It may well be that in the long run the media convergence made possible by ever increasing bandwidth will allow us to overcome some of the very limitations of current technologies. The physician treating an FLK long distance, the technician who can no longer smell the odor or feel the consistency of paper pulp cooking in vats in a remote plant, may eventually get those all-important sensory date re-introduced into their work. This would be a tremendous step towards overcoming one of the major (and often unrecognized) drawbacks of automatization: the divorce from the primary experience (Zuboff 1988).

It looks like in the future true multimedia will finally replace the anemic version of the world that the lens provided by current technology gives us, not only by enabling us to design immersive environments that engage all of our senses, but also by actually augmenting the human sensory repertoire.

5.   Societal Trends that Shape the Lifescapes of the Future

5.1. Blurring the Boundaries

As the lifescapes of the future are formed up in a confluence of technological and societal innovations, we see not only radical shifts in technology but also emergent trends in society that interact with these technologies, shape them, and, in turn, are heavily affected by them.

The most pervasive of these societal trends may well be the blurring of well-established, time-honored boundaries that used to delineate our lives, such as the boundaries between nations, between generations, between work and family, between lay people and professionals, suppliers and customers, workers and supervisors, learners and teachers. Concepts of property are beginning to shift – on the Internet it’s no longer clear what’s yours and what’s mine, what I have rights to and what not. Notions of privacy, of intimacy, of loyalty, ways of establishing trust -- many of the things that we might consider the glue that holds society together are beginning to undergo significant displacements and redefinitions.

Out of this blurring of the old boundaries come shifts in identity -- the identity of individuals, of organizations, of nations, at the same time menacing and hopeful; shifts in who people are loyal to; shifts in the distribution of power and authority. It is to this complex set of reverberations within our social networks, whose origins go way back in history and prehistory but have been tremendously amplified by the new technologies, that we will now turn our attention.

5.1.1. What nationality? 

But would you like to become a member of an online nation? Check out nation1.net or Cyber Yugoslavia at www.juga.com. Want to have a virtual presence in Belize? For a hundred dollars a month you can get a permanent address, a phone, fax and email service, mail forwarding, bill paying, and a variety of other services which allow you to be physically anywhere in the world while virtually, and for all but a small circle of insiders, you remain in the same place. Clearly, where you are, and maybe even who you are, is becoming malleable in unforeseen ways. How much of a country can become a commercial free zone before that little chunk of territory is no longer part of the country? How many of its citizens can live elsewhere and vote on the fate of a country? The Dominican Republic is thinking about extending voting rights to Dominicans living in the US. That would make New York City the Dominican Republic’s second largest voting precinct. In that case, “national” interests and the interests of people actually living in the Dominican Republic may diverge substantially.

At the same time, the political pressures of a global economy lead to ever-increasing blurring of national boundaries. At this time, the first page of a German passport says, in 12 languages, “European Union, Federal Republic of Germany, Passport” in that order. The countries of Europe, having fought for centuries to solidify their national borders, have now joined together in the European Union, thereby establishing a market that will reach twice the size of the American market in a few years (when more of the former Eastern block countries are admitted). In the Americas, NAFTA has immensely increased commerce between the United States, Canada and Mexico, even as Central and South American countries are steadily working towards either establishing trading blocks of their own or joining with already existing crossnational markets. The nation states, forged in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, that waged wars against each other, defended borders, established rules and regulations for crossing borders, taxed each others’ goods, demanded passports and visa for people and reams of border crossing documents for goods, are now involved in complex readjustments that make national borders, and maybe national identities, increasingly irrelevant. There must be large numbers of people now who carry multiple passports. Nowhere is this struggle between the old order of controlled national boundaries and the new one of population and information flow more apparent than in the US/Mexican border region where US border personnel attempt in vain to stem the tide of Mexican immigrants while at the same time US regulations and regulatory personnel increasingly shape the political and economic face of the area on both sides of the border.

So we see the old order of nation states stressed severely under the demands of a global economy. In the economic/political sphere, one may perceive that as a logical extension of prior trading and exchange relationships. But that is not the case in the military arena. As recent events have shown, the old order is extremely vulnerable to an enemy who doesn’t play by the old rules. Now the enemy may not have a nation state base at all, but operate from ideological or religious conviction, with more similarity to Middle Age Crusades to the Holy Lands than modern warfare. When the enemy doesn’t play by the old rules, when the Geneva Convention’s distinction between military and civilian is treated as irrelevant, the dividing lines between foreign and domestic, cyber and physical, criminal, terrorist and military become blurred and ambiguous. National security operations, designed to operate within a nation state framework, are scrambling to reorganize themselves, as the “battlefields” and “fronts” evaporate and the distinction between war and peace is blurred to the vanishing point.

5.1.2. Technology comes home 

How many members of your family use fax, cell phone, pager, email, VCR, networked computers? Are you reading email at 6am, getting paged at the dinner table, and hooking up to a company videoconference from your vacation spot? Are you retrieving faxes from Europe at five in the morning, calling Asia at midnight and emailing your family at lunch? Calling the plumber while taking your coffee break? Where is the boundary between work and home life now?

That the advent of new technologies has a major impact on families is not new. People have adopted new artifacts of various sorts since time immemorial, adapting them to their needs and, in turn, adapting themselves to what the new gadgets made possible. But now something is happening that changes the very fabric of the social institution we call the family. 

