Facebook Makes The World Lose 55 Million Years of Productivity
Twelve years since Facebook went live on the internet, no one could have possibly imagined that the social networking platform would become a giant in its own right many years forward. After all, we all witnessed the rise and fall of other social media sites that came before it (e.g. Friendster and MySpace).
Zuckerberg's brainchild started out as mere tool to poke fun at college girls at Harvard- who's hot and who's not. Now, it has already carved a name for itself in the Silicon Valley with an epic narrative of starting up in a garage or a dorm room.
With an estimated 1.5 billion registered users today, Facebook easily surpasses China as the most populous country in the world. By 2030, the company predicts it'll be connecting some 5 billion people or 60% of humanity according to a report by the Inquisitr.
Right now, the social networking site is already a household tech brand that it has become instinctive for most of its users, at least, to visit it when they hit the internet. According to a mathematical calculation by CNBC, Facebook users spend around a total of 10.5 billion minutes on the site per day based on the company's 2012 IPO filings.
"Assuming that users spend about the same amount of time today, that means people all over the world have spent a collective 55 million years on Facebook since the beginning of 2009," wrote Mark Fahey in article penned for CNBC.
In GDP terms, 55 million years of Facebooking would have translated to a hypothetical labor value of "$3.5 trillion in squandered productivity" as the wasted time could have been used in more worthwhile activities such as making money.
But not everyone agrees. CNBC's article sounds more like a "little misunderstanding about productivity" which Forbes contributor Tim Worstall understood as part of the propaganda write-up for its 12th year celebration.
"They say that the time we spend on Facebook is a waste, a loss of productivity...And that's entirely the wrong way around. That we are on Facebook rather than making money shows that we value the Facebook time more than the money. Thus this financial value of this time is the value that is being added to our lives," wrote Worstall as featured by Forbes.
