The rise of the internet and other aspects of the digital revolution has changed our working and private lives – mainly for the better. But all technological advance has its downside.
We tend to soon take the benefits for granted and are only starting to understand the costs.
To start with the latest, how many of us watched every moment of either or both grand finals, compared with how many of us actually attended the grounds?
If many of us did neither, it’s because digitisation has greatly multiplied the range of rival entertainments available to us – including while we’re supposed to be working.
Of course, the televising of sport – which has commercialised almost every (male) comp – began long before the internet. But it’s now digitally enhanced.
Trouble is, we seem to be watching more sport, but playing less. Is this a net plus?
Staying with leisure, who hasn’t passed many pleasant hours watching YouTube? Or spent hours on Facebook – still the only commercially significant social medium – thinking how much more exciting their friends’ adventures are compared to their own, or how better-looking or happier their grandkids are.
Mobile phones and social media have given us much more frequent contact with family and friends – although I agree with social commentator Hugh Mackay that digital contact is greatly inferior, in terms of emotional satisfaction and effective communication, to face-to-face contact.
We spend so much of our lives staring at screens, which seem to get smaller when we’re on the go, and ever bigger when we’re at home.
Indeed, I sometimes think there can be few white-collar jobs left – from chief executive to office kid - that don’t consist mainly of sitting at a desk in an office, staring at a screen. As a consequence, many jobs have become more office-bound.
Reporters, for instance, use up far less shoe leather. They “attend” a media conference without leaving the office. The hearings of the banking royal commission occurred mainly in Melbourne, but my colleague Clancy Yeates listened to almost every word by staying stuck to his desk in Sydney.
The internet has revolutionised banking, bill paying and how we pay for things in shops or repay a friend – and there’s a lot more to come. You need to be very old to think it noteworthy that these days we rarely darken the doors of our bank branch.
In the day, city workers devoted much of their lunch hours to walking a few streets to pay an electricity bill at the power company’s office. These days, you pay bills via the internet – or set up an arrangement to have them paid automatically.
(Lunch hours are disappearing, too. Eat something at your desk. But while you’re eating, it’s OK to switch from doing spreadsheets to catching up with the news on your favourite newspaper’s website.)
Some people find it harder to manage their money because it’s now less tangible and more conceptual. Pay envelopes stuffed with notes were long ago replaced by direct credits to your bank account. You pay for things with a plastic card (meaning many young people have trouble learning to manage their credit card). We now wave a card – or a phone – to pay the tiniest of amounts in stores.
When the Reserve Bank’s “new payments platform” – allowing you to move money from one account to another if you know, say, the other person’s mobile phone number – is fully adopted, it will be one of the last nails in the coffin of cheques, and bank notes will be a step closer to being used only by people up to no good.
Digital disruption – which has much further to run – almost always brings pain to conventional producers and their workers, but benefits to consumers. Digitised products are always more convenient and usually cheaper. They bring wider choice and easier comparison.
Online shopping is in the process of eliminating the “Australia tax”, whereby Australians pay higher prices for many items than consumers in America and elsewhere, but are sometimes blocked from accessing the cheaper foreign sites.
The digital revolution is changing the structure of our economy (as well as all the other advanced economies) in ways we don’t yet know about, don’t fully understand and don’t even know how to measure properly.
While the punters bang on about the cost of living, the Reserve Bank says one reason consumer price inflation stays so low is that heightened competition in retailing – most of it related directly or indirectly to digitisation – is forcing down prices, or holding them down.
Now we’re told that weak growth in wages is explained partly by the slowness with which advances in technology are spreading from the leading firm in an industry to the rest of them.
If so, that’s another downside from the digital revolution.