ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by drawing disparate observations into a more coherent vision of the post-industrial future of technical and professional writing. The post-industrial is an epochal shift that will continue to disrupt accustomed human patterns for some time. Post-industrial hybrid products, like accessible vehicles and industrial-agricultural products also rely on hybrid thinking. The chapter focuses on communication in workplaces and on the ways in which information technology and network theory impact industrial production and open new horizons for realizing efficiencies and putting human beings to work. Jeremy Rifkin's The Third Industrial Revolution argues for the importance of coupling the real and the virtual, of making things, and the management of the processes of making. Change is disruptive, and the future of post-industrial society is as turbulent as urbanization was at the dawn of the industrial age. The end of mass employment in agriculture did not end food production, just as industrial output is not declining with deindustrialization.
