Where do you live? What is your frame of reference?

Were you born before WWII or the Korean conflict or Vietnam? Do you think MTV is really cool?

The reason for asking is that each of these age groups lives in a context that is out of step with the new reality, the new norm.

The new norm is the Networked Society. While you've been busy living every-day-life 700 million people have subscribed with an Internet provider. Almost 70% of all businesses in the USA have a website.

Internet has become the largest repository of human knowledge in the history of the planet. Jupiter Research estimates that the information accessible by Internet is equal to 305 times the Library of Congress.

Google.com, one of the over 800,000 search engines boasts 3.3 billion searchable pages!

That says everyday problems are that much easier to solve and besides, who needed all the middle men and women?

We're also getting very good at communicating with each other. The degree to which people in the Networked Society like to communicate is astounding. Last year people wrote 400,000 terabytes of email material to one another. They used 300 billion short text messages. They wrote their diaries on 10 million blogs. Who reads this stuff? A lot of people, millions in fact. And all this takes place without intermediaries.

The Internet is more extraordinary than anyone expected, even the most optimistic.

So what does this have to do with my lost job even if I am a subscriber or I have a website?

For one thing, Internet has made the processes of communication and information retrieval very efficient. It has provided some companies a very efficient way to do business. Businesses are leveraging websites to cover a host of jobs that used to take people. Their leveraging websites instead of building "points of purchase."

And that brings us down to what this means to you.

The two million jobs we've lost over the last three years arn't coming back! We've become that much more efficient at solving everyday problems using Internet. Internet companies that have survived the run-up and the bubble-bursting decline are now sized to their revenues, not their forecasts.

Businesses have adjusted and until demand grows well beyond today's levels, most employers will be content to make due with the human resources they have.

Terry and Lisa Wellman

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