Time Is Lost, Confusion Results, and Money Is Spent

In the recent SCUP survey of members' use of social media, a common complaint by those who do not use social media, or who have tried to and loathed it, was that it is a "waste of time." In this recent Economist article, the manager of a Connecticut manufacturing firm is auoted complaining about the effects of the telephone . . . in 1917: 'Time is lost, confusion results and money is spent.' but goes on to say "Yet what is happening now goes way beyond incremental growth. The quantitative change has begun to make a qualitative difference." (Don't worry, SCUPers, as we move forward in social media use, our traditional communications channels - website and email - will still be there for you.) Many SCUPers spend a lot of time with data and are well aware of the new capacities to collect it, analyze it, and display it:

This shift from information scarcity to surfeit has broad effects. 'What we are seeing is the ability to have economies form around the data—and that to me is the big change at a societal and even macroeconomic level,' says Craig Mundie, head of research and strategy at Microsoft. Data are becoming the new raw material of business: an economic input almost on a par with capital and labour. 'Every day I wake up and ask, ‘how can I flow data better, manage data better, analyse data better?' says Rollin Ford, the CIO of Wal-Mart . . . 'The data-centred economy is just nascent . . . You can see the outlines of it, but the technical, infrastructural and even business-model implications are not well understood right now.' This special report will point to where it is beginning to surface.