Electricity

“The impact of new technologies is invariably misjudged because we measure the future with yardsticks from the past,” writes Stephen Baker in The New York Times (1/6/13). Stephen is author of Final Jeopardy, and points out that “in a server farm packed with social data, it’s hard to know what to count. What’s the value of a Facebook ‘like’ or a Twitter follower? What do you measure to find out?” He compares the conundrum to that faced by brain scientists, who must analyze “petabytes of data … to discern whether certain genes or groups of neurons cause something or simply correlate with it.”

The question is one of cause and effect, and which actions are required to achieve the desired response. Stephen cites IBM’s Black Friday Study, which indicated that “few shoppers clicked directly from a social network to buy a laptop or a fridge,” however “some may have seen ads that later led to a purchase. If so, valuable influence went unmeasured.” IBM’s Steve Canepa acknowledges the dilemma: “It’s hard to measure influence,” he says. Indeed, efforts to do so may miss the ultimate value of today’s emerging “grid of personal connections.”

For example, Simulmedia founder Dave Morgan “points to the early years of electricity.” At the time, “most people associated the new industry with one extremely valuable service: light … What these people missed was that electricity, far beyond light, was a platform for a host of new industries” and appliances like vacuums, washing machines, radio and television, for instance. “If you think of Apple in this context, it’s a $496 billion company that builds the latest generation of electricity apps,” Stephen writes. Social networks will likely “spawn new industries … yet to be imagined.”