Article: New Media & Society #2

This article comprises part two, on economies of speed and scale, of a series of articles on the social, economic, psychological, and philosophical impact of interactive media on today's global civilization. The remaining parts will be published in sequence, as they are made available to AWM. The author welcomes comment.

The editors
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New Media, Part 2:
Economies of scale, and economies of speed

October 1, 2004
Author: Paul Silver
CEO, Arpeggio Web Worx

The industrial revolution created what today we know as an economy of scale. Mass production of goods radically reduced the cost of each item. The social impact of this phenomenon was huge. The importance of money, and of a market for goods, increased drastically. Money as capital became the key to success in manufacturing. Craftsmen became employees at factories. The available labor force in an area became a key factor to that areas growth. It was, in part, the need for a labor force, and for a market for manufactured goods, which led the Northern United States to require that slaves be freed. The Southern United States, being largely agricultural in its economy, found this to be a threat to their existence: they benefited greatly from slave ownership. It was the old debate between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. The South remained in the old economy; the North had experienced the Industrial Revolution. This revolution gave them the economic and social basis to win the war.

Similar social upheaval occurred in Europe. It has occurred in virtually all societies when being transformed from an agrarian culture to an industrial culture. At least two new social classes evolve with the advent of industrialism: the teenager, and the senior citizen. Eventually, women take on a different social status as well.

There were well-established rituals and social transitions between roles: children became adults at puberty and entered the productive life of adults. This is what is manifest when we read that people of two hundred years ago, or in tribal cultures, marry and have children at the ripe old age of 14 years old. The elderly were considered to be the masters, and to have a great deal of worth to the society. There were similar rituals to move adults into the elder class.

Roles were firm and well defined. Then the Industrial Revolution came, and with it, radical social upheaval. The increased specialization of jobs, and the complexity of various tasks required a skilled workforce. Children had not had the chance to develop these new skills and so society established adolescence as the training period between being a child and being an adult. With the automated production line came another dislocation of labor. Whatever unskilled jobs that remained rapidly decreased in number. Information and the ability to apply it gained in importance on a mass scale. Electronic media accelerated this transformation.

The speed of electronic communication has had an even greater impact on society and the individual than the automation of production. The majority of jobs today involve handling information, managing information, or facilitating its movement. These are skilled jobs on a level never before seen. Specialization increased. The focus on information altered the characteristics of the workplace. Physical skill was replaced with intellectual skill. The number of people required to fulfill services grew. Women entered the workforce.

The fact that women left the home to enter the job market created a cultural stress insofar as children were left to schools and day care. The role of senior citizens declined in importance. Grandparents no longer cared for the children, and, as life spans increased due to changes in diet, living conditions and advances in medical technology, they were relegated to care centers or merely left to fend for themselves. Adolescents, with their basic biology telling them that they are adults while the society denies them that status, have been left essentially without any cultural role whatsoever: they hover aimless in a strata of society that is neither marked by ritual nor fulfilling of itself. They are not in job training, they are not children, but they feel like adults.

They act to raise the value of a company in the short-range of months and quarters rather than the long-range of years. If they fail to produce instantly, they are ousted. Today it is a great privilege and rarity to be a long-term thinker. Instantaneous communication breeds a need for instant gratification.

Today, while our cultures are still adapting to the advent of the Industrial Revolution, we have been forced to adapt to the yet newer and faster electronic technologies. Employment profiles are changing again. During and after the Industrial Revolution, people remained in a single career, mostly at a single company, and lived in the same neighborhood for their entire productive life. Today, people change jobs and locations regularly, often every few years. Many people have several widely divergent careers. The rate of change in industry is great, requiring a highly educated and adaptable labor force. Although seemingly saturated with goods, and seemingly wealthier than ever, people in the United States today work longer hours for less real spending power than ever before except for a brief period following the Civil War. Outsourcing jobs across international boarders is no longer difficult, communications allow for instantaneous information transfer even despite time zone and language differences.

Our present era begins with the Industrial Revolution, and witnesses an evolutionary leap in the beginning of the Information revolution. Once a critical mass of adaptation had been achieved, general quality of life improved dramatically, but the transition was difficult at a cultural and sociological level. The distribution of wealth grew lopsided, with very few people controlling virtually all of the industrial power of the nation. The gap grew, and a poverty class was created. The nature of the job market changed. People were left poor and unable to find work. This was called the Job Pool. The World Wars followed, inflation and high unemployment levels eventually resulted in the Great Depression. Only the Second World War could bring prosperity.

The relationship between industry and the military is as old as humanity. Entire economies have been built upon this relationship, and always, the advance of technology has depended upon it. Medical knowledge too has always evolved in relationship to the military. Need begets progress. Today the two most volatile and growing industries in the world are electronics and computer technology, and medicine. Inexpensive computer technology has allowed nearly free instantaneous communication around the world. Information is more widely available than ever before. Although increasing in importance, its free availability has increased opportunity for many people and many cultures. With the Industrial Revolution increasingly specialized analytic skills were needed to interpret the information available to the decision makers of industry. The value of these skills increased in the marketplace. Educational institutions answered the need of industry with new programs and entirely new orientations. Liberal education was replaced with specialized skill training. Well roundedness was sacrificed in favor of fragmented expertise. The flavor of the month determined who would get a job, and where.

With the new revolution in speed, the demands on the work force will soon change again. Specialized analytics will still be required, but an age of the big picture is returning. Things happen so fast that a long-term perspective is once again feasible. Adaptability is still required, but at such a rate that the best training is not the learning of special technical skills but in the skill of learning itself. Of course, we are in the middle of a dislocation similar to that of the post-Civil War period, and, of course, we are befuddled by the disintegration of seemingly antiquated cultural, social and industrial norms. The nuclear family has come to pieces. We hark back to its period of integrity and try to resuscitate its structure, but as a cultural artifact of much slower times, it will not revive. We insist that our schools not waste time on the arts, and instead teach and test our children about skills for jobs, but it is the arts that will round out the perspective, and allow for a critical eye in these forthcoming days of the new, electronic, media.

Educational programs, as before, will adapt, albeit slowly. Industry will adapt, perhaps slightly faster. The individual will adapt, per force, and the culture, sluggish in its future shock, will inevitably evolve new structures to answer new needs. Educational programs will respond to industry, which is always in the vanguard. Individuals will adapt on the job, although they will continue to define themselves in terms provided by the culture. The culture, of necessity the last to adapt, will suffer intrusions, disillusions, disintegrations and evolutions, and its constituents will wobble weak-kneed before a new reality yet undefined, and without the vocabulary to describe it. Unless…