Dator on Korea

It seems that South Korea is where "the future" is most clearly happening in today's world.

Having overcome its own self-imposed isolation as "the hermit kingdom" in the 19th Century, only to be subject to the severe restrictions of Japanese imperial rule (during which very few people were able to obtain a college education), then the second world war which was immediately followed by the divisive Korean War (still technically ongoing), Korea has lept from an "underdeveloped" agrarian country reliant on exports of raw materials, to the production and export of light industry, to heavy industry (especially shipbuilding), to cheap electronic products and automobiles, to world-class electronic products and automobiles, to biotechnology, and to becoming the first country in the world to base a significant portion of its economy on the development and export of popular culture products (movies, TV dramas, popular music groups, and especially electronic games), all in the span of fifty years (see "Korea as the wave of a future: A dream society of dreams, icons, and aesthetic experience" for a fuller discussion of this most recent development).

Following the model of "the development state", Korea "developed" quickly and very successfully (with all of the human and environmental problems and hardships that go along with such "progress") and now stands at the edge of history, eagerly trying to determine which way the winds are blowing so it can continue to remain in the lead.

It is within that context that I have been invited to Korea several times recently (with several more trips planned), to conduct futures workshops with private and governmental groups, and to present substantive speeches, seminars and interviews on a variety of subjects which have been very well-reported in print media and websites, and to some extent via radio and TV.

On my most recent visit (November 6-11, 2006), in addition to workshops and seminars, I made two speeches that were widely reported. One was for a Ubiquitous Media Contents Conference that was attended by representatives of all of the major producers and users of various media in Korea. My keynote address for that conference was titled "Ubiquitous, Dream, Transformational, and Other Futures". I discussed a bit about the origin and history of the idea of a "ubiquitous society" (which means a society where computers are everywhere, like the air we breathe); the fact that ideas about it are still based only on electronic information societies, whereas biologically-based "information" might be more important in the future; and end by questioning both whether anyone can make money from the content of media in a truly ubiquitous society (which is what everyone in the audience was keen to do), and whether environmental , energy, and other challenges will even allow such a society to come into existence.

The other speech was for a panel of a very high profile international conference on "Global HR" which brought corporate and other economic actors (like Bill Gates, Paul Wolfowitz, and Francis Fukuyama) together with university presidents and professors from around the world to discuss what "future leaders" needed to know and what universities thus should be teaching to create such leaders. My talk for that, in which I challenge the assumption upon which the entire conference was based, was titled "Alternative Futures for Universities and Business".