Reg's reddit response: The Clash of Civilisations

"The real 'clash of civilizations' is not between 'Islam' and 'the West,' but instead within virtually all modern nations — between people who are prepared to live on terms of equal respect with others who are different, and those who seek the protection. Context

I think the problems runs deeper. The information/communication revolution is still in comparative infancy, but is part of more and more lives around the world. One of the results has been to shrink the physical distances between people even further, often to zero for digital natives. It has, however, caused a widening of the age gap, as the older generation have grown up with industrial age thinking and, for the most part, have difficulty grasping the changes in the world, the workplace and the fabric of society as a whole.

Unfortunately for the world, we have a few more years where almost all of our top lawmakers, policy makers, doctors, educators, reporters and editors are recent digital immigrants. These types of people as a whole have tended to be technology resistant and rely on advice from less-resistant peers. Unfortunately these peers are, like them, digital immigrants - while they may understand the net, they do not grok it like a native, and view it in terms of classical business/economic/social models.

It will be many years before the digital natives, those who have never known a world without the internet, mature to a level where they can gain power out in the real world, but here in cyberspace they will take over.

This is where the tension lies - in the tension between the industrial age paradigms (capitalism, expansion, dominance, secrecy) to the communications age paradigms (sharing, community, transparency, sustainability). Digital natives can see a future where knowledge is shared freely for the common good, industrial dinosaurs cannot imagine something of value without a pricetag.