June 05, 2000 New Thinking:
The information virus
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June 05, 2000
The information virus
By Gerry McGovern
There is a type of virus that infects our bodies. There is a type of virus that infects our computers. There is a type of virus that infects our time.
A recent study by Ferris Research found that using email saved an average of 326 hours per employee annually. This saving was valued at USD13,000 per employee. However, time wasted on personal email and spam resulted in 115 hours of productivity per employee being lost , which was valued at USD4000. Therefore, the overall productivity gain was valued at USD9000. I would estimate that a increasing amount of those 115 hours wasted was taken up by reading about fakes viruses and other misleading information.
Have you heard the hoax warning about the ‘California’ virus? It goes like this: “If you receive an e-mail with a file called California, do not open the file. The file contains the WOBBLER virus. This information was announced yesterday morning from IBM; AOL states that this is a very dangerous virus, much worse than "Melissa", and that there is NO remedy for it at this time… Pass this warning along to EVERYONE in your address book ASAP so that this threat may be stopped.”
The virus warning is the virus. It infects our time, wasting it away. If it truly infects us then we become a host, sending it on to people we know, wasting their time and damaging our reputation.
In cyberspace, information is the air we breathe. Some of it is fresh and clean. Some of it is polluted, infected. There is a danger that the undoubted productivity gains the Internet has achieved will be whittled away as our digital atmosphere becomes more and more polluted with irrelevant, inaccurate or malicious information pollutants.
The Information Virus is not just restricted to hoaxes about computer viruses. Regularly, health scares infect the Internet grapevine. Have you heard about the hoax "Klingerman" virus that travels in a package via the US Mail and infects people who open that package? "These sorts of rumors are unfortunate because they take up valuable time that we would be spending on real disease threats," states Tom Skinner of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Information Virus comes in all sorts of strains. There’s the common cold version carried by employees who like to ‘cc’ too much or who take up any rumor or idea and pass it around for comment. Spam gives you the flu and some spam can be very hard to get rid of.
In the civilizing of information we are still at the Searcher-Gather stage. We came to the Internet seeing a land of great promise. But every morning we wake up there are a thousand new acres of websites and emails. Where yesterday there was a field of rich information, today there is a swamp oozing, filling with spam, out-of-date and irrelevant junk. Viruses thrive in the mess.
Time is the measure of our age. Time is the resource we all crave more of. To save our time and reap the harvest of productivity we all need to learn how to farm information in a much more efficient manner than we have done up until now. Dealing with the viruses that threaten our productivity crop will be just one of the challenges.
Gerry McGovern
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