The Conceptual Age
Wirer magazine continues to generate some of the most thought provoking writing around. While not as personally influential as The Long Tail, the current issue’s article “Revenge of the Right Brain” by Daniel H. Pink is a good read.
The Information Age we all prepared for is ending. Rising in its place is what I call the Conceptual Age, an era in which mastery of abilities that we’ve often overlooked and undervalued marks the fault line between who gets ahead and who falls behind.
The Information Age has unleashed a prosperity that in turn places a premium on less rational sensibilities – beauty, spirituality, emotion. For companies and entrepreneurs, it’s no longer enough to create a product, a service, or an experience that’s reasonably priced and adequately functional. In an age of abundance, consumers demand something more. … Try explaining a designer garbage pail to the left side of your brain!
We’ve progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we’re progressing yet again – to a society of creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers, and meaning makers.
Hat tip: Havi
That’s really eerie. I’ve been think a lot about this lately. I first started pondering this when I was wondering about the future of the working class. If your “knowledge” job goes to India, and your “manufacturing” job goes to Mexico, and your “service” job gets replaced by a self-service kiosk, what’s left? Surely, its not as draconian as all that, but it gets you thinking about patterns. I’ve been noodling a bit about the evolution of economies. Merchantisism==>Industrial (Mining) ==> Manufacturing==>Service==>Knowledge==>??? I’ve been toying with the idea of a Creative Economy. That gets pretty dodgy considering the very left-brained focus of our Educational system. Our students are learning to follow formulas without emphasizing the creation of new ones. I was reading an article in Wired magazine regarding the outsourcing of jobs to India. It further explained how certain other jobs were very difficult to export. Design (and other right-brain disciplines) were cited. Thanks for the article! I’ll see if I can’t dig up that article and forward it to you.