Once upon a time, almost a century back, human occupation was mostly “transformational” in nature. Taking raw material and converting into finished goods. Be it a carpenter at work or be it a worker in a factory or perhaps a farmer engaged in agriculture, a majority of the work force was engaged in the business of transformation.
A few decades later, there was shift in the workforce occupation. From transformation workers we became transaction workers. Ringing up bills at the cash counter, an accountant, a truck driver, an office clerk….all these are examples of a transaction driven workforce (basically doing tasks that are rule based and repetitive in nature).
Now we see another shift taking place i.e. from a transaction-active workforce to an interaction-active workforce. An insurance agent, a nurse, a retail salesman, they are all interaction-workers. Interaction requires ability to use ones experience in a given situation. There are a set of experiences and there a set of situations. And a successful interaction worker is the one who is able to respond to a situation by correctly leveraging his experience. He needs to make complex interactions requiring high level of judgement.
If the world GDP, once upon a time was mainly contributed by transformation workforce, today it is mainly contributed by Interaction workforce. Tasks that were transformational in nature or transactional in nature are gradually being taken over by machines. And tasks that are interactive in nature … here is where Social Media is playing the role of an enabler.
Whether Social Media is going to drive the interaction-economy or whether interaction-economy will spur faster growth of social media…either ways it is mutually beneficial relationship.