Did you wonder whether our economy had grown a little overly precious? How can we really be producing value if we're all sitting around blogging and Facebook-friending each other?
1999 the British think-tanker Charles Leadbeater published the book Living on Thin Air. It was both an appealing notion and a scary one: that we no longer have to produce anything but ideas. And that was even before Web 2.0--a platform for everyone to share their ideas, opinions, favorite tunes, and relationship statuses with each other. It was all a lot of fun, but I occasionally wondered whether it was really good for economic productivity.
it wouldn't be a bad outcome if the current crisis led to a more diligent, industrious economic climate. Chatting and socializing are important things, but they're not the only things.
But it seems to me that many of the activities, business models, and assumptions behind social media are a bit fluffy, and that fluffiness is going to be difficult to maintain in the post-bubble environment we now find ourselves in.
Socializing as a distraction has always existed. Though there are more ways to do this now, people still have the ability to recognize that which produces real value in their life, both economically and socially. Balance between these has always been a challenge.
A few years from now, only the successful, profitable, and useful will survive.
GFW想必大家不会陌生。GFW的全称是Great Fire Wall,是伟大而正确的中国共产党用以屏蔽一切不和谐网络信息的防火墙工具。现在奥运期间,官方迫于国际奥委会的压力,暂时地开放了部分被禁的网页比如flikr、Wiki。奥运之后,大家还可以去尝试一下维基百科这个借助Web2.0的力量,在短时间内制作完成的世界百科全书。域名是http://wikipedia.org/。