will the creative class be the new blue collar class?

I have been reading Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google this week and I am going to put up a post with my reaction sometime relatively soon. But suffice it to say that it should be mandatory reading list for everyone with a passing investment in where network culture is heading. At the Guardian the other day, Carr expanded on his argument by proposing that one consequence of the move toward utility computing would be a decline in white collar jobs. See here.

Carr’s observations dovetail with the Writer’s Strike… Hollywood is one of the few places in the country that still has a powerful and—on the ground at least—popular union system. I wish the union well, of course, but after reading Carr’s article I can’t help but think that this is a nasty byproduct of network culture. Maybe the studios—themselves big media dinosaurs—think that the only way they can come to terms with the changing conditions in the industry is to dig in their heels? Is this Detroit or Pittsburgh in the early 1980s? 

 

I have been reading Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google this week and I am going to put up a post with my reaction sometime relatively soon. But suffice it to say that it should be mandatory reading list for everyone with a passing investment in where network culture is heading. At the Guardian the other day, Carr expanded on his argument by proposing that one consequence of the move toward utility computing would be a decline in white collar jobs. See here.

Carr’s observations dovetail with the Writer’s Strike… Hollywood is one of the few places in the country that still has a powerful and—on the ground at least—popular union system. I wish the union well, of course, but after reading Carr’s article I can’t help but think that this is a nasty byproduct of network culture. Maybe the studios—themselves big media dinosaurs—think that the only way they can come to terms with the changing conditions in the industry is to dig in their heels? Is this Detroit or Pittsburgh in the early 1980s?