“Loving to read as a strategist”. Episode 24. Reading and NAIQIs
Our first weekend of December has landed, and the Christmas decorations are settling everywhere to enlighten us for the coming holidays. Today we are going to make a summary of the main aspects in which the combo of NAIQIs the acronym of Nanotechnology, Artificial Intelligence (including automation and robotics), Quantum Supremacy, and the Internet has affected our reading. During this current whole saga, we have boldly, suggested them. However today, we will recapitulate them. If you have followed me since August, some of these factors may sound repetitive, but today’s episode is the summary of all of them.
Before proceeding further, last night, Pantone´s institute selected the color Viva Magenta as the new Pantone’s Color of The Year 2023. According to Pantone´s representatives’ own words, “this color revels in pure joy, vibrates with vim and vigor… This animated red encourages experimentation and self-expression without restraint, an electrifying, and boundaryless shade that is manifesting as a stand-out statement. Viva Magenta is brave and fearless, and a pulsating color whose exuberance promotes a joyous and optimistic celebration, writing a new narrative for us”. As a result, I will use the occasion to analogize the following metaphor, in our quest to provide a bold and unique strategic reflection for connecting the viva magenta color with our bright lesson of today. Download these slides and keep them for future reference, please.
Disruptive technologies have a tremendous impact on reading.
For a minute, just close your eyes and imagine that we have no mobile computers, no laptops, no tablets, and no smartphones. Desktop computers are available in our fixed locations but without cyberspace platforms or the Internet. For a second, consider that by divine order, the whole world removes digital devices, social media, and applications. In consequence, for our communications, each of us is granted a basic phone, without instant messaging, a mobile model that is not used for anything else, but just phone calls. Let´s place ourselves at the moment in time in which not even the Blackberry existed. In the context in which if we wanted to take pictures, we had to buy our own cameras (disposable or professional). In the scenario in which we wanted to share information from different locations, the post office and faxes were the standards. Just consider for a second that the Internet doesn´t exist not even for the top government or private organizations all over the world.
In this previous context of our lives, we were able to have spare time to read. The information flew in between us, but through phone calls or by physical mail… We were slow, but content. I wonder if this old model of societies made us happier and more balanced in our well-being.
The disruptive technologies available in our daily lives appeared as we know them during the last 30 years. And the NAIQIS has impacted us not just in our schedules or manners to do things, but it has affected our perspective to organize our philosophical criteria of looking at things and our position in the universe. It is going to affect more if we embrace the digital economy with its current flaws, not just in terms of productivity or efficiency, but it is crucifying our precious way of teaching our brains to function with equilibrium. Reading has been affected for worst during all these years, and the digital substitutes of reading have distanced us from doing it. If something that we create affects our well-being and natural functions in such a way, then be sure that we are conducting ourselves to a precipice of no return.
NAIQIs have obstructed our schedules for long reading.
First, and as a testimonial declaration, I am the most relevant example of the existence and excessive utilization of the NAIQIs (which have never been truly regulated in our societies). Well, in general generation X is an example of how disruptive technologies have affected our time and schedules. By the end of the 1990s decade, we all began little by little to access the Internet, and we opened our first email account (usually yahoo.com or hotmail.com). Then, we were seduced by the e-commerce value proposition. Our mobile communication was established as a normal ritual, laptops became ubiquitous in the corporate world, and then the Smartphone disembarked for all in 2008. No one predicted that this tool was going to vacuum our time for reading, in between other activities. The NAIQIS also entered the corporate world, manufacturing plants, banking, architecture design, and everywhere. It joined well-established industries that never considered using them, but for the sake and pursuit of economic efficiency, the disruptive technologies were infecting us, in the same rhetorical way as COVID-19 spread out all over the world. The emergence of the NAIQIs continued unstoppable. Overwhelmingly, we only woke up to the excessive utilization of NAIQIs when the traditional brick-mortar industries began to vanish. But the worst part wasn´t attained yet then, instead of regulating the NAIQIs, our stupid solution has been the irrational promotion of the digital business model as a substitution for the old real traditional business models. And the crisis has continued, affecting our well-being, health, and schedules in such a way that we have no time for our families, or for reading long books. The only ones who still practice long-reading skills (with a literacy 5 level) are less than 1% of the total population worldwide.
