Feb
1
2005
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By category: Hmmm..., Social Web.
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
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lantzilla February 1st, 2005 - 8:01 pm
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.
Jason February 2nd, 2005 - 11:56 am
I think when I retire, I’m gonna be a coffeehouse barista.
No, seriously, I always take these visions of the future with a grain of salt. There’s a lot of folks who still only use the internet for basic functions: email, looking up airline tickets, finding movie times. Many still use traditional media like the newspaper and the phone. (Do telephones qualify now as a “traditional” medium? How time flies.) It’s easy to think that “the world” is moving in a certain direction just because your little portion of the Venn diagram is. The rest of the U.S. is still moving through the Information Age, or hasn’t even hit “the information age” yet.
Remember when “pattern recognizers” and “creators” were just inventors? Why this need to relabel everything to make it sound glorious?
I’m skeptical. I’ve been skeptical since it became clear that I’d never receive my cybernetic implants (no Chiba-made eyes for nearsighted me!) and wouldn’t jack directly into the ‘Net.
Jason February 2nd, 2005 - 11:57 am
Oh snap, Typepad ate my linebreaks! The future is now and it’s broken. ;)
Bob Koechley February 2nd, 2005 - 12:14 pm
I also continue to find WIRED among the best source for thought provoking views seldom mentioned elsewhere. The Conceptual Age in the current issue is a perfect evample.
I was raised to believe that the future demanded us to be educated in the broadest sense; literature, history, philosophy etc. in contrast to mastering C++ or Perl or radiology. The humanities are concerned with the persistant features of human nature and provide the best tools to prepare for the future.
bk