Today is a theoretical day. Pause from practical examples (I know I owe my readers another 60 opportunities in order to win the challenge).
Employment is the biggest industry in the world and it is about to change drastically.
Globalization and decentralization go hand in hand. You cannot have one without the other.
Let me take you back to my field of study: semiotics, more specifically narratology, the study of stories. Everything is story; it is the social texture of our society. We used to live by Grand Narratives, stories that explained the world to us and which subdued all subversive voices because an industrial world where the engines of production where locked in a shed by employers, required standardization. Now that the people own the means of production and have access to a worldwide distribution network, things are de-industrializing.
It is a matter of common belief thatglobal grids are replacing the torn-down local grids, but just as on any building site, construction takes place at the same time as deconstruction.
The Grand Narratives are being deconstructed in:
- Socionarratives (wiki’s)
- Micronarratives (blogs)
- Nanonarratives (tweets)
- Femtonarratives (IM/SMS)
We are reconstructing this experience again via RSS feeds or Atoms. In my RSS reader (Google) I have different feeds which I can subscribe to via RSS daily. But these are only crude reconstruction devices.
Second-generation systems will be smarter to better manage the information overload. Features of these systems will be: double detection, summary, search features inside bookmarks, attention profiling, tag proposition, tag cloud organization, collaborative filtering and recommendation and extend to websites, publications, wiki’s, tweets, mobile, video and audio. In that way we will be able to digest thousands of ‘posts’ per day and socially reconstruct our own Daily Grand Narrative. Changing our minds will be the supertrend to follow which will create flash products, flash audiences and pop-up entrepreneurs and investors.
Now let’s use this trend towards jobs. The job-for-life (JFL) will be deconstructed in:
- Sociojobs: social networks, volunteering, open-source
- Microjobs: small jobs working with purchase order
- Nanojobs: drone work such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk (US only)
- Femtojobs: jobs only paid by the ticket
These decentralized jobs will result in a decentralized identity where people will have several emails, IP addresses, profiles, nick names, handles etc.. The analogy of Feedburner to the job industry will be a destination site where you can find these decentralized jobs and reconstruct them again using various identities.
In other words, people will be working online and aggregate themselves in several virtual entities (companies) often with no legal status. The purpose of these entities will be to take on more complex jobs and eventually compete with the brick and mortar world of cubicled corporatism.
Second-generation job feed systems will aggregate virtual identities in virtual keiretzu’s so that the boundary between the physical world and the online world will be blurred. Ontology will therefore be the science of the future and i-brokers, the powerhouse of the future. They will become more important than banks.
Does this make sense? If not, read my The Biology of Language, Tilburg University. I’ll send you one of my unsold copies if you want ☺
Walter
