Office Rhetoric: Technology, the Silent Economy Assassin

This is what I understand. I understand that our economy is six feet under solid dirt. And I’ve heard every reason why we’re in a recession: a greedy financial district, an exploding Real Estate bubble, a lower level population that is growing beyond supplemental program budgets, a government that can’t seem to print enough money, the previous administration, etc.

I’d like to tell you that there is one factor that the economist couldn’t help but to leave off the list, and that is Technology. Early on in this century, music piracy struck hard on the internet. Record companies banked on consumers getting up on Tuesday morning and running to the stores to buy new releases. And that they did. New Releases were breaking the 100,000 unit mark in sales from the #1 album in the country all the way down to the 10^th.

But once it became affordable for consumers to burn their own music in addition to sharing their music files on sites like Napster, record sales slowly began its decline. In time, the RIAA took action by levying heavy fines for copyright infringement to slow down the theft. Until eventually, the music industry transitioned into digital and ringtone sales to offset their losses.

Recently, ‘Box Office Smash’ hopeful, Wolverine: X-Men Origins leaked to the internet and downloads for the digital copy cracked a million. You want to talk about a blow to the stomach? You do the math; one million downloads multiplied by $10 per movie ticket in losses. And that doesn’t include what the theaters lost in potential concessions for each ticket. Since then, Production companies had to tighten their system to assure that this type of catastrophe doesn’t ruin the entire 2009 summer of blockbuster films.

Even the US Postal Service is losing a fight to technology. There was a time when every bill in the household was paid by check, sealed in an envelope and sent to the company. The US Postal Service posted 9 billion dollars in loses for 2008. While people continue to send large packages, handwritten letters and sending postcards have been replaced by sending texts/emails and pictures with captions from a current location. People are paying their bills over the phone or online. These digital transactions are free of charge as long as you pay your bill at least two days before the payment is due. The USPS is in talks of cutting their work week down a day and raising the cost of a stamp for only the third time in the past 3 years.

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, they always say. If you take a look at the Bush Administration, technology has taken this country from Two-way pagers in 2001 to Pocket PC devices with touch screens in 2008 - from Playstation 2 to Playstation 3 - from floor model projection televisions to flat screen LCD monitors that could be hung on your wall like a painting. Social gatherings once took place at concerts, bookstores, and college campuses just to name a few. Today, millions of Americans share their photographs, videos and their two cents on the World Wide Web. And all of this was happening while the Bush Administration was busy with explaining their reasons for fighting a war that couldn’t be won.

The advancement of technology has made life more convenient. But at what cost? Possibly at the cost of an older generation that has watched the advancements which changed their lives, become obsolete. Technology has as much to do with our economic downturn as anything else out there. So the next time you download a compass application to your phone, think about the company that you are helping to put out of business before you click ‘Buy’.