Jiri’s Notepad

Some fun thought experiments combining few EconPapers:

Aral, Brynjolfsson & Van Alstyne found out that “asynchronous information seeking such as email and database use promotes multitasking while synchronous information seeking over the phone shows a negative correlation.” Add to that the conclusions of the paper by Nick Bloom from LSE that shows that “technologies that reduce information costs enable agents to acquire more knowledge and ‘empower’ lower level agents. Conversely, technologies reducing communication costs substitute agent’s knowledge for directions from their managers, and lead to centralization”.

Now substitute ‘communication technology’ with ‘twitter’ and ‘facebook’ and watch the results…

Rather than the empowerment of workers, you may get the exact opposite… Maybe it is the time for social networking advocates to make social computing improve the quality of information, or they risk ending up with the results that are exact opposite of what was intended.