You guys may remember that I respect Tyler Cowen enough to have bought one of his books just to get a personalized answer to a question (about how reading speed affects assimilation) and that he is my answer to the thought experiment: If you could sit next to anybody on an airplane, who would you want it to be? Well, he’s got an article up at Fast Company on personal economies, which is a super lame term to describe the rush of social production that everyone reading this blog engages in every day, though some a lot more than others:
A second part of the human capital dividend comes from our productivity as Web consumers. Billions of people are rapidly becoming more knowledgeable and better connected to one another. Self-education has never been more fun, and that is because we are in control of that process like never before.
The theme of ideological capital obsesses me. From time to time it becomes apparent, even through the assorted fogs that obscure most of the world, how revolutionary are the times in which we live. DDB moved out of the Hot Tamale Club into a place without internet, and he spends shitloads of time pecking into his crappy Blackberry trying to get his fix. The flow of information, the weaving together of a thousand strands of information and insight and tiny amusements is the chief leisure occupation of a hell of a lot of people. But unlike TV-watching, which this new web activity is unseating, your online explorations creates value for other people.
Someday we’ll gain the tools to measure these new benefits. Twitter’s value will lie not in its eventual market cap but in the human connections it creates. My Twitter feed is a virtual meeting room with economists, aid workers, entrepreneurs, housewives, celebrities, and plain old friends. The Web unites millions of diverse individuals, who interact and sometimes even meet up or marry. The world has a lot more of these connections, even if we’ve yet to see all of their implications — including the traditional financial ones of new businesses, employment, and revenue. And it may sound counterintuitive, but the more time you spend staring at your screen, the bigger that human capital dividend will be.
I’m thinking of how affected I am by your tweets, Facebook updates, shared items on Google Reader, Flickr photos, everything FriendFeed aggregates, even what few comments get made on this blog. The web has a lot of rah-rah folks who can do a better job of cheerleading than I can, so I’ll just paint the image I see one more time: a billion people pecking away like a billion tiny factories, creating “durable” goods both more and less durable than anything we’ve known before.