By Kent Carlson
Facing the truth: Betty White is right
When a friend first told me I should join Facebook, she warned me that I would waste a huge amount of time. She completely underestimated my obsessive-compulsive disorder. Even Betty White said of Facebook, “I have to say, it sounds like a huge waste of time.”
Like most octogenarians, Ms. White realizes youth is wasted on the young. But ironically, the average Facebook user is 44 years old. In fact, 46 percent of social gamers are older than 50, and 55 percent are women. What is a “social gamer?” That is a person who wastes an inordinate amount of time on social networking sites playing Web-based games like “FarmVille” and “Mafia Wars.” An even more disturbing stat may be that 41 percent of gamers work full time, or at least claim to.
FarmVille, a “real-time farm simulation game,” has 80 million users. That is particularly ironic considering there are less than a million real-live farmers in the United States according to census data. In fact 1 percent of the earth’s population is now playing FarmVille. Yes, Betty, it is a huge waste of time.
But computers provide a plethora of time-wasting opportunities. That was graphically illustrated when Google provided a free online version of Pac-Man to celebrate the 30-year anniversary of the video game. A research firm calculated that computer users spent 4.8 million hours playing Google’s Pac-Man in one day. At $25 per hour including salary and benefits, employees cost their employers about $120.5 million. It was also estimated that 75 percent of the people who saw the game on Google had no idea they could actually play it. In other words, it could have been far uglier.
While Bernie Madoff was busy using his computers to screw investors, attorneys at the Securities and Exchange Commission were spending up to eight hours a day surfing porn sites. One SEC accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in one month. Seventeen of the SEC employees accused were senior officers to whom taxpayers were paying between $100,000 and $222,000 a year.
Frailties of human nature can account for many a wasted hour on the computer. But for people who don’t suffer from those maladies, the frailties of computer software and hardware can make a person truly crazed. A weak link with modems, routers, service providers, VPNs (virtual private network), buggy software and cranky tech support can bring even the most productive people to their knees.
Like Betty White, my wife has absolutely no interest in social networking. She averages 85 incoming work e-mails a day, while juggling non-stop phone calls. And of course it seems every phone call has to be followed up with an e-mail to confirm what was said in the last 20-minute-long conversation. Add to this text messaging, and you can see why she is the last person who would subject herself to elective computer time. When there is a crash or failure, my wife’s life becomes a living hell. Does the computer aid her productivity? Probably. Does is add to her frustration? Absolutely.
The information industry employs some of the brightest minds on the planet. But for some reason nobody has done a comprehensive analysis of how much time is wasted because of computers. It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to wonder why.
The world now revolves around computers. That became painfully obvious on May 6 when the Dow dropped more than a thousand points in a matter of minutes.
More than 19 billion trades were executed that day, yet nobody can explain the anomaly. Originally the debacle was blamed on human error… some broker’s “fat fingers” when entering a trade. That has since been discounted, but high-frequency traders (HFTs) no doubt had a huge impact. Computer-generated buying and selling now account for between 50 to 75 percent of all trading. It’s complicated, but that day the market dropped 800 points in less than a half-hour.
In a matter of minutes, a trillion dollars of capital evaporated. Fortunately, most of it rebounded. However, it spooked investors enough that they pulled $8.6 billion out of the market over the next week. But don’t worry. The SEC is looking into it.
As a matter of full disclosure, I spent about three and a half hours on the computer researching and writing this column. I sure hope Betty White doesn’t read it. CV
Kent Carlson is a native Iowa artist interested in the preserving Iowa’s architectural heritage and the common sense of its leaders. And he writes a few columns for Cityview, too.
