Saturday, February 01, 2014

How has our new social media technology improved productivity?

What technological changes are happening in our children's lifetime? Well, we have gone from personal computers to laptops, to tablets to iPhones. Joel Kotkin writes,
The new raft of minidevices are ingenious and much more powerful than even the high-end desktop computers of a decade ago. But this wave of technology is not doing much except, perhaps, to make us ever more distracted, disconnected and obsessed with trivia.

As one former Facebook employee put it succinctly: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”

The prospect of the easy score in social media, notes longtime entrepreneur Steven Blank, “marks the beginning of the end of the era of venture capital-backed big ideas in science and technology.”

The new social-media technology has done very little for productivity.

Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy predicts that the mass of humanity “will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.” Joel Kotkin writes that
firms like Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft are using their unfathomable riches to dominate a host of fields, from robotics and space travel to health care, even publishing.

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