In a study of the changing work- and lifestyles of families living in high-technology Silicon Valley in California, a group of anthropologists from the California State University at San Jose have been studying how technology has changed the life of knowledge workers. [13]  In these families where both parents work and children have demanding academic, social, and recreational schedules, elaborate monitoring and coordinating via cell phones, message machines and pagers is the rule. Under the pressures of a bulging work day and an ever-expanding work week, the lives of these ‘informated’ families have been invaded by a host of interconnected communication devices: cell phones, pagers, VCRs, fax machines, palm pilots, email, voicemail, shared calendars and schedules – you name it. Kids coming home from school page their mother. Mom from her car phone checks on kids who have just come home from school. Johnny pages his dad to find out if he can pick him up from soccer practice. Dad, on his travels, supervises math home work from his hotel room. In these households, communication technologies are crucial for monitoring and coordinating the family’s daily activities and schedules.

It is true that knowledge workers in Silicon Valley are (still) a special case; it is also true that people have used computers and telephones for years. What is new, however, is that these devices have now reached not only a new complexity and interconnectedness but also a critical density that makes them increasingly indispensable for running the day-to-day ‘business’ of families. Many of us try to hold out for a while but in some ways all of us are beginning to experience the effects of the increasing penetration of our daily lives by communication devices.

5.1.3. Intimate connections 

When asked about the effects of the new technologies on their households, most people mention early on a tremendous impact on family communication. Members of extended families now use them to coordinate activities ranging from joint baseball outings to picnics to weddings. They create networks of connectedness by making and sending videotapes and emailing distant relatives. Family histories are recorded and distributed. My dental hygienist who is from India told me how her marriage to a systems engineer in Silicon Valley had been arranged by long-distance conference calls between the  two families.

Increased communication and mutual monitoring is true not only for family members residing in the same household (“couldn’t we go to Pizza Hut for dinner?”) but also for geographically remote members. Extended families keep a spreadsheet of joint income and expenses, some exchange recipes, some distribute gardening advice, some coordinate vacation schedules and then broadcast their latest vacation pictures.

Several years ago Phil Agre asked subscribers to his newsletter to describe how computers and email have affected their family life. It is worth listening to some typical responses:

A Canadian expatriate writes how her far-flung family keeps in touch:

“My mom who is almost 69 got in touch with at least a dozen online relatives all over the world from Ohio to Ontario and Israel, and we now all keep in touch. Very cool. She also reads the Toronto Globe and Mail online and gets transcripts of the CBC evening news online which she distributes over email. Otherwise, in Southern California, you'd never know Canada exists, except for maybe Wayne Gretsky on the LA Kings.”

And another characteristic response:

Every Sunday at 6:30 pm, the Forman family sits around the kitchen table in their home, in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, to discuss the details of the coming week. “My week doesn’t have a beginning or an end,” Forman says. “I live the startup life: I travel a lot, and I carry a bunch of cell phones plus an Internet pager. This family meeting allows us to come together and update one another about what’s on tap for the week ahead. Our family meetings are like my company’s project-update sessions. … Nothing – not friends, phone calls, or TV – interrupts them. We take turns telling one another what’s on our schedule for the coming week and what’s been nagging at us.” [14]

The parents in families like this one have very little non-committed time that they can spend as ‘quality time’ for themselves or with each other, and especially with their children. They feel the need for methods that help with efficient time management. As a consequence, they eagerly adopt anything that allows them to feel efficient at home as well as at work. Since there are no edges to their jobs, thinking about how to organize work imperceptibly shades into thinking about how to organize family life. Work schedules and family schedules become integrated and of a piece.

Some time ago, in the course of a research project on corporate leadership in a Fortune 50 company, I attended a series of Covey seminars on that topic. [15] I became interested in the case of a young manager who had been struggling with the fact that she was short-changing her husband and small children because of the heavy demands of her job. The seminars taught her, she said enthusiastically, to set the proper priorities, to ‘begin with the end in mind’, ‘put first things first’ and to ‘think win/win.’ As part of this rethinking she felt more justified to say no to certain work-related demands for travel, but she also began to negotiate at home for a more explicit understanding of who in the family was doing what, what their joint priorities were, and what she would be responsible for. This was clearly energizing for her and probably had beneficial effects both at home and in the workplace. However, a year later, she reported that with a recent company reorganization she had been unable to maintain what she called ‘”he sane course” and was back into frenzied activity at work as well as fire fighting at home.

It appears that these kinds of transformations work only if there is institutional and organizational support for the change, something that is not likely to happen if a single individual wants to work differently. Unless there is a systemic transformation of the entire organization, it may well happen, as in the example above, that employees eventually leave the very company that originally sponsored their exposure to these management techniques.

The integration of work and family life under a single set of organizing principles is at the core of many corporate seminars. On examination, however, it turns out that many of these programs advocate a one-sided extension of efficient work practices to home and family life and completely ignore the possibilities of importing principles for harmonious living from family life to the arena of work. We may be seeing a colonization of home life by a work mentality rather than a true integration of both.

As work and family life struggle to accommodate to each other, new issues of responsibility, monitoring, and privacy arise. One of the things that are changing is the extent to which family members are accountable to each other for what they are doing at any given point in time. What activities should be communicated to whom, what type of progress made or failure encountered are they expected to announce to whom, what tasks have they carried out and what responsibilities have they shirked in the course of the day -- all these become hot issues when one family member can say to another, “why didn’t you page me?”

Computers, cell phones, pagers and other communication devices are often handed down by family members or given as welcome presents on family occasions. These gifts are not without implications. While presents have always played a major role in family games, these new devices define in new ways the extent of personal freedom and mobility, extending the degree to which parents and children, friends and relatives can exercise access to and control over each other’s schedules. The eight-year old paging her parent when she gets home from school lets them know that she has arrived safely, but also has access to her parent’s attention away from home in ways no eight-year old before her time ever did.

While the new technologies provide freedom, they also, at the very same time, provide for the possibility of greater supervision and monitoring than ever before. There arises a new visibility. Once it is possible to know where our loved ones are at any time of the day or night, do they really want us to know? Do we really want to know? Is it good for us to know? There are privacy issues here that are deeply cultural. What parts of my life can you have access to if you are my friend, my lover, my child, my employer, my physician? We are straying here into territories where we don’t know yet how our norms for privacy and our rules of accessibility have to be renegotiated. The old family game of control and resistance to control is now being played out via pagers and email, but the game remains. The question is: how are we going to play it in the future? Can we play it differently?

5.1.6. Boundary management 

There is no doubt that well-established boundaries are being breached by the new communication technologies. Equally clearly, however, families and workplaces are developing strategies for resisting the constant monitoring that digital devices permit. With ever-increasing availability and visibility, people feel the need to set boundaries, create barriers, fence off areas of their lives so that they are not universally open for inspection and colonization by anyone. In the workplace, we see the rise of such institutions as ‘quiet Monday’, a meetingless day with big chunks of uninterruptible time dedicated to writing and thinking. Within the family as well, boundary maintenance is an issue for individuals attempting to guard against being taken over by the demands of the other side.

Technologies that bind family members together can just as easily be used to avoid each other. People do turn off their cell phones, don’t turn on their car phone, monitor caller id to see who is at the other end, and selectively delete their email or voicemail to create personal space and some feeling of control. As a consequence, we now see family squabbles around battery power running out in pagers and forgetting to turn on cell phones -- contemporary versions of time-honored excuses.

This blurring of the boundaries between work and home is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it gives (some) people the freedom to arrange their lives in a way that fits their needs better and is more satisfying to them; but on the other, people fight desperately to maintain some semblance of order and predictability as the pressures at the office combine with those of a hectic family life. Some give in and adjust – they become high-tech road warriors who ‘manage’ their family life remotely as effectively as their work life. Others create boundaries, new institutions, new no-trespassing signs, individually or collectively. Some become hyper-connected. Some make new rules that renegotiate the interface between family and work – balancing the demands of children and homelife on the one side with those of work on the other. At home, many families work out explicit rules about technology use and the conditions under which work, scheduling issues, and other technology-generated interruptions may intrude into family life. For some, dinner time is off limits for answering pages both for adults and teenagers. Some have clearly scheduled "Daddy is working now" times. Couples try to manage by alternating bedtime responsibilities.

We see families developing conventions about such things as when to have their pagers on, when it is alright to interrupt a parent working at home, and what to do when Mommy is at home but not available for homework. These parents often find it very difficult to make clear to their children what their status is.  As they hook into their virtual office or classroom from their kitchen, living room or home office, all markers of transition are gone. No good-bye rituals, no business clothes, no briefcase or backpack. In t-shirts and jeans, they appear totally available and interruptible to their children as well as to household help. In desperation, people try to create boundaries by manipulating the technologies and reinventing some of the rituals and props (like wearing an “I’m working” cap) to help police the boundaries between these activities.

The relationship between worklife and homelife is clearly stressed. There are no fixed rules yet for how to deal with these issues, either in the sphere of work or at home. New social contracts and agreements are in the process of being worked out. Standards are only in the process of evolving and what will finally emerge is by no means clear.

The all-important questions of how much solitude/loneliness or connectedness/overcrowding we shall have, what shall be normal and expected, what shall be privilege, what shall be considered substandard, these kinds of issues have not yet been negotiated at the beginning of the 21^st century. We have the new technologies, but the societal rules which allow them to be domesticated and adapted to human life have not yet appeared (Arthur 2002). As technology designers we are grappling to adapt the new possibilities to life as it exists now. As a society, we are in a period of intense experimentation about how to conduct ourselves with these new toys, in families as well as in workplaces.

5.1.7. Is the family crumbling? 

Over and over we hear complaints that the family is crumbling with all that technology, that people’s lives are fragmented, that they feel alienated. I suppose that’s true in many ways. Actually, if one looks at the record of historical complaints, the family has always been crumbling for one reason or another, according to one type of expert or another. However, the family is an extraordinarily resilient institution that has used each societal innovation to reinvent itself, possibly gaining even greater strength. The automobile? did it destroy the family? No, it added another place for courting, provided a source of family pride, of economic mobility. Television, women at work, birth control pills were all going to destroy the family. But the family is alive and well. What is changing is the way it does its business: how it gets people together, defines joint projects, reorganizes the architecture of its living quarters, manages the division of labor.

Technology has added a new dimension. Familial relationships with computers are complex. Even in less informated families computers unavoidably make inroads, raising questions like: Who is the expert here? Who can be pointed to with pride by other family members? Do lines of authority and power shift in families where who holds knowledge and expertise in computers and communication technology is changing? Who becomes a ‘geek’, a ‘nerd’ in these families? It is interesting that these terms can be used pejoratively as well as proudly about one’s offspring or elders. Who is proud of hating computers? Often it is the younger members who are most savvy, but not necessarily.

A youngster writes (in the Agre Survey. Original spelling):

“Computers are a very complex character in our family. I love computers. Mom hates them, and thinks she is really lucky because she has never touched them. My father is tired of hearing my stories about computers .... you know, those are matters you discuss freely with you compu-friends. When I am with my friends somewhere, the subject to discuss is related to computers. I get rid of those persons who hate computers.

Computers are the most important thing in my life. I spend many hours with them in a day. First, I keep up the computers at school. When I get home, I try to spend all the time for computers the axams let me. I have to help my dissappointed father to use his software. And, as if this were not enough, I solve the computer problems of my friends who are all the day asking why do they have to have more than 1MB for running DOOM.”

The new technologies are subtly changing people’s relationships with each other, including their expectations about what they should hear and when. Now that email allows far-flung family members, friends and co-workers to be connected as closely and as frequently as they might want, we are faced with a new set of choices: Who do I want to tell what about myself? What level of detail is expected? What are newsworthy items? I suspect that intra-family communication and alignment are actually much strengthened by the new possibilities. When it took six weeks for a letter exchange across the ocean, I used to write a letter to my parents every six weeks or so, with a level of detail dictated by that time span. Now, with Instant Messenger, I may talk to my daughter in Switzerland several times a day, with infinitely more disclosure given and expected. Is the family crumbling? Hardly!

5.1.8. Shifting lines of power and authority 

With global connectivity and universal access to previously inaccessible kinds of information, our relationship to former sources of privileged, authoritative knowledge is changing. Professionals such as teachers, doctors, lawyers, bosses and, yes, parents, have been holding positions of power in society for a long time because they had access to information others didn’t have. In many situations it is no longer the case that one party holds more or better information than the other, because there are now many more ways in which to become knowledgeable. As a consequence, we are now beginning to see subtle but pervasive changes in the relationship between laypersons and professionals, students and teachers, workers and managers. In the old society power came from hoarding information. In the new society, power and prestige come from sharing it!

Consider what is happening in the medical profession. A few years ago, a woman diagnosed with breast cancer would go to her doctor to find out what was in store for her. Some might go to a library to begin the painstaking process of assembling bits and pieces of information from arcane journals, but the majority of women simply would rely on their physician to tell them what their prognosis was and what they should do.

Today, many of the physicians I have talked to say that increasingly a different scene plays out in their offices. By the second visit, their patient has already checked into the net (not surprising since 50% of Internet hits go to healthcare sites). She has become familiar with the bewildering array of opinions, trial results, and experimental treatment courses offered in her geographic area and perhaps across the nation. She will have talked to her friends in person and by email, will have found out who else suffers from the same affliction and what their experience has been like. She will have accumulated the collective wisdom of her social circle, not only about strictly medical issues but also about such things as which doctors favor which approach or what hospitals are more patient-conscious than others. Most likely, she will have located support groups consisting of other women in her area who suffer from the same condition. She has begun to think about what is reliable information out there, what is trustworthy and what is quackery, and what potential courses of action are open to her.

By the time she sees her doctor again she is likely to treat him or her much more as a consultant who should help her steer through this sea of information than the godlike pronouncer of her fate. It is true, of course, that there are still many patients who prefer to be told what to do. But as any practicing physician will tell you, this majority is shrinking. As access to the net becomes universal, it will be shrinking even more rapidly.

And there are other technology-based trends that support such changes. The very artifacts and technologies that have developed through the centuries to reinforce our conventional patient/physician relationship are being modified, as are the practices surrounding them. Most important among these may be the slow but inevitable automation of patient charts.

Consider what can happen when your medical record is computerized. Currently, patients, at least in the United States, have little or no access to their records. What anybody has ever said about them or done to them, whatever results have come from examinations and lab tests, is buried in a bulging paper file that is handled only by medical care providers. Patients do not get to look at it, much less study it in depth. And though legally the record belongs to the patient, to copy all the little lab slips, partial entries and illegible handwriting is well-nigh impossible.

Once the medical record is in electronic form, however, there is little reason why doctors cannot give patients a copy of their record on a disk. Back home on their own computers, patients could search for patterns. Is there something to the fact that my cholesterol level is lower after trips to the tropics? John has gained five pounds. Is that a common pattern for him or highly unusual? Patients might even start to annotate their charts (blasphemy in the current system), recording information that they believe to be significant. At the next visit, patient and doctor might be able to assess the current state of the patient’s health with vastly more information than before.

