Red Shift part 1: “Fly, All Is Known!”
This is part 1 of a 2 part entry: I’m aware of the risks in announcing same and if part 2 doesn’t materialise I suggest you call me rude names in the comments box.
Dalton Conley’s Elsewhere, USA - a sociologist’s overview of “knowledge economy” workers - is not an especially good book, for the reasons laid out nicely in this NYT review. It’s thin, it’s anecdotal, it’s weirdly outdated - for instance, it diagnoses the economic bubble but seems to assume it won’t burst, despite it already having done so some months before publication time.
One metaphor did stick with me, though. Conley discusses the knowledge worker’s constant, nagging fear of being found out - exposed as a fraud. Of course there’s an immediate and obvious explanation for this, which is that most knowledge workers are indeed frauds who should be found out. But setting that possibility aside, Conley locates this anxiety in two broad areas.
One is what he calls the “economic red shift”: income inequality has been rising in the US (and some other) economies for decades. Conley points out that the bulk of this inequality is happening in the top tier of incomes - i.e. the gap between the 80th and 100th percentile is increasing more rapidly than that between the 60th and 80th, which is spreading more than between the 40th and 60th, and so on.
Conley observes that for an affluent individual in this situation both the less and the more well-off appear to be accelerating away, making the stakes of ‘success’ or ‘failure’ alike seem larger.
His other explanatory factor is what he sadly doesn’t call a “digital blue shift”: the well-documented way in which network and portable technologies pull previously compartmentalised elements of professional lives together - home/office, work/leisure, local/global, personal/professional etc. (Not everyone approves.)
Conley suggests this has a shattering effect on the individual but I don’t think I buy that. Instead I see technology as allowing us to network our own lives, activities, and interests, making them if not quite interdependent at least harder to separate. This makes us more resilient but also increases our awareness of systemic risk - the catastrophic impact a major life change could have. Hence, more stakes-raising and more anxiety.
Anyway, the mental health of white-collar America isn’t really what prompted me to start writing this. I was more attracted to the red shift metaphor as a description for what being a statistic in a power-law distribution (like income!) feels like. Which has direct relevance to how people experience - and design for - social applications.
To be continued…
