In a recent New Yorker blog post, John Cassidy asked "What Happened to the Internet Productivity Miracle?" and then carefully stepped through the causes and theories of what's going on. We started as optimists, he said; the Web was going to be the third Industrial Revolution. For a long while, too, it looked like we were right. From 1973 to 1996, for example, output per hour grew by just 1.5% annually. Then, as the Web became broadly adopted, productivity grew from 1996 to 2000 at 2.75% annually. That's the difference between our standard of living doubling every 26 years instead of 48. That's remarkable and heartening.
And that's when we stepped in it. 2004.
That's when we held our first Web 2.0 conference to celebrate the coming world of social networking, wikis, video sharing, user-generated content and virtual communities. And that's when it all went to heck in a handbasket.
From 2005 to 2012, annual productivity fell to just 1.5%--right back to pre-Web levels. In 2011 output per hour rose just .6%--and in the last quarter of 2012, it went backwards.
If you want an economic/futurist view of what's going on--and there's still hope--please head over to Cassidy's excellent post here. If you want my simplistic, boots-on-the-ground take on the problem, at least as currently construed, please see the 10 quick examples below. I've harvested these with a handy web clipper from my virtual travels over the last two weeks or so. There's more, but I'll stick with these 10 in the interest of, well, productivity.
The simple truth is that the Web giveth, but the Web also taketh away. The tools that we put to such good use on the front end of this technological phenomenon have now boomeranged. Much of what we're doing now we're doing because we can, not because we should. It seems silly. The numbers suggest it's incredibly wasteful.
Example 2: This is about stuff you don't want to buy (and there's LOTS of that on the Web). From people you don't care about (lots of those, too). Stuff you don't want to buy from people you don't care about, offered by a good publication to which you subscribe, a publication trying to stay relevant? Visible? Hip? I don't have a clue.
Example 3: Impossibly idiotic titles are now offered to get you to read articles posing questions you didn't know anyone could possibly be asking. In the interest of enticing us to click and garnering improved metrics, I'm certain.
The moral of the article below: Don't stop innovating. It just took 4 minutes of your time to read what you knew so well you would never have asked the question in the first place.
(P.S.--I may travel in different circles than the author, but I never, ever heard anyone ask if big companies should stop innovating. In fact, I think a little poking around in the literature [start with Drucker] suggests that big companies deliver the lion's share of global innovation. Always have. Small company-high tech is noisier and sexier, but is less process and more chance, and fails far more then it succeeds. In other words, would you want Google, Apple and Microsoft to stop innovating and leave progress up to VC portfolio companies?)
Example 4: If half of all Facebook subscribers watched this video (and that estimate may be low), it sucked 937,500 days out of the economy. If half of that half were on their coffee break and had legitimate goof-off time, that brings the loss in productive time to just 1,284 people-years. In other words, this little gem easily removed the total productive output of a person who fought side-by-side with Charlemagne and then worked every single day, 24 hours a day, right up until the moment Justin Bieber's deposition jacket went on sale.
Example 5: This raises the thorny theoretical question: If Twitter is down but you can't tweet about it, is it really down at all? And, is the "almost an hour" of recaptured productivity implied by the service going down really added back to the economy, or is it simply eaten up by a stampede over to Tumblr, FriendFeed and Plurk? Some social media calls to mind Thoreau's famous comment: "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
Example 7: There's lots of "art" circulating on the Web these days whose damage was once limited to 50 people in an indie movie house in the East Village. Now we all stop and gawk. The sucking sound is earsplitting, so to speak.
Example 8: Selfies. Cats. Do you think, had Tim Berners-Lee known this was going to happen to his fantastic creation, he might have stopped and gone to the beach? Selfies and cats. What exactly is wrong with us?
Example 9: I used LinkedIn for three years and didn't know why. And then, for a little while, I knew why and it worked great. And now, it's heading where all social media sites are wont to go. Yes, that's 32,494 comments from people who just might be at work, on the clock, contributing (or not) to the nation's productivity.
Example 10: And then there's all those food pictures being sent around the Web. It's kinda weird, no?
So, that's my 10 part explanation for lost productivity. I had to stop clipping after a while just so I could, well, get something done myself. Maybe Winston Churchill had it right when he said, "We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us."
How are you being shaped today?
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