August 23, 2005
Multitasking Multidisciplines Multiculturally
Posted by Kevin | Print This Article
Interesting piece in this morning’s NY Times (registration required) on the growing number of computer science majors in college who are augmenting their studies with other disciplines like art, anthropology, sociology, biology, etc.
“For students like Ms. Burge, expanding their expertise beyond computer programming is crucial to future job security as advances in the Internet and low-cost computers make it easier to shift some technology jobs to nations with well-educated engineers and lower wages, like India and China.”
This trend echoes the thesis of Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind on the need for left-brainers to embrace right-brain thinking to compete with the unstoppable flow of technical jobs to developing countries.
Only slightly touched on in this morning’s article, though, is a concurrent trend that I think should be encouraged and where many of us are falling behind: the need for people whose study is not computer science to understand it anyway.
Take my own original “field” of communications (if you can call it that; a true product of liberal arts education, I graduated from college knowing how to write, and how to think, and little else). For the fifteen years I’ve been doing it, yes, as the cliche goes, “it’s changed.” Communicators themselves may not be changing enough.
It’s not enough to know how to write, how to interview, how to develop a PR campaign, how to layout a newsletter, etc. Communicators today need to know and understand technology. Not just what it is, but why it is, how it works, and how to use it. (I’m being purposely vague when I say “technology” because it never stops and I believe it should be the communicators in an organization — moreso than the IT personnel – who know exactly which new technologies are emerging and what their impact on the organization may be).
Too many “communicators” seem wedded to behaviors that seem old-school even to me, and I’ve been around for a while. (On the ASAE communications listserver yesterday, there was a robust back-and-forth on whether one should use a red inkpen when editing. I have no idea what they were talking about.)
I think Pink is right — the right-brain is ascendant in our economy, but that doesn’t mean the artists and writers and philosophers should rejoice. The left-brainers will still dominate, they will just have expanded their portfolio a bit beyond rote knowledge work. To succeed, right-brainers will need to embrace their left-brain as well.
The future belongs to technologists who know how to communicate with human beings. People who know how to communicate with human beings but don’t understand technology … well, that sounds like retail to me.
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