reading this section the other day, the text literally reached out and grabbed me:
...Postmodernist concerns with communication and codes, with the way in which interpretations can be endlessly modified, and with the abolition of a single center of authority, certainly seemed appropriate for an era that many called "the Information Age" and others called the postindustrial society. The industrial phase of economic development was characterized by an emphasis on production. But in the postindustrial phase, the MAKING of things becomes less important than the MARKETING of them. A postindustrial society, in fact, is characterized less by things in general than by IMAGES, IDEAS, and INFORMATION. If the factory symbolized industrial society, then the epitome of the postindustrial era is the home computer, with its capacity to disperse information, market products, and endlessly duplicate yet constantly alter visual and verbal images. By the end of the 1990s, relatively inexpensively priced home computers gave their users access to libraries, art galleries, and retail outlets from across the world, and provided, for entrepreneurs, the opportunity to make (and lose) enormous fortunes by exploiting this new image-oriented means of marketing products and information--all without any central regulating authority.
thought you guys might find this interesting, considering most of us are all playing the same game.
if anything else, the text is telling me that entrepreneurs of our type are right on track with what is developing now, and in the future
section derived from: "The West - Encounters and Transformations"