The Conceptual Age

We are entering into a new paradigm. A paradigm called the Conceptual Age. Fueled by technological innovation, this age will herald the democratization of information. It will empower the masses. To compete, we must become content creators. And for that, we must think differently.

In the 2005 book A Whole New Mind, author Daniel H. Pink argues that society is standing at the brink between the Information Age and the Conceptual Age. Access to information, he writes, means access to power. Or so it does in the Information Age. Entry into the Conceptual Age will be a game changer; it will make information useless.

We have yet to make this transition, but Pink’s underlying premise still holds true. Today, we can access an enormous amount of data through search engines like Google. So much so, in fact, that it often takes both time and experience to find what we are looking for. This creates inequalities. And inequalities means that access to information still equates to power.

But information will be democratized in the Conceptual Age. And we will have a semantic web with which to find, share, and combine information more easily. As a result, everything will be available to everyone at literary a click of a button. Inequalities will become a thing of the past, and whatever advantage you had in the Information Age will be lost.

In the Conceptual Age, it’s no longer possible to compete solely on access to information. Information is now useless—unless you can add something to it. It’s what you do with the information that counts, meaning that in order to compete in tomorrow’s market place, you, and anybody else like you who wants to compete, will have to become content creators.

Pink believes that the Conceptual Age will belong to “right-brain thinkers,” and he uses the two-sides-of-the-brain metaphor to distinguish them from the “left-brain thinkers” he says currently rule the Information Age. Right-brain thinkers, he writes, are more inventive and empathic, and they have a greater sensitivity for meaning and context.

It’s easy to draw parallels between this characterization and those provided by advocates of Design- and Systems Thinking—both of which are methodologies that can be associated with successful content creators. And perhaps that is no coincidence. As the Conceptual Age draws closer, we are realizing that the status quo isn’t maintainable. We are realizing that we need to alter the way we think. And for that, we will need a whole new mind.