It's much easier for people to compare wages or identify bad employers or discuss bad labor practices in the Internet economy than it was in, say, a factory environment, where that stuff wasn't usually published or available.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When you cover the economy as a reporter, there's one part of the job that is always easy: finding economists who disagree.
There's an idea out there that salespeople have actually been obliterated by the Internet, which is just not supported by the facts.
Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we've seen - the Internet - has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don't get in the way of this ideology.
I am a data hound and so I usually end up working on whatever things I can find good data on. The rise of Internet commerce completely altered the amount of information you could gather on company behavior so I naturally drifted toward it.
Years ago when you'd go to a working group most of the people in the working group would be from universities. Now most of the people are from companies who are building internet products and care what the standards turn out to be.
The problem with the Internet is that it gives you everything - reliable material and crazy material. So the problem becomes, how do you discriminate?
Ultimately, your economy has to be measured in the real eyes of real people, not simply in statistics that appear in newspapers about the unemployment rate and so forth.
While the web is very much the first draft of history, a rough-cut, it still has to be good journalism, well-sourced, reliable. Clearly, the printed form is going to have more effort put into it, going to be more reflective and relevant.
The more you eliminate the inefficient use of information, the better it is for productivity.
With work increasingly invisible, it's much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy.