From online banking, to online buying, to online snooping (the legal kind) to you name it, the Internet reduces the amount of time that it takes us to make decisions. Having the world's largest library available at our fingertips drives what economists call "transaction costs" (in lay terms the time it takes to research a purchase) significantly lower. This has lots of implications with respect to the choices that we have available to us that were not available before because we had no way of discovering them. I believe this is part and parcel of the long tail argument (if not the whole damn thing).
In general, however, apart from purchase decisions, the ability to make all kinds of decisions faster should have a significant positive impact on economic (and personal) productivity across the board. Empirical data is probably hard to come by in this space, but if anyone has references I would love to see them. For me all roads lead to Google and I am rarely disappointed vis-a-vis the quality of information that the Web produces (i.e. it is almost always useful to my decision making process even if not always on point).
Comments