Metathinking in the 21st Century
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level we were at
when we created them.

                                                                     - Albert Einstein
Trend #1: Growth of Social Media Techologies
When social communication media grow in capability, pace, scope, or scale, people use these media to construct more complex social arrangements - that is, they use communication tools and techniques to increase their capacity to cooperate at larger and larger scale. Human history is a story of the co-evoltution of tools and social practices to support ever more complex forms of cooperative society."

                                                           Technologies of Cooperation
web 1.0 - read only
web 2.0 - read/write
web 3.0 - semantic
"I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of
analyzing all the data on the Web - the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A 'Semantic Web', which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The 'intelligent agents' people have touted for ages will finally materialize."

                                                          - Tim Berners-Lee, 1999
Trend #2: Complexity and Compression
"The explosive development of the Internet and related information and
communication technologies has brought into focus the problems of information overload, and the growing speed and complexity of developments in society. People find it ever more difficult to cope with all the new information they receive, constant changes in the organizations and technologies they use, and increasingly complex and unpredictable side-effects of their actions. This leads to growing stress and anxiety, fuels various gloom and doom scenarioes about the future of our planet, and may help explain the increasingly radical movements against globalization."

                                                             - Francis Heylighen
The developmental history of the universe, of life on Earth, and of human technological civilization may be briefly and eleganted described as doing more, (computation), better (more intelligently), and with less (physical resources). 

We can call this process STEM (Space, Time, Energy, and Matter/Mass) Compression, a term that [refers to both the increasing efficiency and the density of complex systems over the course of development].

                                                                                                - John Smart
Twitter's 140 character limit: 
critics say the limitation makes us unable to engage in meaningful exchanges, but actually, it forces the user to learn to compress information in less space without it losing its value. It means information can be sent in short bursts and spread throughout multiple networks via the retweet feature. It means that information relevant to specific communities can find its way to the people who can extract its value and do something with it. 
Presentation format originating in Japan:
20 images, each for 20 seconds
6 minute and 40 second presentations
avoids "death by powerpoint"
forces presenter to communicate the same message in a shorter timeframe
limits video upload to 90 seconds
recent engagement analytics by Postrank

"The big picture is that total engagment with online content is growing while on-site engagement
is declining in significance as off-site engagement like link sharing on social networks grows. Surprisingly, this off-site link sharing has also extended the lifespan of content."

"While the real-time web is all about lowering the latency," Grigorik says, "the pervasive nature and number of people engaged in their communities and conversations (the Social Web) is helping with information discovery. People are worried that the real-time web will destroy their readership as everyone just gets distracted by the newest shiny thing on Twitter, but the numbers show something very different. It's so easy to spread information now that it lasts longer and finds more niches - this trend is helping content travel further."

                                   - How Blogging Has Changed Over The Last 3 Years (Stats), ReadWriteWeb
Trend #3: Accelerating Change
The concept of accelerating change suggests that the
rate of technological, social, economic, and cultural progress
has been increasing throughout history. (Let's assume 'progress' means 'doing more, better, with less')

These dynamics have been observed in everything from agricultural productivity to the increasing power of information processing (Moore's Law), growth of online social networks (Reed's Law), and more controversially, in human intelligence (Flynn Effect).
check out the Social Media Revolution video on youtube
to help contextualize how the adoption of social technologies is impacting society and business

so what?
because we experience time as linear, the 'explosive growth' of technologies may seem surprising.......
...but viewed on an exponential scale
actually looks relatively predictable
what might this mean?
"An analysis of the history of technology shows that
technological change is exponential, contrary to the 
common-sense "intuitive linear" view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). 
                                           - Ray Kurzweil
on a lighter note...
the takeaway?
These three forces seem to have been co-evolving and fueling each other throughout history. By understanding the changes that society is experiencing as being influenced by these trends, we may gain some clarity and insights that will allow us to meet the challenges ahead with strategy instead of fear. 

It will be important to look at the social tools we have available, and figure out how to use them in order to better anticipate, plan for, and adapt to change, to think critically, and to create conditions for creativity and innovation. 
for example.....
An Oxford Business School recently asked a panel of experts:

"After social networks, what's next?"
Venture Capitalist & Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel asked back:

Are we at the end of innovation of social networking? And is social networking the last innovation of the internet?
if so, we need to do some planning...
...like figuring out how to harness the power
of our social networks to help us filter through the noise, make sense of information, and solve problems...
...and perhaps develop a new system for thinking
and understanding the world altogether ?
continue the conversation at emergentbydesign.com
for example.....
again, we become responsible for filtering information from noise
we're not quite there yet, but the frameworks for
its emergence may have been put in place with 
the birth of the real-time Web & Twitter
we're on the verge of a knowledge-based economy, where essential skills
will include the ability to sift through noise to find information, to understand how things fit into the big picture, and how to leverage the power of networks to solve problems
there seem to be three key trends
fueling these shifts
In other words, despite the fact that online publishing has
increased the amount of noise, we've developed a system
for filtering valuable content to the top and sharing it with
our networks.