The central challenge our minds and leaders have to face is promoting digitization of the creative economy, health and culture.
Deepens the global crisis, but digital growth continues. In Brazil and the world. The Internet 3.0 is emerging, development is increasingly the result of an individual and collective intelligence that breaks boundaries, territorial and even emotional.
This internet of "the future" is already coming to schools, businesses, governments and civil society. Intelligent cities, creative, social networking and challenges to intellectual property standards, income generation and governance occupy our daily lives. We are becoming social beings that feed semibodies that are growingly embedded in technological audiovisual digital life. The crisis sealed the fate of the financial game. In the network society, the way out of the crisis is digital.
It is a fact that panic often leads to resistance to the digital. Many cling to the occupation of physical space, the place, which still seems to be "real."
But even the physical occupation of the square only works if turned into images, news, digital information circulating in the net as the only means to generate value while remixing the real and the virtual square, as media.
Whether by increasing access to information, communication and knowledge, the many new forms (positive and negative) to colonize the virtual space or turn it into battlefield to change the world, digital realities are now the condition for the survival of individuals, groups, businesses and governments.
On the horizon of the global digital society, three structuring vectors integrate the agenda of the ICT Forum (information and communication technologies), which is now installed by the Pro-Ideal consortium at the School of Communications and Arts at the University of Sao Paulo.
The first vector is health, individual and public, seen as a priority to translate the power of ICTs to accelerate faster improvements in indicators of human development.
The second is digital culture, a process that combines digital and real to redefine the boundaries between education and fun, knowledge or technology and employment, income and wealth.
The scenario os one of expanding the "creative economy", which in many countries have been presented as a "lifeline".
It is worth warning: what are we going to do with the World Cup and the Olympics, not in terms of stadiums, roads and airports, but in education and culture?
Last, but not least, ICTs have been and continue to be a determining factor in the design and reconstruction of debit and credit networks, means of payment and financing, with the emergence of social and creative currencies which can change the speed and give more meaning to local development policies.
To promote the digitization of health, culture and the creative economy is the central challenge that our authorities, business and social leaders as well as academic and cultural intelligences must face.
To occupy the digital is to go beyond weeping and teeth gnashing now plaguing societies worldwide, so many victims of a global financial "meltdown". However, to build the network society, we should not only buy machines or extend cable and wireless networks. We must know how to make the best use of this infrastructureas well. Do we want to change the world? Let´s occupy the digital, now.
An article by Gilson Schwartz and Guilherme Ary Plonski
