问答题 The Internet, e-commerce and globalization are making a new economic era possible. By the middle of the 21st century, capitalist markets will largely be replaced by a new kind of economic system based on networked relationships, contractual arrangements and access rights.
Has the quality of our lives at work, at home and in our communities increased in direct proportion to all the new Internet and business-to-business Internet services being introduced into our lives? I have asked this question of hundreds of CEOs and corporate executives in Europe and the United States. Surprisingly, virtually everyone has said, "No, quite the contrail." 16 The very people responsible for ushering in what some have called a "technological renaissance" say they are even less civil in their dealings with colleagues and friends—not to mention strangers. 17 And what"s more revealing, they place much of the blame on the very same technologies they are so aggressively championing.
The techno gurus promised as that access would make life more convenient and give us more time. 18 Instead, the very technological wonders that were supposed to liberate us have begun to enslave us in a web of connections from which there seems to be no easy escape.
If an earlier generation was preoccupied with the quest to enclose a vast geographic frontier, the dotcom generation, it seems, is more caught up in the colonization of time. 19 Every spare moment of our time is being filled with some form of commercial connection, making time itself the most scarce of all resources. Our e-mail, voice mail and cell phones, our 24-hour electronic trading markets, online banking services, all-night e-commerce, and 24-hour Internet news and entertainment all holler for our attention.
Social conservatives talk about the decline in civility and blame it on the loss of a moral compass and religious values. Has anyone bothered to ask whether the hyperspeed culture is making all of us less patient and less willing to listen and defer, consider, and reflect?
Maybe we need to ask what kinds of connections really count and what types of access really matter in the e-economy era. 20 If this new technology, revolution is only about hyperefficiency, then we risk losing something even more precious than time—our sense of what it means to be a caring human being.