Tapscott addresses COBA conference on info technology
LAURA SEGURA
News Writer
The future of technology and the economy were the focus of this weekend's College of Business Administration advisory council conference, featuring keynote presentations by author and Internet guru Don Tapscott and Michael Mazaar, former director of the New Millennium Project.
"Technology is changing the paradigm that we know," Tapscott said Thursday.
The key to change lies in the hands of the children, he said.
"For the first time in history, children are an authority in the big revolution that is changing our institutions. We are seeing a generation lap, not gap," he said.
He named youth ages 2 to 22 the Net Generation, the first generation to grow up immersed in a world of technology.
Tapscott said that parents go to their kids to learn about the Internet and gave examples of children who are making money through the Internet, having jobs and bypassing their parents in knowledge of cyberspace.
"Three-fourths of kids in America above the age of six know how to use the computer, and 85 percent of kids know more about the Internet than their parents," said Tapscott.
Children are no longer watching 24 hours of television like their baby-boomer parents did at their age; rather they are interactively stimulated, learning in a whole new realm, said Tapscott.
These vast developments, in what Tapscott called the "digital economy," led to discussion of business webs, disintermediation/reintermediation, marketing in an interactive world, transformation of education and the revolution's dissonance.
He discussed the Internet economy as "infrastructure for all sectors" and users as "investors of intellectual capital."
Tapscott stressed that every adult and child must work together to forge this new economy with values in mind and that only then can society deal issues of privacy, censorship, intellectual property, employment, access, equity and democracy in light of new technologies.
Mazaar, who served as editor of "The Washington Quarterly," spoke about general trends in society in the coming century. He has worked in a range of foreign relations jobs, including serving as a congressional staffer, teaching at Georgetown University and authoring ten books.
Four members of the Advisory Council — Gary Gigot, Richard Heckmann, Clark Keough and Tom Quinn — gave presentations on emerging issues in the global economy after Mazaar's talk.
Father Oliver Williams, director of Notre Dame's Center for Ethics and Religious Values in Business, concluded the presentations with a discussion of dominant ethical issues in business today.
All News Stories for Monday, October 4, 1999
