back to the teach-ing relationship. Continuity will leadto greater effectiveness, and that ef-fectiveness will create opportunitiesfor mentors and higher levels of ful-fillment for all concerned.

But there is a danger to this newform of learning. What happenswhen our play allows us to simulateand rehearse reality? We applaudsimulation training for pilots orphysicians—in fact, we demand it.We want them to be able to handlethe chaos of a crisis with icy cool-ness. However, when this simulationtechnology seeps into the hands ofour youth, we can unwittingly createcold-blooded killers, as we saw with14-year-old Michael Carneal, the boywho methodically carried out hismurders at a school in Paducah,Kentucky, in 1997. Carneal killedeach victim by one accurate shot. In-vestigators found he liked to play avideo game that required shooting“human” targets. This was like thetraining soldiers receive to kill theenemy.

Facing the Digital Challenge

Clearly, managing the transitioninto the Digital Era will not be easyor problem free. We must expectchallenges in most of our institu-tions, so we need to rethink themand build them well for what liesahead.

A few years ago, I spent severalhours with an oil company executivecharged with designing and con-structing the firm’s oil tankers. Thishelped me construct my own mentalpicture of how to build for an envi-ronment of turbulent change.

Building an oil tanker is an amaz-ing feat. The number of details ismind-boggling, and the obstacles areincredible, especially if it is being de-signed to face the North Atlantic, themost treacherous environment of all.Remember the Titanic!

North Atlantic tankers must beable to withstand a head-on collisionwith an iceberg at seven knots. With-out dropping anchor, they mustmaintain a stable position while buf-feted by 50-foot waves. To cope withsuch a turbulent, hostile environ-

ment, the North Atlantic tankershave multiple redundant systemsacting as safeguards and backups.They have powerful stabilizers ontheir sides to keep them in positioneven while enormous waves crashover them.

The North Atlantic tankers give usa phenomenal metaphor for today’sinstitutions to consider as they re-build themselves for the challengesof the Digital Era. Today’s institu-tions must navigate stormy seas ofsocial and technological change. Un-fortunately, we are still building thesocial equivalent of vacation cruiseliners: large, slow structures madefor calm, balmy seas and friendlyports of call. These “cruise-liner” in-stitutions may be a little more user-friendly, but they are built for calmseas and a sunny horizon. And thatis not what we are likely to get.

Today, we need institutions builtlike North Atlantic tankers to meetthe colossal waves of largely un-predictable social change. They needto be highly agile and fast-changing,with extra capacity, awareness of theenvironment, powerful stabilizers,and buffering, like the double hullsof the tankers.

Redesigning our institutions forstresses and opportunities of theDigital Era is now the greatest chal-lenge we face. ■■

About the AuthorM. Rex Miller is vice presi-dent of sales and chiefconcierge for Spencer Furni-ture and author of The Mil-lennium Matrix (Jossey-Bass,2004). He is a successfulbusinessman with degrees

in theology and communications theory. His address is 1409 Dartmouth Drive,Southlake, Texas 76092. Telephone 1-214-498-3055; e-mail rmiller@millenniummatrix.com; Web site www.millenniummatrix.com.

Miller will be speaking on this subject atWorldFuture 2005: Foresight, Innovation,and Strategy, the World Future Society’sannual meeting, to be held in Chicago July29-31.

36 THE FUTURIST May-June 2005 www.wfs.org

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