Do you often wonder why 20-somethings are not engaging themselves more into revolutionizing the old ways of doing things? Why the participants in Metanomics or We Are the Network are often in their forties or older?
At the end of today’s Metanomics show, professor Robert Bloomfield told us why: it’s all about opportunity costs.
Young people are getting much value from getting traditional credentials. They want to become respected professionals: lawyers, accountants, professors, journalists, you name it.
The older guys however often have less to lose, for instance when they are unemployed or, more often, underemployed. For those people the opportunity cost of experimenting is not that high anymore. They’ll try out crazy things like a blogging network, or a virtual show. After all, they don’t have that much to lose!
Some people enjoy the privilege of having very nice jobs, like professors who were awarded tenure, and they too can and should experiment and try out new forms. Their fear could be a loss of credibility, but still they have a moral obligation to experiment.
But why should we consider this to be a moral obligation towards the community? Bloomfield refers to another concept: exploration is a social good.
Entrepreneurship and exploration, so Bloomfield explained, will be needed in order to pull us out of these troubled times. Because those crazy people (my words here) who are setting up blogging networks and virtual communities at their respected universities or at their venerable media outlets, maybe are exploring something which might very well turn out being part of the future of education and media.
Roland Legrand