Stephen Downes

Future civilizations will look back on ours and note with some perplexity the way so much of society and culture is expressed in commercial terms (the rest is expressed in militaristic terms, but that's another post). Take, for example, phrases like "x is the currency of y" - as in "reputation is the currency of social media" - and ponder seriously how something intangible like reputation can be through of in the same terms as a medium of exchange with which to buy bread. It's not just the blatant use of terms like "social capital", "human capital", etc., that represent people as the object of commercial exchange, it's the representation in general of anything that is a moral good as having "a value" - 'values' (commerce) and 'values' (morality) are thought of and expressed in the same way, in the same sentence! Most of the world is not the domain of commerce and enterprise, but you'd never know it reading a newspaper or even an education blog! The bankers and bean-counters are so persistently in charge that we cannot even think outside their language.