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This article aims to provide a succinct summary of the actions learning and development (L&D) professionals should take to get involved in and make the most of social media, both for themselves and their organizations.

This viewpoint is based on the author’s book published in 2014, which explores how corporate learning has changed in the past five years and what the big trends are currently.

Social media is here to stay and will continually reinvent itself at perhaps even greater speed. L&D professionals in particular must quickly learn to embrace the technology to assist learners to build a personal knowledge framework and thereby assure their usefulness and enduring competence.

By embracing social media you create an enabling and facilitating model, which shifts the burden of responsibility firmly onto the learner.

Information has become a strategic resource, a factor of production along with land, labour and capital. In some ways it rivals the money form as vector of value and means to power and influence in the new order. Narrowing the definition of information to mean a use‐value which conveys knowledge about the world and excluding bits, bytes and digitized transactions such as money transfer, brings us to the dynamic, booming “tradeable information” sector of the economy. This new area of growth can be seen as the precursor, in embryonic form, of a new mode of production. Just as the spinning‐wheel and steam‐engine epitomize earlier phases of industrial development, so the computer and its network links to the outside may herald a new form of social organization, albeit coexisting within earlier modes for the forseeable future. The emerging informeconomy exists, of course, in the real world of market relations, recession and global corporations. The backdrop is the economic equivalent of World War III, where only the toughest survive, be it in steel, cars, electronics or agricultural commodities. Where do libraries and information centres fit into this picture? Do we stand in relation to this process like the declining corner‐shop of the information world, confronted with the rise of the super‐, mega‐ and hypermarket? In the world of privatized consumption, “spectacular” domination, will the still small voice of humanistic culture survive?

I WAS perturbed by a ‘kite’ flown in a national newspaper recently that in its search for economies in public expenditure, the new Conservative government might wield its axe on the British Library's proposed erection in the Euston Road. The current cost of the new building is informally judged to have climbed to a total of £300m, but as this expenditure is to be deployed over a decade and more, abandonment is hardly likely to make serious inroads into government expenditure curently running at more than £50,000m annually.