A BOSTON CONSULTING GROUP STUDY OF THE INTERNET’S IMPORTANCE IN OUR DAILY LIVES REVEALS SOME SHOCKING FIGURES.
How important is the Internet to us, really? That’s what Boston Consulting Group asked in their recently released study (PDF), which weighed the Internet’s importance on everything from the global economy (which will account for 5.2% of GDP for G20 countries by 2016) to individual lives (polls found that 21% of Americans would give up sex for Internet access, but only 10% would give up their cars).
The results offer us an endless array of discussion points, and thanks to a collection of simple infographics, we can peruse the data quickly.
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For one, despite the innovations from American companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple, America isn’t the proportionate leader in Internet commerce. By 2016, we’re the 6th-placed country, and we fall below the average of developed markets. It sounds hard to believe until you examine the numbers. In the U.K., 12.4% of the entire GDP will be represented through online spending. In the U.S., it’ll be just 5.4%. We’re behind, and nothing is bucking the trend.
Things get really interesting though when you start asking people what they would give up to keep the Internet in their lives. 73% of Americans say they’d give up alcohol. 43% would give up exercise. And 21% would give up sex. (Is that high or low? Depends, I guess, on your own answer.) Just 10% would give up a car, which hints that most Americans would rather have a car than be celibate. America!
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However, the more interesting point (to me) is that our perceived value of the Internet is highly inflated. Americans see the services worth about $3,000 a year. (As a telecommuter for half a decade, I’d go even higher with that figure.) But what’s the Internet really worth, in terms of its cost? $472/year. So we’re all basically getting a 650% return on investment.
That’s really what it means when something is a productive technology, rather than a consumer good. In a world where most of us expect everything to plummet in price, and many of us lament companies like Apple’s high margins (50-100%) as generating “overpriced” products, we’re completely out of sync with the value of digital services and online products. It’s like the dot-com boom still lives and breathes in all of us, and we still see the images and videos streaming to our computer screens as a bit too wonderful to be true.
Given that we live in a world full of skepticism, where most of us take the ingenuity around us for granted (in part by necessity, since we can’t spend all day oohing and ahhing at flat displays and planes floating in the sky), the fact that we overvalue the Internet--that we intrinsically hold it sacred--is actually a somewhat beautiful idea, no?
COMMENTARY: Let's face it people, we are all addicted to the internet or slaves to it. There's no two ways about it. The internet has replaced or quickly replacing print, film and television media, and it's available to us 24/7, 365 days a year. It appears that everything is going into the cloud, insuring that we become slaves to the internet.
I don't know about you, but I can do without the internet, but as a blogger, I need the internet so that I can provide my loyal readers with interesting and informative content. That's my excuse. However, I would never giveup sex for the internet. Never, never, ever.
One of the new trends I have been reading about is how the internet has disrupted our intimate relationships. Couples and spouses are using the Internet to track each other. It is now one of the key sources of information for finding evidence in a divorce.
The internet has also given rise to social media snooping firms that track what we say and post online and provide this information to employers and insurance companies. The FBI, CIA and NSA now use the internet as a key source of information in their war against crime and terrorism.
I think one of the reasons that individuals are willing to give up sex for the internet, is because the internet has become the principal media for delivering sexual content of all times. If you can imagine it, you will find it on the internet, so it is quite possible, that the internet has in some ways supplanted sex from an intimate relationship. If your girlfriend, boyfriend or spouse won't do it, you can easily find somebody who will online. That sounds sad, but true.
Courtesy of an article dated March 21, 2012 appearing in Fast Company Design
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