The World is Flat
In small doses I’ve been reading several books on the global economy and off-site fulfillment procedures. One of these books is The World is Flat and it’s has provided ample food for thought. For better or worse the technological advances of the last century have shattered our once insular domains.
What Admiral Perry had to threaten bombardment to do, MTV-Viacom can inadvertently achieve through broadcast. Perhaps America’s greatest asset is its ability to exert influence via the media. Some may level accusations of cultural imperialism but clearly Great Walls are a thing of the past. Governments can throttle the flow of information but never truly contain it. The 2007-2008 unrest in Burma was, at least in my eyes, proof of that assertion.
I’ve talked about the promise of mobile content in developing countries, the access to information it could allow under privileged children in those markets, and bolstering the fourth estate. What I’ve yet to discuss are some of the possible downsides.
In the midst of an economic crisis much has been said about out-sourcing and how it’s cut into the job market here in the U.S. My feelings on this aren’t exactly neutral and I’m more than willing to submit to charges of protectionism in regards to this matter.
Whilst it’s great for stockholders, and workers overseas; those of us not who aren’t part of a major corporate entity out-sourcing will continue to be an escalating problem. This is not necessarily a new trend. Traditional hand drawn animation left the shores of the United States and Continental Europe decades ago. The animation was done in Japan, South Korea, China, and even North Korea. Now with rapidly growing storage space and high speed broadband access this becomes an issue for other sectors of the entertainment industry. Any task that can be broken down into component steps and be done elsewhere will be. Logging, grading, and replicating footage are all headed down this path.
Lucas Film Animation Ltd. has already opened an digital animation center in Singapore, Eastern Bloc countries are being utilized for sound and grading tasks, and storyboarding can now be done via someone in India. This is wonderful for locals in the area as it improves their standard of living and infrastructure but the company’s increased savings are not passed on to us the consumers. Actor’s salaries will continue to skyrocket (for the short term at least), ticket prices will not drop, and tie in properties will increase but post production staff and freelancers are going to need to adapt.
We can react by playing the luddite, bemoaning this turn of events, or by using other technological changes to our advantage. The promise of innovation is a double edged sword but one that can cut in our favour. Small and agile business will still be able to deliver niche content. Soon I’ll expand on how that can be done.
J. Ewan Van Dijkhorst
March 2nd, 2009 at 7:39 pm
You should read this review of Friedman’s latest book and his work in general http://www.alternet.org/environment/121617?page=entire
money quote: “I’ve been unhealthily obsessed with Friedman for more than a decade now. For most of that time, I just thought he was funny. And admittedly, what I thought was funniest about him was the kind of stuff that only another writer would really care about — in particular his tortured use of the English language. Like George W. Bush with his Bushisms, Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn’t make them up even if you were trying — and when you tried to actually picture the “illustrative” figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors.”