But what does "important" mean? Much of the debate has been over productivity: people are looking for a Verdoorn's Law for computers. But this may be the wrong issue. The importance of computers could depend on their imposed and induced impact on social and economic organization, quite apart from productivity. In any event, that was the argument I was trying to make earlier (summarizing, really). Peter Doug Henwood wrote: > > Peter Dorman wrote: > > >The information technology revolution is best compared to electricity, I > >think. Just as electricity permitted a truly distributed power supply, > >so the computer does this to information. It's hard to imagine the > >radical reorganization of work and space in the twentieth century > >without electricity. I think that we will see similar effects from the > >computer. Very imperfectly, this is what the "postfordism" literature > >has been trying to get at, at least in part. > > > >Of course, the larger context is equally important -- I'm not arguing > >for any sort of technological determinism. But different technologies > >also have qualitatively different effects on society. > > No one is arguing that computers aren't really really important. The New > Economy types are arguing, explicitly or not, that they're unprecedentedly > important. And that case just isn't proved, to put it mildly. > > Doug
