It's silly to point at technology and say this is what is making people waste their time. And, conversely, it's just as silly to expect technology to prevent those same people from wasting their time. But when social problems occur in a technologically delimited environment, the temptation to simply patch a hole with a few lines of code is irresistible. Never mind that every technofix has a loophole, or that employee morale might suffer from the prospect of managerial surveillance, or that you can't expect 100 percent productivity all the time. The software solution is the easy way out.
Nothing is anyone's fault.
Nobody wants to be responsible for going down the hall and telling their employee or colleague that something is not allowed. Just fire the first employee caught breaking the no porn rule, he says, and your company will see a dramatic decline in porn accesses. Indeed, in the long run, the best policy seems to be just having a policy. Craig Campbell, a video production specialist in Kansas City, just completed a master's thesis on the topic of employee productivity and Internet access. And not depend on Orwellian technology as a cop-out crutch.