Do you know someone who has lost their job in the last few years working in IT, media, finance or retail? These industries and many others are already feeling the pinch of “online gravity” - a special set of economic forces and drivers that increasingly govern business in the age of the web.

Much has been made of the disappearance of jobs due to the digitisation, automation and networking of many traditional industries — most notably in traditional media. But careful global economic analysis has shown the internet has in fact added more jobs than it has destroyed.

According to McKinsey and Company the internet has created 2.6 new jobs for every 1 deleted. What’s becoming increasingly apparent however is the location and setting forwhere these new jobs appear is often not the same for those which were lost.

Online, business today is being influenced by a different set of economic forces than those that exist purely offline. I call these forces “online gravity” – not unlike the forces that led to the formation of our solar system. These forces favour the creation of planet-like superstructures with lots of white space in-between. In a former article (Why there’s no Pepsi® in cyberspace) I outlined this phenomena and here I examine how online gravity is reshaping the future of work.

Read the full article published at The Conversation here.