Thanks for the excellent comments. As Bob Johansen from the Institute for the Future said, the important thing about “futuring” is not whether you are right or wrong, but whether your forecasts stimulate useful thinking.

“To appear ‘trustworthy’ will be held in suspicion.”

I sure hope this is not the case. I think that the opposite is true and will continue to be true. National and international corporations alike have been ravaged by the lack of trustworthy executives for some time now and MBA programs have done their best to inject a more robust ethical focus. So, if the traditional definition of “trustworthy” refers to one’s moral or ethical behavior in the workplace, this seems to be an item of renewed priority among most enterprise and university settings. A recent article on this topic.

If “trustworthy” refers to the subjective weight associated with one’s accuracy relative to the content they disseminate, I also think this is and will become more important as the continued expansion of online blogs, amateur journalists (ireport, etc.) continues. While one’s ability to apply appropriate qualification skills to content analysis has and will become more important, so does the social capital associated with those who disseminate content or information-based product. Tara Hunt’s discussions of the Whuffie Factor drive this point home since social capital is really synonymous with whether or not individuals find you, and by extension, your company, trustworthy.

“Creativity will finally get the respect it deserves in most areas of life. In learning material development, the relative nexus of power will shift from content experts and technology specialists to artists and communicators.”

Perhaps, perhaps not. The titles you use are simply titles and I don’t think they accurately capture what is happening on the ground in most businesses and universities. Many companies (not all) have shifted to an almost pure-information product. Google, Netflix and many of the web app juggernauts are primarily manufacturing conceptual innovation that often takes on relatively new or non-linear forms of process. It’s therefore not surprising that the true value of companies like these are often primarily wrapped up not in the intellectual property or secrets (like Coca Cola’s secret formula), but in the intellectual capital of their workforce. So, I think the very concept of job roles is very much in flux; especially as it concerns publication, journalism, communication, and education. Could it be that those who are considered “content experts and technology specialists” will develop skills in art and communication just as those who are not as fluent with technology will develop a more well-rounded competency? Case in point: How many employees in companies focused on technology are artists or communicators who have learned the technical aspects of their job after being hired? Creativity is obviously greatly valued and developed, but often takes the form of new process or product/service enhancement and may or many not be artistic.

If the aforementioned companies are any sign, this is probably the case and representative of the times to come. From that standpoint, the concept of a narrow job title and role can often seem like a contrived heuristic that is already out of date in many companies. Sure, roles and job titles are still helpful, but only so far as they help accomplish organizational goals and leverage employee competency to the fullest. This also explains to some extent why companies like Intel often rotate their employees from role to role so they are better able to manage process and can more effectively balance multiple roles simultaneously. Google’s tries to allocate 20% of their employee’s schedule on new or creative projects that are based on whatever the employee finds interesting. Today’s knowledge worker must seek to balance the creative and the technical.

“Technology specialists will have a relatively smaller role in determining the scope, function, and quality of learning materials as instructional technologies continue to be more widely available, more sophisticated, and more easily employed by those without technical specialization.”

I agree and disagree. I’ve been involved in numerous roll outs of new media across companies or universities and in each instance, technical support and what might be called “technical withitness” has been essential. Today, try crafting an iPhone app or an interactive Flash app with creativity alone. It could be that one day technology is seamless enough to remove any technical barriers from new media creation, but my guess is that the “new something” on the horizon will always involve some level of technical expertise to instantiate it until broad adoption and usability have taken place.

“Institutions that have traditionally played an “information gatekeeper” function, determining what material is and isn’t published, now find themselves in difficult times. In their place will rise a “curation” function to help users find the right information and use it in their own social context.”

I think librarians have already to some extent shifted their role in this direction. Interestingly, the term “curator” here might be synonymous with a technology specialist. So, isn’t the use of “curator” here simply a neologism for technology specialists whose role primarily keeps them involved in helping users find and apply information in their own social context?

A short reading list is available on my website. It’s about healthcare, but I think can be applied to Social Media.

http://john-norris.net/2008/07/28/healthcare-systems-not-as-machines-but-living-organisms/