Digital Civilization

Stimulus payments to consumers is analogous to dumping frosting onto a cake mix, before the ingredients have been mixed and baked. All elements of the economy, from raw materials, to intermediate goods, to consumer goods, must return to a supply-demand balance before the economy can gain Krugman’s “traction.” That necessarily takes time, because mining companies and other producers of basic raw materials have time scales for increased output and employment that are very different from the time scales of intermediate goods producers and consumer goods manufacturers.

Keynesian economics, as expounded by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, is essentially a black box theory. Stand on the outside of the economic box and dump into it endless baskets of inflationary fiat money, and things supposedly just happen automatically inside the black box to produce permanent prosperity and near zero unemployment.

tudio executives say they're optimistic that particular headache will be resolved soon. But the pay channels are unlikely to allow movies to be sold online while they have the rights unless they negotiate a reduction in rights fees worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

These days one witty Tweet, one clever blog post, one devastating video - forwarded to hundreds of friends at the click of a mouse - can snowball and kill a product or damage a company's share price.

It's a dramatic shift in consumer power. But what if companies could harness this power and turn it to their advantage?

At the most basic, these tools measure the volume of social media chatter. Researchers at Hewlett Packard showed that they can accurately predict a Hollywood movie's box office takings by counting how often it is mentioned on Twitter before it opens.

"What we think is good for the consumer doesn't matter - it's what the consumer thinks is good that matters."

When you link the consumer to the manufacturer there are huge areas of opportunity

It's the internet, of course, that makes crowdsourcing possible - on a global scale.

If the company could monitor sales of ice cream - or bottled water or sun tan cream - on hot days like this one and then gauge future demand, he said, it could alter the way the company behaved

Real-time - the act of responding to events as they happen - is changing the way that the world behaves.

The software has also been blamed for exacerbating the financial crisis. Computer programmes automatically sold stocks as fear spread in the markets, because their algorithms have built-in "sell" orders.

by watching his Chatter dashboard, Benioff says he can spot - and reward - pivotal individuals who might not have come to his attention in the past

If these tools take off, then perhaps 'pivotal individuals' within companies really will get noticed, and businesses will become better meritocracies as a result.

Of 3,500 employees in a range of companies and economies, 58% said they would contribute more ideas to their company if they were more likely to be rewarded for them.

The lone genius, beavering away in the seclusion of his lab is how most of us imagine the great moments of innovation have come into being. But is this really the whole story?

"[Good ideas] come from crowds, they come from networks. You know we have this clichéd idea of the lone genius having the eureka moment.

"And so much of that is because it's wonderfully set up for other people to build on top of other people's ideas. In many cases without asking for permission.