Globalization: A New Urgency for Building Digital Communities

"The prize of the future will be the ability to attract, nurture and retain the type of bright and creative people who generate new inventions, world-class products and the finance and marketing plans to support them."


Cities across the world have been struggling to reinvent themselves for the new, post-industrial economy and society foreshadowed in the 1960s by economists Fritz Malcop and Marc Porat (1) and by sociologist Daniel Bell (2). In their efforts to prepare themselves for the 21st century, many communities focused on updating their data infrastructure to accommodate the needs of an age in which information is the most valuable commodity. Now the stakes have gotten higher.

As author and New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman has said, "The world is flat" (3). All of our communities and us are suddenly competing with every other community around the world for basic manufacturing requirements and provision of high tech and biotech services. With this flattening taking place everywhere, we must accelerate the change-taking place within our communities and reinvent our centers of learning -- our schools -- at every level and at a pace unparalleled in the history of the country.

This is not about technology for its own sake. San Diego, for instance, even commissioned a "City of the Future" (4) committee in 1993 to make plans to build the first fiber-optic-wired city in the country in the belief that as cities of the past were built along waterways, railroads and interstate highways, cities of the future would be built along "information highways" ?wired and wireless information pathways connecting every home, office, school and hospital and, through the World Wide Web, millions of other individuals and institutions around the world.

These new information?technologically sophisticated-- infrastructures are important. Yet, it must be remembered, the effort to create a 21st century city is not so much about technology as it is about jobs, dollars and quality of life. In short, it is about organizing one's community to reinvent itself for the new, knowledge economy and society; preparing its citizens to take ownership of their community; and educating the next generation of leaders and workers to meet these global challenges.

Today, the demand for creativity and innovation has out-paced our nation's ability to produce enough workers simply to meet the needs of Silicon Valley or the Hollywood entertainment community. Seven years ago, for example, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers asked the governor of California to declare a state of emergency to help Hollywood find digital artists. There were enough people who were computer literate, they claimed, but they could not draw. In the new economy, they argued, such talents are vital to all industries dependent on the marriage of entertainment to computers and telecommunications (5).

Worrying about the lack of qualified workers in this day and age may sound unusual. With the globalization of media and markets in full bloom, America is beginning to see the outlines of yet another out-migration of American jobs, unleashing new concerns about rising unemployment. Many economists are alarmed that the latest round of losses, unlike the earlier shift of manufacturing jobs to Taiwan and less developed East Asian countries, will have a dramatic impact on the West's economic wealth and well-being.

Twenty years ago it was fashionable to blame foreign competition and cheap labor markets abroad for the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs, but the pain of the loss was softened by the emergence of a new services industry. Now that the service sector also is beginning to automate, banking, insurance, and telecommunications firms are eliminating layers of management and infrastructure as the traditional corporate pyramid disappears and is replaced by highly skilled professional work teams. State-of-the art software and