I’m at the Technology, Knowledge, and Society conference in Cambridge UK, where I spoke this morning on the theme of network-enabled apprenticeship. It’s a topic I began developing last fall for a talk at the University of Michigan. I don’t feel that I nailed it the first time around, nor this time either, but it’s provoked a lot of interesting and helpful discussion.

My argument is that for most of human history, in tribal life, village life, or farm life, it was common to be able to watch people do their daily work. Kids who grew up on a farm, for example, saw the whole picture — animal husbandry, equipment maintenance, finance. They understood more about work than kids who only saw dad go to the office, do nobody knew what, and return at the end of the day.

To the extent that we now find it culturally acceptable to narrate our work online, in textual and especially in multimedia formats, we can among other things function as teachers and mentors. We can open windows into our work worlds through which people can find out, much more than was ever possible before, what it is like to do various kinds of work.

I claim this will help people, in particular younger people, sample different kinds of work and, in some cases, progress from transient web interactions to deeper relationships in cyberspace and/or in meatspace. And I suggest that those relationships could evolve into something resembling apprenticeships.

There are plenty of holes in this argument, and James Governor, whom I met for the first time yesterday in London, drove a truck through one of them. It’s nice to have loose coupling and lightweight affiliation, he said, but apprenticeship was always a durable commitment that involved submitting to a discipline. It wasn’t about window-shopping. Point taken.

Today on a walk in Cambridge I met Andrew Jackson, a bespoke tailor who’s just opened up a shop here, and we had a great conversation on this topic. Thanks to Thomas Mahon’s English Cut, which is a great example of work narration, I know a lot more than I otherwise would about this craft. When I asked Andrew if he’s having trouble bringing people into the business I touched a nerve. It’s a huge issue for him.

Maybe, I suggested, online narration of aspects of his craft would be a way to attract worthy apprentices. But he was way ahead of me. Among other things his firm trains tailors in other countries, and they deliver that training over the Internet, using video. That’s not the problem, he said. The problem is that young people just don’t want to do the work. They want to be rock-star fashion designers, not cutters and tailors, and they will not submit to the discipline of his trade. What’s worse, he added, is that little or no stigma now attaches to unemployment.

Andrew Jackson has a good job that nobody else seems to want. The same holds true, he says, for the guy who fixes all the lead-framed windows in Cambridge. He’s been doing it forever, he knows everybody in the town, he does lucrative and socially rewarding work, and yet he cannot find anyone who wants to help him and eventually step into his role.

So, back to the drawing board. I do think that online narration of work will be a necessary way to attract new talent. But it may not be sufficient. It may also be necessary to demonstrate the non-monetary rewards of doing the work. The window repairer, for example, may enjoy low stress and much autonomy, may see and hear a lot of the interior life of the town, and may enjoy pleasant relationships with long-term customers.

If he told you his story, or if someone else did, those rewards might become clear to you. Admittedly there’s no guarantee that outcome will occur. But if nobody tells the story, we can pretty much guarantee that it won’t.