What is Big Think?

We are Big Idea Hunters…

We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

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Transcript

Question: How has social networking transformed unionizing?

Sara Horowitz: It’s the tool. It’s another tool. You know, the strike as a tool, sit down are tool, petitions are tools. These are tools. Sometimes people confuse tools with strategies. And what, I think, a lot of the social networking sites are showing us is that there are ways that you can communicate with people, bring people together, mobilize them in ways that we haven’t been able to before. I think that’s where the Freelancers Union has been really successful is because we’ve been able to leverage that. And… You know, we now have over a 100,000 members. We never would’ve been able to do that without the Internet.