There will be another important effect. As an active contributor to the diagnosis and with a deep understanding of the implications of varying forms of treatment, the patient is also much more likely to stick with the chosen treatment. Research has shown that at the present time 60% of all prescribed medications in the US are either inappropriately used or not used at all and around 125,000 Americans die each year because of failure to take prescribed medications. Increased compliance generated by active patient participation in the decision making process might have far-reaching consequences, not only for patients’ well-being, but could well result in substantial savings for the health care system as well. At this time, consumers’ failure to follow directions on prescription drugs results in thousands of hospitalizations costing an estimated $20 billion a year in the United States alone. Where patients become actively involved in data collection and diagnosis, these costs might be reduced substantially.

Eventually, in the not too distant future, technology might lead to even more transformative changes. Imagine: as you walk into the examination room, your doctor is not thumbing through the chart in his hands or looking at his little computer screen that is, incidentally, turned away from you so you can’t see what he is looking at. No, as you walk in, he is pulling up your record on a ‘live wall’, a large display of your medical information, complete with graphs that track relevant data – like how have your blood pressure and weight changed through the years (and is there a relationship)? Has your bone density fallen off when you stopped taking estrogens? What patterns are visible in your cholesterol levels -- the displays of data being tailored to your current and long-range concerns. Via the web, clicking on key icons would provide access to the literature on what is known about worrisome findings to any depth desired, from quick summaries to reading the original articles, to looking at the underlying data, and it would indicate e-paths to experts who are open to being consulted on those issues. If we think of knowledge as information made actionable, such a process truly transforms the inert data of the medical record into knowledge that is shared and usable by both patient and physician.

In that type of medical ecology, patient and physician together explore the space of symptoms and illness events and what they mean, what kinds of consequences different actions and interventions might have, and for what kinds of procedures consensus exists and where it is shaky, so that in the long run health care providers would become expert consultants, navigators and guides through the maze of specialized information, rather than functioning as privileged decision makers about the management of the patient’s condition.

Though few physicians keep complete computer records for their patients and even fewer give access to those records to their patients, this might change. Many future scenarios are possible. But it might well be the case that authoritative knowledge will again acquire a ‘social life’. No longer resident in the physician alone, it could be constructed collaboratively, with truly active participation by the patient, the care-providing medical team, and the patient’s family and social network.

Similar transformations may soon be occurring in the legal profession and a number of others. Apart from the arcane language in which our lawyers and lawmakers express what we may or may not do, one way in which those caught by the law are excluded from active participation is the sheer magnitude of inaccessible paper-based records. The American legal system is drowning in paper and I imagine other countries are not much better off. For example, one civil court division in Los Angeles receives an average of 4,000 documents each day. Now, what would happen if litigants had easy access to their own records and to those of others who might constitute precedents for their case? It has been argued that electronic filing of judicial records would democratize a justice system that today is rigidly controlled by the keepers of arcane language and procedures.

In the future, large, shared interactive information displays that are accessible to multiple participants will provide the technological infrastructure for generating conversations that fundamentally change the distribution of power and authority in the new world. They will provide part of the infrastructure that allows people to explore complex events and relationships jointly, leading not only to patient-centered health care but also to learner-centered learning in and outside of our learning institutions.

5.2. Population Movements – Real and Virtual 

Another major arena in which important changes are happening concerns the characteristics of our workforces and consumer populations. While there is much thought given to emerging technologies and how they are likely to affect our lives, little attention is paid to the ways in which these technologies interact with and often are even enabled by, ongoing changes in society. Our social world simply does not look anymore like it did even twenty years ago, but living in the midst of it, we tend to pay little heed. Let’s focus on two particularly impactful trends: first, the redistribution of populations that we are currently witnessing, and then the consequences of the fact that we can expect to live substantially longer than any other group of people in history (and prehistory).

What has become known as ‘the war for talent’ has generated both a real and a virtual flow of highly qualified technical specialists from other countries into the Silicon Valleys and Techno Gulches of the world. In the United States, high-technology companies like Microsoft, Intel, Cisco and Motorola have thousands of foreigners working for them on specialized visas, and each year Congress increases the number of such visas substantially. Add to that outsourcing, the ‘virtual migration’ of hundreds of thousands of programmers and systems engineers that become employees of these companies but remain physically located in their own country, and we can readily see that we are looking at a significant geographical redistribution of competencies, people, work, loyalties and resources.

The high-technology economy has generated particular kinds of population movements which go beyond what we have always known in the past, such as movements of refugees displaced by wars or the seasonal migrations of agricultural workers. Reverse migration, for example, long known as associated with South-of-the-Border workers returning home when the economy in the host land restricts, is taking on interesting novel features. Christine Avenarius, a German ethnographer who has studied relatively affluent and skilled Taiwanese technologists in Southern California, notes that these immigrants have been particularly well-positioned to take advantage of truly global economic opportunities, often set­tling families in the US while taking advantage of superior investment and employment opportu­nities in Taiwan and other parts of Asia. The objectives for this practice are the status and security of res­idency and possible citizenship in the United States, but most of all the desire to offer children an American education. In Taiwan, very strict and high­ly time-consuming education, coupled with demanding, difficult college entrance exams, permit only a fraction of high school students to enter college. Added to this is the threat that the family’s young adult males might be conscripted into military service at eighteen, factors that prompt many Taiwanese families to settle in the United States [17]. When heads of households find superior economic opportunities in Taiwan and other parts of Asia, they may return, while leaving their families in the U.S. “The access of immigrants to space-and time-compressing technology makes travel and contacts between the two countries more accessible and convenient than ever before and provides a con­tinuous link between people in both places,” says Christine Avenarius. But many of these immigrant scientists and engineers find better job offers and business opportunities back in Asia at some point, so they pack their bags and go back to Asia, leaving their fam­ilies behind. The result­ing commutes of men between Taiwan and the United States has led to the phenomena of ‘astronaut husbands’, husbands who travel with high fre­quency and speed between two worlds, and of ‘parachute families’, nuclear families who are dropped into the United States by the providing husband. [18]

