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Labor Today
September 3, 2007

Work has changed. Very few people woke up this morning to bale hay, build houses, or pour molten steel. We live in a service economy, not an industrial economy. More importantly, our service economy has been increasingly shaped by the development of digital, information-based economic opportunities. This post isn't about those opportunites. This post is about unintended consequences, side-effects if you will.

One of the most obvious side-effects of the increasingly service based, information focused, and digitally powered economy is Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. Named in reference to a classic story of a supposedly mechanical chess game that was secretly powered by a person, Amazon's service provides distributed human interaction to complete small tasks. In the past, Amish barn raisings or other community/group distributed tasks required physical proximity for physical labor. Today's intellectual tasks can much more easily be distributed globally.

There are a lot of library tasks that can be distributed; maybe not around the globe, but certainly around the school.

Posted by Chris Harris on September 3, 2007 | Comments (0)