Futurists find the bright side in Ideas Festival books

NINETEENTH-century thinkers and writers, from Charles Darwin to Thomas Hardy, would be awestruck if they could look forward to our times, in the developed world at least.

Once they had overcome the initial shock, they might be struck by four principal developments from their own times: mass education, general adult literacy, globalisation and digitisation, the last particularly embodied in the internet.

But the wonderment might also be accompanied with some sense of dismay. Having developed all this technological wizardry, having essentially solved the problem of meeting our material desires, and having given almost everyone the ability to log in, what did humanity do with it all? Surely there has to be more than online movies, internet blogs and Facebook?

John Howkins and John Hartley would like to think so, and their books, both to be launched at the Ideas Festival in Brisbane, are offered as ways forward past the relative uselessness of online consumerism and digitised popular culture towards higher ends.

In Creative Ecologies: Where Thinking is a Proper Job (University of Queensland Press, $35),
Howkins's primary concern is the fostering of creativity.

Using insights from biology, hence the title of his work, Howkins advocates diversity, change, learning and adaptation as the keys to a creative culture. Traditional institutional boundaries, regulation, security and isolation all mean stasis.

Remove or weaken them, and everyone can contribute – we can all be creators of economic, cultural and social advancement.

Digital literacy is obviously central to such a creative ecology, largely because of its ability to conquer distance and time.

In The Uses of Digital Literacy (University of Queensland Press, $35), Hartley argues that digital literacy needs to be part of the mainstream of educational systems to better prepare people for the knowledge economy.

It is an exciting vision of the near future that Howkins and Hartley offer, but it is also somewhat discomfiting, and both authors might have tempered their enthusiasm a little. Creativity and innovation also need to take place within an overarching framework that recognises social goods as well as individual ones.

Creative solutions to global warming are to be welcomed; creative ways to extract more coal are probably not.

Both also suffer from the fault, common to futurists, of failing to recognise that much of what they advocate has already been adopted, in a form at least.

Education already focuses on capacity building, and people already form networks.

The chat group is superior to the morning tea room in some respects only.

And if institution and regulatory frameworks can inhibit creativity, they can also foster it by providing the security and safety within which individuals can raise their sights to something more than mere survival.

As ever, finding the best way forward in the digital age will involve a mix of the new, through creativity, and the old.

Both these works are predictably stronger on the former than the latter.

Martin Crotty lectures in history at the University of Queensland.

Creative Ecologies: Where Thinking is a Proper Job and The Uses of Digital Literacy will be launched by Dr Terry Cutler at the 2009 Ideas Festival at 3pm on March 29. The Courier-Mail is a co-sponsor of the event. www.ideasfestival.com.au