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September 22, 2003
Are we better off today than yesterday?
Americans and everyone around the world are spending $$$ to purchase/upgrade their technology in the past ten years. Of course, the reason for doing that should be obvious: improvement in productivity. Of course in education, the benefits are supposedly increased learning.
However, the latest productivity study shows America (supposedly the technological leader in the world) falling behind a number of our European counterparts, and I haven't really seen any study that shows that technology has really improved our productivity.
In fact, the prolific writer Stephen Jay Gould, a paleontologist and geologist, who recently passed away had been known to use his old Smith Corona typewriter to write and never used his e-mails for correspondence.
Also, the latest CNN article reports that schools are now facing an increasing problem of students using their PDA's and cell phones for cheating, playing games, surfing the web, and gossiping. When I was young, we used to pass notes in class, now students are wirelessly passing notes through their cell phones and PDA's. Worse yet, students can now cheat on their exams by passing answers and notes using these gadgets. One of my colleagues recently caught a student here on campus who was communicating with his roommate via SMS (Short Message Service) to get the answer to his engineering exam questions. I bet PDA and cell phone designers never contemplated these uses when they were first designing these devices.
So, my question to you this early Monday morning is "is technology helping us to become more productive, or are we learning more as a result?"
Comments
Ken, I think that the fact that the economy is in this so-called "jobless recovery" is quite good evidence that all those IT investments of the late 1990's have lead to increased productivity -- companies are now starting to be able to do more (in terms of producing goods and services) with fewer people.
The much-ballyhooed "productivity gap" associated with IT in the late 90's is no longer talked about much, at least not in the academic literature. Those researchers who posited that gains would take a while to show up are being vindicated to some degree. Tech spending virtually stopped a couple of years ago, yet productivity gains, especially in tech-rich environments like services, are just now being realized. Coincidence? I think not. :-)
Posted by: Craig at September 22, 2003 3:26 PM
I am on Craig's side of the fence. As a techie, I like to think that technology has something to do with the soaring productivity gains.
http://finance.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,7173584%255E14305,00.html
Posted by: bob at September 22, 2003 7:53 PM