Anne Zelenka on The Connected Age

I am a big fan of Anne Zelenka, and I like much of what she is pushing at with her recent post, From The Information Age To The Connected Age at GigaOM. But some of the dots don't connect for me in the arguments about 'web work' replacing 'knowledge work.'

I can accept the knowledge work moniker -- which is, by the way, the 1959 coinage of Peter Drucker, which is generally lost in the sauce -- although it was relentlessly abused by the business book mavens of the '90s (like Davenport and Prusak) and the big N consulting firms (where N is some small positive integer). Knowledge work is basically getting paid to work without sweating. However, I don't buy into all of the distinctions she draws between knowledge work and the new web work:

[From The Information Age To The Connected Age]

Who Matters -- Ok, I agree with the top-down v bottom-up distinction. This is the rise of the Edglings, the fall of the Center, once again.

Style of Work -- project-driven task work versus bursty discontinuous work? Hmmm. I think this is really a transition from personal productivity to network productivity: webheads are willing to trade personal productivity to remain connected and to help others make headway. That makes things bursty, and involves more context switching, but is a better manifestation of network altruism that the tempo of the work.

Currency - I don't buy in on the attention-as-a-resource metaphor (as I have discussed at length elsewhere), first advanced by Herbert Simon, and now taken as a given. This is something like Freudian principles of the human psyche, which have become internalized through the endless chanting of popular culture; however there is no proof whatsoever of the existence of id, ego, superego, and so on. It's like witchcraft in a culture that believes in ghosts and spells. In general, people use attention as a shorthand for time, basically arguing that the pace of life has 'sped up' -- another metaphor. What this really means, I think, is a shared collective perception that our lives are busier than ever, meaning that we are working longer hours, or that the traditional divide between work and non-work has become blurred. But the latter is actually a return to the pre-industrial integrated notion of life, one that was put aside with the rise of industrialism. In non-industrial cultures, the line between work and play is pretty vague. For a lot of people who actually are unwilling to examine where they spend their time, really, the sense of being overly busy often translates into how much time they are spending commuting (which has gone up slightly in past decades), or watching television (which has fallen somewhat from it's peak of over 4 hours per day). This attention thing is strongly linked to the folk wisdom made popular by Alvin Toffler that we are being driven crazy by information overload, another metaphor gone mad. In a sense, this whole preoccupation with attention can be viewed as the war between contending media within ourselves. People externalize media choices as being something out there demanding our attention, when it could just as well be framed as individual and social choices we make. Metaphors matter, again.

The rest of her points are dead on, although I will quibble about one theme. Knowledge is an emergent property of social relationships. We are as smart as the conversations we have been involved in (David Weinberger, Gregory Bateson, et al). In a time when we can invest more and potentially get a greater return from our social relationships, we could simply state that we are made smarter because of those higher-order, more complex relationships.

Whatever way we want to compare work in the twilight of the industrial era ('the information age' we are leaving behind) with today's webbed world (the 'post-industrial economy' we are moving into), it's clear that the metric for measurement will be based on the connections we are making through and because of the Web.

I can't wait to read Anne's book. I am certain that it will be extremely rewarding and thought provoking.

Comments

[Anne Z.]

Hi Stowe -

I'm not entirely comfortable with the terminology of "knowledge work" vs. "web work." Of course web workers create knowledge. Perhaps post-industrial is a better way of thinking about it. Information Age sounds too much like bits rule though, when I think people should rule.

I don't think attention as currency implies the limits information overloaders suggest. Some ideas and creations (like the Harry Potter series) have an attention multiplying effect. So it's not parallel to money in that you have an endowment and that's it unless you earn more. But still, in terms of figuring out how to work, thinking of earning attention can focus people on how they might raise their profile and attract opportunities to them, something you've talked about before.

Thanks for the feedback. Of course your ideas about flow and network productivity have been hugely inspirational and foundational for me and I look forward to ongoing conversation in the future.

Of course you'll be getting an early review copy (I'll be in contact in November or December about that) and be sure to check the acknowledgements. :)

[Stowe Boyd]

I like 'post-industrial', or even 'post-everything'! The last go was industrial, and I think the rise of knowledge workers is/was a part of that era.

We are now in a time when our work, and our cognition, are less likely to be considered in industrial terms. That's why 'knowledge management' seems antiquated, and why attempts to 'manage' our social networks are missing the point of participating in them altogether.

'Earning attention' sounds interesting, but would avoid the negatives of the entire attention discussion if you couched it in terms related to reputation: whuffie, karma, or swarmth (as I call it). Influence amplifies impacts of actions.

Looking forward to the book, and thanks for the kind words.

[Britton Manasco]

While I agree that "knowledge work" and "knowledge management" seem antiquated, I am not yet willing to buy into the idea that social networking merely replaces it.

I actually think there is a real danger here that people will spend so much of their time interacting and networking that they lose the capacity for reflection and personal creativity. We return to the issue raised by sociologists like David Riesman ("The Lonely Crowd") and Vance Packard ("The Status Seekers") in the 1950s who warned us about the dangers about being profoundly "other-directed." Even Clayton Christensen warns us not to follow our customers too closely if we hope to be innovative.

Well, I'd say the same about social networking and web work: Follow your colleagues ("your hive") too closely and you sound like everyone else. You become a prisoner of group think. It's interesting that one of your respondents mentions the book series Harry Potter. I don't think J.K. Rowling (or any prolific writer, for that matter) gets the work done through excessive social interaction. It's the discipline to sit down and write -- typically in isolation -- that produces the final product.

While I am not making the case for living in a cave, I am concerned about an economy (and world) where personal reflection, action and autonomy are so devalued.