NAIQIs are affecting our well-being, but much more our brain functions.
We have already suggested a discussion about this topic in our previous episodes. The Smartphone (particularly this tool that came into our lives with the Apple iPhone) is hurting our brains, in such a way that our brain´s memorization capabilities, deduction, induction, critical thinking, and analysis can´t be done without that little black rectangular box and without the Internet. It requires tremendous willpower to stop using the Internet (and every tool that is automatized or driven by Artificial Intelligence). It demands an enormous and vast degree of alertness and awareness to stop digital addiction. It requires a supernatural discernment to cognize that it is much better to read a paper book than to dedicate hours and hours of skim-reading with Smartphones. And finally, it demands iron self-discipline and super will-strength to decide to take a book for reading than going for all the abundant digital substitutions available in the market.
NAIQIs and digital information are challenging us to put boundaries. Thousands of amazing books are available, on paper or e-reader platforms, but no one needs or wants to read them. We already covered this topic. The issue is not the digital book (either through e-reader platforms or tablets), the problem is that people who know how to read well, don´t want to make the effort to read. And those who can´t read well (most of the population all over the world), have settled for information (skim-reading) instead of books (no matter the format). The resolution of Steve Jobs to provide a mobile flashy touchy screen that could help us to improve our digital communication strategy has become the worst addiction in our history.
Any drug addiction recovery involves a process. First, those who need rehabilitation must wake up to their situation. Many drug addicts only resolve to leave that condition, when they are confronted with its worst decay… some only take consciousness of the problem when they have lost their families, and jobs, and are faced with sicknesses or are facing a quasi-mortal consequence of their own disorders. But there is hope, even for drug addicts. Those who resolved to leave that infrahuman risky dependence, have done it successfully with the help of their loved ones. Setting boundaries. Several treatments for drug addiction or alcoholism are accessible, but their common storyline for therapy has been to establish strict boundaries. To rehabilitate from digital addiction will necessitate more than each of our determination, but strong social-community-family boundaries in the format of self-regulation. It will also require that the NAIQI industries try to stop producing what is hurting us. If the private sector is driving digital addiction, it is in the hands of the private sector to develop an iron will to restrain development or continue offering the list of products and services that are hurting our brain capabilities. How to do it? It is a matter of business strategists. As a corporate strategist theorist, my role is to answer to the question of what to do? And it is not my domain to respond to the multiple ways in which the NAIQI industries can turn around their value propositions and business models. Nevertheless, the philosophy for our brain rehabilitation starts with the willpower to stop all this mess of virtual reality and NAIQIs powered applications and businesses. And then activate to set boundaries. As citizens, we are urgently mandated to request regulation of the NAIQIs in all our countries. It is important to put a pause or a suspension until new notice. That is painful. Many entrepreneurship endeavors are related to the excessive use of digital technologies in our Smartphones. And the strategic plan implementation to offset an equilibrium will take maybe, the double time of what it got us to where we are. Surprisingly, humans are amazing when they understand, that there is hope to fix our digital addiction processes. We all together have shown many times, that we can act with purpose to fix our troubles.
Listen to the artists and historians.
