More than a thousand managers surveyed in the United States, Britain, Europe and the Far East indicate the Internet is producing a growing number of dataholics. Simply by finding this story you may be showing symptoms of what a new British report warns is a worldwide plague. More than a thousand managers surveyed in the United States, Britain, Europe and the Far East indicate the cyberworld is producing a growing number of dataholics. Half those questioned said that if information was a recognized drug, they knew an addict. More than three-quarters said they believed that acquiring information can be addictive.
People are always a bit nervous they are missing something.
Maybe there's something they haven't seen that they should have seen. Hooked Up, Then Pulled Plug One company that might have known better ran into productivity problems when it hooked employees to the Net. Sequent Computer Systems manager Marcos Gonzalez-Flower said productivity dropped because employees spent so much time finding interesting but relatively useless information. But they very quickly realized that if they spent all day looking at what was happening with the company and not actually doing anything to support it, it wouldn't help the company grow. The report, which was commissioned by the Reuters news and information service, says one symptom of the problem is addicts spend so much time gathering information they don't have the time to do anything with the facts they've found.