This article is adapted from a book titled A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age (Pink 2006). The author argues that, with the further advent of the information revolution, workers in the West will increasingly have to rely on conceptual skills associated with the right hemisphere of the brain rather than those associated with the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere, which features “computer-like logic, speed, and precision” and “handles sequence, literalness, and analysis” dominated the skills of knowledge workers of the last three decades. But its importance in the West is now undermined by outsourcing (“foreigners can do left-brain work cheaper”) and information technology (“technologies are proving they can outperform human left brains”). To find new sources of wealth creation, knowledge workers in the West have to switch on their right hemisphere, which “takes care of context, emotional expression, and synthesis” (Pink 2005). What is distinctive in this analysis is the dissociation of human consciousness into two distinct entities and the association of one to computers. This dissociation is even more evident in the illustration that accompanies the article (Pink 2006). The illustration can in fact be read as a most precise and direct expression of the spirit of networks. The left brain represents the critical stance of the spirit of network against the human condition during Fordism: bureaucracy, uniformity, impersonality, boredom (represented with a gray-blue monochrome), lack of personality and creativity (all workers look exactly the same), lack of flexibility (represented by straight lines, and the closed and suffocating office space). The right brain represents the new spirit that responds to the humanist critique: personal expression, liberation, creativity, joy, the blurring of leisure and work, exploration, and eroticization. Moreover, the historical shift in capitalism is represented here quite directly as the escape of people form the left brain to the right.
To the extent that network humans start to understand their self as such, they also begin to understand themselves in terms of network technology. Thus their personal qualities and characteristics take the form of the technology. This is evident, for example, in the case of connectionism as a prime and valued quality of the network human. Much of the power and prestige of the network human stems from her skills of what Boltanski and Chiapello term connexionism (2005, 362). Esther Dyson— described in Wired as “the most powerful woman in computing,” and “The intellectual of computer analysts”—is celebrated in particular for her networking skills. As she acknowledges, “Some people like to do the work. I just like putting people near each other” (Borsook 1993).
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age