The mythology of the cowboy in American life romanticizes the idea that one can escape the degradations of wage work by an exercise of willpower. Instead of stressing the opposition between wage work and rugged individualism, contemporary advertisers have blended the wageworker with the rugged individualist mythology, stretching the cultural imagery of the cowboy into a metaphor for the working class male, as in this 1999 Ford Truck ad . Though the condition of work as a necessity of life is rarely present in the discourse of advertising, it is also not completely absent. To call our times an age of transition is to understate the obvious. Deindustrialization, outsourcing, downsizing, the development of semiconductor and networking technologies, and the rise of the Internet are all forces that are dramatically wrenching the labor force and the conditions of workplaces.
New jobs replace old jobs at a more and more rapid pace.
The Internet will be the biggest thing to hit business since the industrial revolution. The Internet will be nothing more than a chat line for physicists and video-game addicts. Someday your web address will be more important than your phone number. One day on the Internet, a modern-day Attila the Hun will loot and pillage all in his path. One day on the Internet the Colonel's secret formula will whiz past the secret formula for Pepsi.