In a Washington Post article about power looms coming to factories in 19th-century Massachusetts, James Bessen suggests that the Information Age will ultimately confer wealth to workers as the Industrial Age previously did, something that is certainly possible but not definite. An excerpt:

“When Charles Dickens visited Lowell in 1842, he reported back to his English readers three facts that he thought many of them would find ‘preposterous’: young girls who worked in the mills played the piano, they subscribed to circulating libraries and they published their own literary magazines. To the class-bound English, such activities were ‘above the station’ of factory workers.

British readers expected mill workers to come from the lower classes because the first British mills sought the cheapest labor. This lowest-common-denominator approach wouldn’t have worked in Lowell. While much of the machinery was copied from Britain, the mills were organized differently. In Britain, specialized workshops produced a variety of cloth goods, many of fine quality. In contrast, in Lowell all of the operations involved in turning raw cotton into finished cloth were conducted in one integrated facility. That allowed the production of a highly standardized product in large quantities.

Coordinating all aspects of production under one roof required specialized technical and business skills. The Waltham mill was one of the first business organizations to use professional managers, called mill agents, who were separate from stockholders (though many mill agents also owned stock).

Waltham mills also required a different kind of worker. Mass production demanded training on a large scale and the new technology demanded new skills. In the British craft workshops, sons often learned as informal apprentices to their fathers. But apprenticeships couldn’t quickly train the large numbers of workers the mills required. And technology was changing too quickly for formal classroom training to be practical. Instead, Lowell and his partners sought to recruit intelligent workers who could learn quickly from experience on the job.

This is why American mill owners encouraged the cultural enrichment activities Dickens found so ‘preposterous.'”