Your Face in The Crowd

Back, lo these many decades ago, when WinWord began to displace the DOS wordprocessors, mainly WordPerfect and MultiMate, studies (none of which I've managed to find a cite to; will update if ever I do find any) were published with findings not commodious to MicroSoft. Or employers with functioning brain stems. What the studies found was that the GUI process had changed the focus of worker bees from content to form; eye candy was more fun to play with than pondering content. It was my opinion at the time that the reason all of this was ignored was a kind of network effect. Win 3.0 and Office were fairly easy to clone to a user's home computer, thus alleviating the training needs of companies; employees and potential employees could learn the rudiments at no, or at least minimal, cost to the company. The dominant character based word processor (centralized on a Wang mini) was, you guessed it, Wang Word Processor. MultiMate was a near clone of Wang Word Processor for DOS.

Existing GUI operating systems (applications), Mac being the best known in the consumer venue, were specifically aimed to content light, form heavy fields, such as advertising. Artsy, fartsy stuff as was then the saying.

So, lo these decades later, and some folks continue to wonder about strewing candy before swine. A research outfit has done a study. Sacre' bleu!!!! Facebook use chews up ludicrous amounts of employee time. That study is about two years old, so I'll take a wild ass guess that the wastage is far greater now. What's hilarious is that there are anecdotes on message boards, and job boards, and every other kind of board, to wit: if you don't have a "meaningful" presence in social media, especially Facebook, you'll not be considered for employment. Who, with at least a functioning brain stem, would want to work for such morons? Oh, yeah. Retards (don't get your panties in a bunch, these are truly mentally challenged folks) who spend their day checking the "status" of their 500 closest friends.

This is worse than the dot-com bomb. At least then the software being purveyed had some commercial value. Some have even survived. This Social Media thingee is unalloyed decadence.