“More than half of office workers use sites like Twitter and Facebook for personal use during the working day, and admit wasting an average of 40 minutes a week each.

“One in three of the 1,460 office workers surveyed also said they had seen sensitive company information posted on social networking sites, leading to fears about how workers use the internet.” ~ according to The Telegraph (article linked to below)

If Twitter ‘costs British economy £1.38bn’, then how much is the total economic cost of using social media in other countries worldwide? Consequently, in the long run, does social media have the power to deteriorate the economy in general? And is social media to blame for information leakage and lack of privacy?

World Economy

I Told You So! Or Did I?

In recent posts, I have discussed the power of social media both positively and negatively. May it be in terms of its privacy concerns, the personal safety threats it represents or its ability to motivate us to waste time, social media has been blamed for almost every mishap in our lives since Web 2.0.

However, when it comes to actual facts, figures and numbers, I highly doubt that it is a true statement that social media does have the ability to actually hurt the economy! Here is why:

1. There WAS technology before Web 2.0 & social media; we were not living in the dark ages! Whether we used to spend hours sending e-mails, making phone calls or just sending messages via our mobile phones, there has always been a reason or a way to waste time! Before the mobile phone, there were landlines, before those, there was the television and so on so forth!