The Next Layer

This table is taken from p. 19 of The Economics of Industrial Innovation
by Christopher Freeman and Luc Soete (1997 edition).

This is a graph by Jay Wright Forrester from his book Industrial Dynamics, showing the expected time (in weeks) that must be allotted for distribution from the factory to wholesalers, retails, and ultimately the public (on the right side of the graph) as well as the time to be allotted for advertising to be planned, executed and achieve its end, namely the creation of "effective demand" for the product (left side of the graph).

This is a table from Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan's article, "Countours of Crisis, Plus ça change, plus c'est pareil," available here: http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/255/

This is a table showing the five major technological revolutions identified by Carlota Perez.

This text is a first draft, trying to identify key topics for an inquiry into the new organisation of labour. It starts with a historic analysis and then explores the notion of Post-Fordism.Specific sections are devoted to cognitive capitalism, the creative industries, informational capitalism and the split between manual and mental labour. It ends with a modest proposal for an alternative path of development.

The most influential discourse on media art up to and around 1995 uncritically based itself on techno-science and the techno-imaginary which it creates. It offers a technologically deterministic interpretation of the relationship between societies and social change. This discourse was successful in institution building and is still very influential today, even though its foundations can shown to be problematic. This is the essence of my 2005 MA thesis on "Technological Determinism in Media Art" which I republish here due to difficulties with my old site.

We propose to develop a cooperative, open-content research format that will facilitate a detailed theoretical debate on the historical relations between technological and political transformations, culminating in studies of the present crisis of "informationalism" or the "network society." Building on existing concepts of the technological paradigm, we seek to enlarge the current horizons of research by establishing a chronological framework to track developments in the arts and the communications media as well as changing patterns of consumption, circulation, self-organization and political mobilization. The resulting more broadly integrated model of technopolitics will allow individual researchers to develop their own applications of shared concepts and resources, thus contributing to an informational commons and an enriched public sphere.