It's late and I had a whole essay planned to tell you about this "chesterised" montage. Maybe tomorrow.... In short it's my journey to getting my degree. So feeling a little less tired now I spent some years working in a music shop (instuments and sheet music) where I became a department manager. I was out though a managment course and the one thing I took away was "if you read 20 minutes a night you'll read about 18 books a year - imagine how much knowledge you'll gain" so I started to read again (has been too busy socialising!) and got hooked on the Apollo missions (thanks again to the movie Apollo 13) and then on universal matters, espcecially as described by Carl Sagan. Not long after I trekked through the hilltribes of Thailand (from whence this hand stitched scarf comes) and had an epiphany that I was wasting my life in a job that wasn't making me happy, yet these villagers had nothing but they smiled all the time. I came back and though a series of events found myself enrolling in night school to study school subjects necessary to do astronomy as part of a science degree. Half way through my degree I decided high brow theoretical astronomical questions were not where I wanted my future, so I switched to Environmental Management which essentially teaches how to come to terms with ashpalted paths in hign raffic areas of natural beauty. It took 12 years but I graduated last year; at age 40. Some say I'm crazy but I've enrolled in a Masters for next year, but I figured whilst I can't work full time, I can keep studying till the little one is slightly less reliant on me.

Imagine a deep pan, filled with boiling water. Water is people. 0 - People at bottom = Labour, production 1 - Liberal professions, free lancing 2 - creative, leading people, architects 3 - abstract, philosopher, researcher, educators, politician The different state of matter are in correlation with theoretical degrees of freedom, labour is liquid, creative class is in ebullition, abstract thinkers and trend setters are gaseous. Bottom water needs to be actually hotter than gas to provide transformational state potential. Now, about technology : what does it change? If everybody is empowered, they are not generally equally empowered. Meanwhile some medias are more democratic than others. Let's take the example of youtube.com : the thinkers propose the idea, the software designer, UI designers build the framework, free lance and labour people use it for entertainment and culture-making. In the process, if everyone is treated not as a user or admin, but rather as a contributor, more creativity comes from the inside of the framework, people posting, having fun. In that sense, technology, when used to develop "playground" type collaborative frameworks, empowers more the lower class with fun, while limitating "leading" people to managment and admin work => Creativity has shifted.