Many thanks to Linda Davis for her sharp eye! She spotted the following article in the Janesville Gazette and contacted the author, Anna Marie Lux, to get permission to share it in our Carlin blog.
And, congratulations to Bill and Julie! What positive recognition, to have their book well-summarized and reviewed in a newspaper so far from their home town. It's a pleasure to see how well-respected our lake friends are in their own fields of work.
The future is now for authors of book about 21st century
I asked Bill Draves if I should be scared.
“Excited and intrigued,” he assured me. “But not scared.”
Draves is a futurist, who looks ahead and tells us how our lives are changing and will change.
In case you have not noticed, we are in the middle of a huge shift.
So big, in fact, the last time anything like this happened was 100 years ago, when the automobile—and the way it was produced in a mass production factory—changed most of life as we know it.
I talked with Draves last week about the New Year and what we can expect in the not too distant future. He and his wife Julie Coates live in River Falls and founded a national consulting group in education, which works with colleges and anyone doing lifelong learning online.
They wrote a book called “Nine Shift: Work, Life and Education in the 21st Century.” The term “nine shift” is used to describe the great changes taking place in our lives right now as we move from the machine age to the computer age.
The authors explain how the rise of the automobile from 1900 to 1920 created many common features of life as we know it, including offices, suburbs, fast food restaurants, unified school districts and even the way companies are organized.
Today the Internet is behaving the same way as the automobile did a century ago. It is dramatically changing how we work, live and learn in the 21st century. In fact, between 2000 and 2020, some 75 percent of our lives will shift in ways that are well underway, the authors say.
Here is how they explain it.
In 1900, our grandparents and great-grandparents were farmers, and most people lived on a farm or in a town with a population under 2,000. But in just 20 years, society went from agrarian to industrial.
Today’s information revolution has created a new kind of worker, who uses his or her brains and the Internet to earn a living and who will dominate the workforce in the 21st century. These “knowledge workers” are bringing about change. Most notably, commuting to an office is becoming a thing of the past, and most people will work at home and telecommute by 2020.
“People over 40 are sitting in an office and saying, ‘I don’t get it,’” Draves says. “But millions of Generation Y kids understand because they are living and doing it. People who work at home are 25 percent more productive than people who work in offices.”
Already, Draves sees the impact.
“Office space is declining so much in downtown Chicago that some are worried about it becoming a thing of the past,” he says.
At home employees will turn to Intranets or Web sites, which employees in a specific business or company can access for information to do their work. And, along with the Intranet comes a basic change in how business is organized. The old model limits information to the top brass. The new model shares information across the board, increasing decision-making power among workers.
Draves also says the automobile is in decline, and our future depends on rail systems.
“Trains go three times as fast as cars,” he says. “People do not want to spend a big part of their day in a car. Young people understand they don’t want to spend their time driving, when they can be working and earning more money.”
Commuters in Europe, Japan and Australia already depend on rail travel, and it is only a matter of time before it comes to the United States.
“There is no future for the automobile,” Draves says. “You see evidence everyday. To anyone over 40, this looks unrealistic. But train ridership is the highest in 50 years, and who is riding? Young people.”
He further points out that riding trains is good news for the environment because trains use a third of the fuel of cars. Hand in hand with the shift away from automobiles also will be a shift away from big houses and offices.
“Building was how you showed your status in the last century,” Draves says. “But that won’t be how you display status in the 21st century. Have you seen a skyscraper of Google headquarters lately? Or Amazon.com? Or Facebook?”
Along with the building shift will be a desire by people to live within walking or biking distance of shops and stores. Draves and Coates say dense neighborhoods will replace suburbs and bring urban sprawl to a halt.
There’s more good news. The two also see a new social structure in our future, which will deliver universal health care and close the huge gap between rich and poor.
“It is simply unsustainable for a society to have all the money in the hands of a small percent of the population,” Draves says. “Knowledge workers will be able to make good money, support families and be the new middle class.”
To do that, they will need to keep learning to keep pace with expanding knowledge, and they will do much of it online. In fact, online learning will do for education what the tractor did for growing food a century ago. It will make educational opportunities cheaper and more widely available.
Draves, 58, says baby boomers may never embrace some of the technology of the new century, like the online virtual universe of Second Life.
But the new era brings enormous possibility—and excitement.
And it is already here.
“Most of us just don’t know it yet,” Draves says.
“But for me, my staff and my family, all these future predictions are taking place right now, and we experience them on a daily basis.”
I don't have any new photos to send you--the snow is still on the ground, and there's nothing exciting to take pictures of. So, thought maybe you would enjoy looking back to last year's ice cream social in August---or, looking ahead to next summer's ice cream social. 
Bob and Judy Ruch, representing us on the Presque Isle aquatic invasive species committee, tell about the meeting they attended last week. Their group voted to send a letter in support of Ted Ritter to continue as the Vilas County coordinator for AIS.
This peaceful sunrise, about 7:20 this morning, welcomed a cold, windy day. The pine and spruce branches, which have been beautifully snow-laden since the Christmas blizzard, are now mostly bare, and the loose snow has been flying by our windows all afternoon.