Week 3: Labour in the 21st Century

From the telegraph to a whole new world called cyberspace in just a century or two? That is honestly so fascinating in my opinion. Who knew we would be living in the era of time where a brand new type of universe is created?

Nowadays, everything is connected through the internet. From socializing to work, we are all always having that online presence around us. This breaks all types of material borders around the globe, creating something called “network time/space homogenization”.

The cherry on top? *drum roll please*

Information is free. 

On the labour aspect of this cyber network, information networks came from horizontal and centralized to distributed and decentralized. You may be thinking, what in the world is decentralization? Well, to put it in short, its changing the decision making process from a large powerful group to more delegated groups. In World War II, the Germans were actually the the first to initiate this format of decision making.

With that, different types of feedback charts were created, such as Wiener’s Feedback loop and John Boyd’s OODA loop. Both were used to assist in managing large information networks in real time. Below are the loops of Wiener’s and John Boyd’s respectively.

The drawbacks however, would be that conducting this method would be pretty pricey, and the larger of size and complexity of the network, the more costs you have to pay for the coordination.

What other upgrades came along with the internet? We came from industrial labour and factory machines, and evolved into information machines and information processing. That would have saved a vast amount of time back in the day where everything was dealt without technology, but that is another story.

Thanks for reading!

Stay tuned for next blog about the attention economy and the long tail effect!