Since the new communication technologies have made it possible for many kinds of work to be carried out remotely, more and more people are less and less tied to a company-defined workplace. Instead, they may be able to live at a location they love while they do what they had to do before in a place they disliked. New communities are springing up in the rural areas of the Rocky Mountain and at the seashores, where people are connected to their work via data links, video conferencing, email and phone links and, maybe, a once-a week two-day commute to their office back in Los Angeles, but otherwise are able to enjoy the advantages of a world-class skiing area and the pleasures of rural life. Interestingly, for the first time in the last century, we are seeing a reversal of the rural to urban migration in some (only some!) parts of the United States. Some of these new communities explicitly cater to young professionals who want to provide a healthy environment for their children, while both parents are engaged in high-pressure technical and managerial jobs.

Technology-generated migration is also becoming more frequent across national boundaries. The State Department recently estimated that 2.5 million US citizens live abroad and while there are no figures on how many of those are telecommuters, one can easily predict that this number will be rising at a steep pace as more people begin to realize that they don’t have to breathe the smog of inner cities and face the stresses of physical commutes. Countries with desirable living conditions are beginning to exploit this lucrative market. In the small community in Costa Rica where I live part of the time, almost all real estate transactions along the coast involve Europeans and Americans, most of whom expect to remain actively tied to their business ventures back home. So Nicaragua and Belize have started up ambitious competitive programs to attract foreigners and Costa Rica is talking about increasing the minimum income it requires of foreigners who want to live in that country permanently, in order to attract a type of expatriate that is a bit wealthier and more sophisticated than the formerly typical retiree living on social security.

As boundaries between work, home, and school become more and more permeable through telecommuting and distance learning, the most important change in society may well be the one that allows people to live lives where working, learning, recreation, and family life are again integrated in a meaningful fashion. In the future, more and more people will not only live but also work where they feel at ease, which are increasingly places where they can forget about daily commuter stress, where they meet interesting people, where they can shape their lives and their relationships individually, living in landscapes with the right climate and recreational opportunities. So living and working may merge again, functionally and geographically, in a tailor-made manner, and this will happen especially where people feel well - in small villages and country towns, at seashores or in the mountains, or in distinctive city-neighborhoods.

5.3.  Extension of Life Expectancy and the Rectangular Survival Curve 

Take a look at the famous rectangular survival curve for a graphical illustration of the significance of that extension (Laslett 1990). In the early 1900’s, there was a very high rate of infant mortality which shows up on the curve as a steep drop right after birth. After that, throughout adolescence and adulthood, people died at a steady rate. In other words, even if you made it beyond the infant stage, your chances of dying before reaching old age were quite high.

By contrast, the modern curve increasingly approaches a rectangular shape. That is to say that most people can expect to live to a fairly advanced age. As a matter of fact, in contrast to earlier times, now most of the dying is done by old people. I find it personally poignant that this changes the meaning of death. Most people now are not torn away in the middle of a productive life. It was a terrible tragedy when, before antibiotics, my mother died at the age of 34, leaving five small children behind. By the time I die at the age of 100, my children will be in their 70’s, my grandchildren in their 40’s.

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The aging of our populations has become a major issue on the societal as well as on the personal level -- not only in Japan, Germany and the United States (who have some of the oldest populations) but in developing countries as well. Public discussion rages over such questions as: Who will pay for upholding the already strained net of social benefits? How much healthcare should society provide for old people? How long a retirement period are people entitled to before they are expected to die?

When life expectancy is 75, it is one thing if the majority of your country’s working population retires at age 65; but it is quite another if life expectancy goes up to 85 or 100.

5.3.1. The Emergence of the Third Age 

What we are seeing is a fundamental reconceptualization of the stages of life that has far-reaching effects on issues of agency and identity. In the past, people thought of themselves as traversing three stages in life: the first was one of learning during infancy, childhood and the years of formal education. The second was a period of achievement where one did one’s life’s work. Retirement ushered in the final stage which, after a few years spent fishing and knitting, all too quickly ended in infirmity and death.

At this time, the straight-line model of the stages of life from birth to death no longer holds. At least not for increasing parts of the population in the United States and I suspect other countries as well. As people become more and more aware of the fact that they are likely to have a significant post-employment period in their lives, a period that for some may last longer than the time they were gainfully employed, these notions are fundamentally disturbed. Peter Laslett, the British sociologist and demographer, called this phenomenon the emergence of the ‘Third Age’. It has been argued that the emergence of the Third Age will be one of the most important of all societal trends in the 21^st century on all levels of society, from the personal to the political, economic and cultural.

