How the information age ruined America...Follow

I've been working on a research paper for the past 2 weeks on the early-mid 1990's for my Human Services class. Its been interesting, because its brought up a lot of things that I never realized before.

for the paper we could choose any time period, and then any important piece of legislation from that time period, to write about. So, I chose the 1990's and FMLA, because I thought it would be neat to see what I was too stupid to see was going on around me while I was growing up, and the FMLA just because I was a little familiar with it.

But, yeah, so the internet. In the 1990's, after craploads of money had been invested into communications and computer technologies, the internet as we know it really came into existance. With it came a huge opportunity for increased development rates for companies because computers could help out with so much of the work. The downside? Where hundreds of people were needed to perform a task, you now would only need a handful with computers. We made a transition from an industrialized society into an information based society. With the transition, companies realized that less workers were needed, and most of those that were could be "flexible labor," that is to say, short term employees. This was wonderful for them. They could get more work done, with fewer employees who got paid less, and they didn't have the fringe benefits of long term employees.

Another problem with an information based society is that the jobs dealing with intangibles, such as data, are easily moved anywhere around the globe. Tangible goods are much harder. This is why (I believe) a major rush for IT outsourcing didn't occur until midway through the 90's.

On top of that, the internet, and the increased rates of data transmission allowed for incredibly fast development times all across the board in the USA. One of the sectors which reaped the most was medical technologies. Incredible leaps forward were made in the 90s. However, there was a problem. They were expensive, and very few people could afford them. The number who could afford them was cut even smaller due to the "flexible labor" policy that many corporations found themselves in favor of, with an ever rising number of citizens finding themselves without insurance. So we had incredible preventative and corrective medical procedures, but they were prohibitively expensive, and the insurance companies weren't going to help anyone out.

So, would you guys say its fair to reason that the internet, while it brought with it incredible developments, also really helped to ***** over America? Just curious on all of your opinions.

Edited, Thu Mar 3 15:47:49 2005 by scubamage

Gore only invented one of the internets, ask Bush.

True, but not quite. Actually, so many former soldiers used the GI bill to get an education that there wasn't a shortage of white collar or blue collar wrokers for jobs. The reason why a factory job isn't as lucrative as it used to be is because there is increased foreign competition as well as **** poor immigration policy. On top of that, there is a shrinking percentage of the populace who have college degrees. This trasnlates into economic stratification and the diminishment of the purchasing power on average per American citizen.. You learn these things when you actually listen to Greenspan, who kinda knows what he's talking about.

I'm not so sure about ruination, but there are definitely ongoing consequences.

Two that I can think of off the top:

1. Information gap between the wired and the wired-not. I don't know what the ultimate consequences will be, but further social division is probably not a good thing on the whole; and

2. Increasing physical isolation of the wired from the rest of the world. Sure, you can get information about anything, chat with people from everywhere... but you have less and less reason to leave your house, less reason to socialize, less impetus to get out and about and see and be seen. Again, I don't know what effect this will have in the long term, but humans are social critters. The extreme form of wiresolation has to have some deleterious effects, eventually.

Edited to add:
Of course there are other down sides as well...

Edited, Thu Mar 3 16:46:23 2005 by SamiraX

It all comes down to this really:
"Video killed the radio star"

I rest my case.

Bob Damn the interwebs!!

I'm not seeing anything in there that backs your casemn(admittendly I skimmed it rather quickly), but it looks to me like more people than ever are getting higher than ever educations. What I did see was...

"the proportion of 10th-graders expecting to complete a bachelor's as their highest degree has nearly doubled since 1980 and the proportion expecting to earn a graduate degree has more than doubled, with the potential of higher educational attainment in the years ahead."


There may have been a spike in college graduates after WW2 as a result of the GI Bill, but that represent an aberration, and not any sort of trend. Even if you take illegal immigrants into the equation I still can't see there being a decrease in the percentage of the population that has graduated college.


As for the stratification of wealth, that's easy to see. Since the 1970's wages for corporate executives have risen 40 times faster than those of top level labor jobs. Not surprising.

There are several theories on how to handle an automation society. If you are truly interested in the subject i recommend

http://www.checs.net/checs_00/presentations/nanotech.htm

Among other reads. The subject is a pet fascination of mine.