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Course: Social media literacy > Unit 5
Lesson 4: What new paradigms do we need to shift towards?What new paradigms do we need to shift towards?
Keeping the planet and all its life at the forefront of design
What new paradigms do we need to shift towards?
To protect your future, we need changes and we need them quickly. Unsustainable old paradigms need to be replaced with new ones, like:
- Growth must be balanced with responsibility. For example, a business shouldn’t be able to extract a resource (like a tree, or our attention) so much that the resource can’t replenish (deforestation, or addiction).
- People often need support to make informed choices in their own long-term interest. We often get caught up in the moment, but see more clearly in hindsight.
- People thrive when they can live a balanced life filled with the relationships and activities that they find most meaningful. Too few of these and we can feel bored or unfulfilled, but too many lead us to overwhelm.
Changing these types of fundamental assumptions that society is built on might seem impossible. But it’s also impossible to keep pretending that the Earth has infinite resources or that our democracies will continue to function when we can no longer tell what’s true or not.
So all of us who understand what’s at stake have to demand change. As a young person, your voice is perhaps the most important, because your future is most at stake.
Go Deeper
Listen to historian Yuval Noah Harari on the Your Undivided Attention podcast. In this wide-ranging conversation, Yuval explains how technology and democracy have evolved together over the course of human history, from Paleolithic tribes to city states to kingdoms to nation states. So where do we go from here? “In almost all the conversations I have,” Yuval says, “we get stuck in dystopia and we never explore the no less problematic questions of what happens when we avoid dystopia.”