For many people, the Third Age is a time for new careers -- for pay or not; a time to turn hobbies into part-time businesses; a time to re-devote energy to family and community; a time to travel and to take on civic and honorary duties. Theodore Roszak has argued that it is this group that will produce new spiritual leaders and the main guardians of cultural capital. They are the volunteer docents in museums and nature parks, they are the organizers around community initiatives, they are the people who wage campaigns for the public good that Second Agers have no time for (Roszak 1998). Demographers have shown that there are now a substantial number of people in the Third Age in all industrialized countries, and the trend for Third World countries is to go in the same direction. Roszak also talks about the emergence of a national corps of volunteer caregivers, increased care giving by men, more Third Agers holding public office, “true elders’ sharing their wisdom and experience and less emphasis on material values. As he points out, on a global level we have simply never had a senior population of this size, or this educated, before (Roszak 1998).

5.3.2. Changing Life Courses and Career Patterns 

With a long life in front of them, young people are beginning to see their life’s course not as a linear progression from school to job to retirement, but as a winding, branching path with multiple potential detours into promising parts of their lifescapes map. They no longer see themselves on a straight, uninterrupted time line from first job to retirement. Rather they anticipate periods in their lives that they might devote to other pursuits, blocks of time where they might explore new careers, go after adventures, pursue educational opportunities, or devote dedicated time to family or community. The conventional goal of advancing in one’s job and reaching company-defined success is being replaced by a view of multiple opportunities and a focus that skips between a regular job, trekking in the Himalayas, getting an independent business set up, starting a family and devoting time to meaningful volunteer work.

People now take ‘sabbaticals’ or ‘time out’. They think and talk about breaks from their regular money-making activities in order to figure out what they want to do next. Rethinking their lifescapes often involves learning new skills, travel to foreign places, and trying out different life styles. Sometimes they return to their old work with new ideas, but frequently they make a radical career shift into a different field. On a plane the other day I met a 42-year-old woman who was going to a sales meeting for, as she said, “very small vineyards that make very fancy wines.” Was she from a family of vintners? No. Actually, until three years ago, she and her husband were successful IBM executives who decided to hang it all up and do something that really excites their passion. They took early retirement, bought a vineyard and learned how to make wine – now leading the kind of life they had always dreamed about. This is not an unusual picture, especially among highly paid, technologically sophisticated knowledge workers who are looking for more meaning in their lives than what they get from climbing the corporate ladder. As people look forward to an active, healthy later life, they mix periods of ‘retirement’ to pursue personal interests with active career-building throughout life, rather than waiting until they have retired from their primary career.

We are seeing job changes and career flips with increasing frequency. People often pursue multiple careers, sometimes sequentially, sometimes concurrently. At the same time, the boundaries between retirement and non-retirement are disappearing. Actually it looks like he baby-boom generation refuses to retire, [21] while young people ‘retire’ at age 30 and then switch to a new career two years later, the motto being “retire early and often.” It is, then, rather possible that much of the alarm over depletion of social security funds when the bulge of baby boomers reaches retirement age, will turn out to be unfounded. Most of them may never retire at all. They may quit their jobs, but they’ll continue as part of the active work force. This clearly will constitute one of the driving forces in the deep reaching restructuring of roles and responsibilities in the society of the future.

5. 4. Working in the New Economy 

We have seen that people now tend to construct a non-linear career path for themselves, a trend that will probably hold for quite a while. The deep significance of this is that it foreshadows a wholesale identity shift for many people. Who they will be in the future (and therefore who they are now) is different for them as compared to earlier generations. They see different options for themselves and that produces a different self image. The newly graduated electrical engineer who just started her first job at the telephone company sees her life course quite different from that of her father who started at the same company 35 years ago and still works there. And she sees it also quite different from that of her mother who, after raising four kids to school age, worked as a data entry person at the same company until she got laid off ten years ago. This reconceptualization of career paths and life courses has its roots not only in the extended life expectancy we talked about earlier, but also, to a considerable extent, in the period of ruthless corporate downsizing during the 80s and 90s when people became deeply suspicious of corporate motivation.

At least potentially, and at least for some part of the population, work life becomes riddled with time out from paid work. At the same time, the ‘leisure period’ of retirement becomes permeated by work. I heard a 62 year old say the other day: “I retired from IBM in ’91 and opened my own design studio. I went to Intel in ’95 and when I retire next year …” He went on to talk about his plans to open a free-standing consulting business, assisting start-ups to bring their products to market. For people like him, ‘retirement’ clearly does not mean stopping work, not even stopping paid work.

Two of the driving forces, work and leisure, are becoming harder to distinguish. This country has a huge mythology surrounding the work ethic. Now we’re creating a leisure ethic. People take their work home and their leisure to the office. Work is no longer segregated but has become a way of life. It determines people’s identity. Jobs are no longer just jobs; they are lifestyle options. Corporate recruiters have promoted this conception of work with job advertisements that promise challenge, wide experiences, opportunities for travel and relentless personal development.

5.4.1. What Workplace?

With increasing technologization, it has finally become possible to divorce much work from the factory floor, the office and the on-site meeting room. People now work at home, at satellite work centers, in the car, on airplanes, on vacation -- but less and less in workplaces as we used to know them. Call it telework, telecommuting, home work, distance working, electronic cottage, or flexiplace. This is clearly a major feature of the global economy wherever sufficient communication networks are in place.

