For decades, scholars, activists and social critics have grappled with how to characterize the economic shift that has transformed the United States—and, indeed, the world—since the 1960s. I have written elsewhere about the analytic challenge observers face in giving this change a name: postindustrial? Informational? Service? High-tech?
Daniel Bell and Alain Touraine were among the first out of the gate, noting the decline of manufacturing as a relative proportion of employment and speaking of the “postindustrial society” in the early 1970s… [Read More]
Alex Sayf Cummings is a professor of history at Georgia State University, whose work deals with technology, law, public policy, and the political culture of the modern United States. Alex's writing has appeared in Salon, the Brooklyn Rail, the Journal of American History, the Journal of Urban History, Al Jazeera, and Southern Cultures, among other publications, and the book Democracy of Sound was published by Oxford University Press in 2013 (paperback, 2017). Alex can be followed on Twitter at @akbarjenkins.
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Brain Magnet 