What Haven’t You Noticed Lately: Achieving Awareness in a Complex World

NOVEMBER MEETING
Tuesday, November 27, 2007

WHAT HAVEN'T you noticed lately? Most of us experience our complex, interconnected world by paying acute attention to what we are presented through the grand entertainment spectacles of news, sports, business and politics. Like a magician's audience, we are distracted by what we are directed to see, and relatively unaware of the ways in which the things we conceive and create are restructuring everything from the pillars of culture and society, to the way we think. In 1964, media icon and guru Marshall McLuhan predicted the world of 1994, including such things as online shopping, telecommuting, and the reshaping of our fundamental institutions of education, politics, and economics. Join Mark Federman as he uses McLuhan’s awareness-creating thinking tools on everything from Pinky and the Brain to Google and mobile devices, to The Matrix and what he describes as “the most profound cultural contribution of our time.” Learn to see the hidden effects of the world we are actively creating, and gain a new awareness of the things you see – and mostly ignore – everyday.

Mark Federman is AN UNCONVENTIONAL, yet strategic thinker. He has more than twenty-five years’ experience in the high-technology industry as executive, manager and consultant, spanning disciplines including research and development, marketing, sales, operations and strategic leadership. Mark is co-author of McLuhan for Managers — New Tools for New Thinking, and served as Chief Strategist of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto for over five years. Some of his recent explorations have examined “How Do We Know: The changing culture of knowledge,” “Generation Gap: Why today’s youth are living in tomorrow’s world,” “How to Know What Business You’re Really In,” and “Creating a Culture of Innovation.”

Mark provides thought leadership on the consequences of seemingly massive changes occurring throughout society. His current research at the University of Toronto is A Valence Theory of Organization that strives to re-think the concept of organization, creating an emergent model of the “organization of the future” that is consistent with our present conditions of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity, or “UCaPP.”

Mark can be contacted via his weblog, What is the (Next) Message?, located at http://whatisthemessage.blogspot.com.