DE - Impact of DT on Bus

BROADCASTING

CONVERSATION

The Ancient Internet vs Web 2.0

WEB 2.0 (or the 'social web')

TIM O'REILLY (2005)

• Radical decentralisation
• Radical Trust
• Participation instead of publishing
• Users as contributors
• Rich user-experience
• Remixing data
• Collective intelligence

In general the growth of digital technologies has had both positive and negative impacts...

Can we agree on the following?

Instant communication

• Customers, colleagues and stakeholders require communication to be instant. People do not like to wait for anything

• In fact, according to research led by Akamai, a two-second delay in page load time can increase bounce rate by more than 100%

• The speed of business has increased massively, this has been both a good thing and a bad thing. There is an 'expectation of availability (Becker et al, 2018). How many people check emails outside of work?

Data is king

Increasing computer power and internet access makes it easier than ever to find out what is going on. Increasingly organisations rely on the collection and analysis of data to drive decision-making in every operation.

'Big data' can drive productivity, cut costs, improve user/customer experience...

How Netflix Uses Data

Data is king?

• The predictive capacity of data is revolutionising decision-making

• However some worry that the sheer amount of data now available is leading to 'information overload'

• The availability of data is outpacing our capacity to process and understand it...

Information Overload

“Information overload occurs when the amount of input to a system exceeds its processing capacity. Decision makers have fairly limited cognitive processing capacity. Consequently, when information overload occurs, it is likely that a reduction in decision quality will occur.”

Bertram Gross (1964) - The Managing of Organizations

Does More Data Always = More Productivity?

"Ironically, the introduction of digital technologies into fields like nursing or teaching often has the effect of making them less, not more, productive. This is confirmed by Federal Reserve statistics, by the way: while productivity has been skyrocketing in, say, manufacturing, it’s been declining in health and education.

This is due in part to the fact that digi­tization in those fields means that people have to spend so much time translating qualities into quantities, to translate what they’re doing into terms that a computer can understand. So teachers spend less time teaching and nurses spend less time nursing because they’re doing paperwork. So when it comes to care work, digitization clearly decreases productivity"

Prof David Graeber - Harvard Design Magazine

Transparency

• Increase in accountability measures

• Nowhere to hide, everything is subject to quality measurement and feedback

• Accountability measures have led to 'unprecedented levels of stress and anxiety in teachers and pupils (Hutchings, 2015)

• In 'Audit Society' Power (1997) sees accountability measures as 'ritual' and symptomatic of general reduction in trust. Trust itself is now a precious commodity.

Innovation

• Digital technologies have lead to innovation in every aspect of life and have changed the way we do everything!

• Technological disruption - everything is/or is potentially open to distruption, for businesses this presents opportunities and challenges

• Business is more competitive than ever

• More and more jobs are being automated - 30% at risk of automation 2030, 44% of low skill jobs (PwC, 2019)

• On the other-hand jobs might exist that we can't even imagine now. AI represents a potential $15 Trillion contribution to global GDP (PwC, 2019)

Intimacy, Collaboration and Open Systems

• Organisations and brands are expected to be more 'human'. Conversely SM users are encouraged to become brands and constantly selling themselves

• Systems become increasingly open and difficult to predict (more on this later). This has made business much more volatile

• Internet-based technologies allow greater collaboration and sharing

• Privacy becomes difficult to protect

Copyright and Intellectual Property

• From the very beginning of Web 2.0 the negative impact on copyright owners to defend their intellectual property has been obvious (eg; Napster)

• Terranova (2004) argues that Web 2.0 was based on exploitation of free labour. It has become increasingly difficult to monitise creative work, within an everything is free system. Some industries, such as journalism has struggled to survive - this may have a bigger impact on tangible products in the future (3D printing

• This has led to the growth of tech-monopolies which survive by exploiting scalability

Fuchs on Social Media

"Social media optimism is based on the techno-deterministic ideologies of cyber-utopianism and internet-centrism that postulates advantages for business and society without taking into the account of the realities of exploitation"

Christian Fuchs (2014)