The first group of people who perceived the impact of the NAIQIs was the artists. I think the musicians got it by default, around 25 years ago, when they saw their music being played from a computer software… That was the time when the most visionary musicians woke up. Their trouble-ahead theories were then confirmed when their music began to be sold online using the apps available. The same ensued to the authors. Particularly the authors such as Ray Bradbury, who got all this mess and left an extremely well-categorized picture of it around 60 years ago. As usual, discerning between a cause and an effect is always observed first by the artists. Some consequences of the excessive utilization of NAIQIs: Thousands of independent community newspapers collapsing, meanwhile, the writers’ word beggars are trying to adapt to a sick digital system that only procures cannibalization of their non-protected oeuvres. Several cinema directors have tried to warn us through their movies for decades. Ballet dancers’ adorable suppliant artworks in the streets and plazas, movie theater closings, sculptors finding difficulties to sell their artwork all over, and painters imploring for respect for their artworks which are replicated in printers and sold under a rotten potato price strategy. If you were culturized to attend theater presentations, even the Cirque du Soleil Entertainment Group has already told us about digital addiction, at least 2 decades ago.
The first citizens who feel by heart when something wrong is coming are the artists and historians. Consultants and data technocrats are the last ones to get it. Some of them still don´t trust what I am writing. And only the most advantaged clever consultants are starting to realize these hazards, but 30 years afterward. That is why we insist that corporate strategy solutions should be holistic and multidisciplinary. The bottom line of our integral strategy is: Every single product and service that we launch should comply with the top of the top laws of all: “Love God with all your heart, soul, and spirit; love others as yourself”
Announcement: Next Friday´s publication “Libraries matter” will help us to answer another question: How to stop NAIQI’s intromission in our reading goals when everything is digital?. Libraries play a role of enlightenment when starting to read good books again.
Strategic Music Section.
Music Reading chill-outs
Today´s musical reading counsel continues with deep reading. Please recognize, that deep reading comes to pass when we read books of at least 70,000 pages or more, and when we have reached a Literacy 5 level according to the OECD. How to kindle our passion for deep-reading books again? First, it is not automatic. Second, it will take a while. We have foreseen that it will take at least three generations of consensus and orchestrated work to recover our reading capabilities. It will take between 50 to 60 years to revamp reading consequences in our future children, which means that the kids of my kids will reap the joy of reading as we knew it before the NAIQIs and Smartphones. It will require that the whole technological economic sector takes the stand to realize that what we have is not better than what we had. The technologies are at the service of humans, and not leading humans. Excessive tech is damaging us.
For the sake of the well-being of societies, it will also demand that government regulation takes place. In the meantime, as families, or as future moms (which will be my role once I marry), the primary thing is to lighten reading from the inside out for ourselves. And to our kids since pregnancy. Moms or moms-to-be need to practice reading again. Attend your library or community book clubs. We already discussed the importance of a book club. Do it with your church friends or your neighbors. Meet once a week to gain the habit of reading again. That helps vastly. Schools and teachers are also demanded to catch that light of early childhood and be prepared to teach reading appropriately. Universities and colleges should open reading circle courses and book clubs to students, parents, and non-registered outsiders everywhere. We can do it!
Our music for reading today is always found in Halidon Music. I truly adore this youtube channel compilation of pieces that help to read, concentrate and focus. The piano is interpreted by Carlo Balzaretti, who is the Director of Conservatory G. Verdi Como and Kalaidos University of Music of Milan. http://www.carlobalzaretti.com/
See you next Tuesday 6th of December with the 25th episode of the saga “Loving to read as a strategist: Reading and NAIQIs”. As of next week, we will release the new saga that is coming next year. Only 5 more episodes and we are done for 2022. Thank you for reading to me. Blessings.
“Loving to Read as a Strategist”. Illustrative and non-commercial image. Giphy source from Nazaret Escobedo
Sources of reference are utilized today.
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Disclaimer: Illustrations in Watercolor are painted by Eleonora Escalante. Other types of illustrations or videos (which are not mine) are used for educational purposes ONLY. All are used as Illustrative and non-commercial images. Utilized only informatively for the public good. Nevertheless, most of this blog’s pictures, images, or videos are not mine. I do not own any of the lovely photos or images posted unless otherwise stated.
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