As a consequence, more people work where they want to live, hooked up electronically to their market, their colleagues, and their databases,. Peter Drucker said a long time ago that we need to move work to where people are, rather than people to where the work is, as was the case during the industrial age. True. The massive factory relocations that located workplaces at sites where qualified (and often cheap) labor was available was only the first step in this process. The second step is to connect people and work, no matter where they are.

If you travel in some of the scenically beautiful rural areas of the western United States, or in the seaboard regions of the tropics, you find new kinds of settlements. There refugees from city life have found ways of doing their work long distance. You might meet two women doing investment counseling from the wilderness of the Osa peninsula in Costa Rica or a couple from Los Angeles who escaped to a fabulous ski region in Utah with their three children. They say they take turns commuting to their software engineering jobs in Los Angeles, an average of two days a week. The rest of the time they work by phone, fax and email from their home offices in their mountain home. Doing one’s work while not being ‘at work’ has become increasingly realistic for more and more people.

Some companies, especially in highly competitive areas like Silicon Valley, want their employees and contractors to spend as much of their life at the workplace as possible. They provide elaborate R&R facilities on their premises. Exercise centers, volleyball courts and subsidized gourmet cafeterias are quite common. So are offices with futons and armchairs. A design firm in Kansas City has set up a tent with a pad, alarm clock, sleeping bag, eye shadow, earplugs and a tape player for music, so hard-pressed employees can take a nap or stay overnight.

As a matter of fact, for some people the workplace has taken on many of the characteristics of home. For many a dedicated knowledge worker, work has become the site of social life. And many companies encourage that development by providing flexible work hours and making the workplace a desirable place to be. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild suggests in a recent book that sometimes couples are working long hours not so much because their jobs require it, but because they want to escape their hectic home life with its complex physical demands and emotional entanglements. The workplace has become their community center – where they work out, get a massage, connect with their bowling partners, and go to parties. It is a refuge where they get some of their most significant emotional rewards Hochschild 1997).

But extremes aside, it is clearly important for employees to be able to keep up with their community, their outside interests, running their household, and communicating with family, so domestic affairs are conducted at the office no matter what company policy says. As a matter of fact, home concerns literally penetrate the office with digital shopping, email to family and friends and keeping track of the kids by voicemail, fax and pager.

5.4.2. Jobs are going away

New technologies always generate changes in the distribution of labor. A hundred years ago everybody complained about the servant problem. The problem was there weren’t any. Since then another class of workers has pretty much disappeared. Farmers. Now blue collar jobs are going away. The transition from farm to industrial work was comparatively easy because people used to farm work had many of the skills required in machine shops and factories. It has been suggested that the transition from industrial work to the kind of knowledge work required in the new economy is more difficult because many do not have any pre-adaptive skills. I don’t believe that is the case considering the alacrity with which even grandparents have taken on the new tools.

Still, it is not only blue collar work that is being outsourced or automated. Professions, too, are under pressure to transform themselves or go the way of the dinosaur. The intermediation provided by skilled specialists like car dealers, mortgage bankers, real estate agents, or travel agents -- people who have privileged knowledge about a particular domain, becomes obsolete when customers can get that same information over the Internet. A private detective told me that her business has fallen off dramatically because Internet-knowledgeable clients now conduct their own investigations on the net. A huge number of ‘locates’ (clients looking for a childhood friend, a lost relative or a former lover) no longer go through her hands. The ready availability of online information has dealt a blow to her business as it has to many other intermediaries. Some jobs are in the process of major transformation. The image of the librarian, for example, that nice lady who’ll recommend a good novel to you or will help you locate a copy of Consumers Reports, is giving way to cybersavvy professionals who are specialists in navigating the sea of information that is out there. And doctors, teachers, professors, trainers and other specialists in the education industry are seeing their jobs usurped by the web.

5.4.3. The idea of a job

Come to think of it (and maybe it’s worth giving some thought to this) jobs are a fairly recent invention. The idea of ‘jobs’ emerged early in the 19th century to package the work that needed doing in the growing factories and bureaucracies of industrializing nations. Before the industrial age most people worked on farms and in cottage industries. They didn’t have ‘jobs’ in the modern sense, though they worked hard on a shifting cluster of tasks, in a variety of locations, on a schedule set by the sun, weather and seasons. What they did and how was largely under their control and of direct benefit to them (Bridges 1994:36). With the industrial revolution, work needed to be assembled into jobs that were easy to supervise, for which performance criteria could be established, and to which pay scales could be assigned.

What is interesting is that when factory work first started and people began to work in a fixed place in fixed shifts on specific, unrelentingly repetitive kinds of tasks, this was considered dangerous for the human soul. Working continuously in one place, doing one thing over and over again, seemed unnatural and generated dire predictions about what this might mean for humanity, not unlike those that appear now in relation to the disappearance of these jobs.

What is happening now is that the entire structure of jobs and job categories is unraveling, only to reconstruct itself in a new manner. As the economy moves from atoms to bits, from producing things to producing information, it becomes clear that jobs in the old sense are well suited only to the atom economy, in which all-important industrial production processes can be managed by explicitly defined criteria. Those jobs are, of course, precisely the ones that can be automated. They are the ones that Karl Marx would have described as alienating, as opposed to those that can't be automated away because they require complex problem solving skills and independent decision making.

5.4.4. Loyalty to whom?