About: Good/Bad Research Sources

Numbers, numbers, numbers: seemingly the only way to add any validity to any argument we may present.  Needless to say, economics are all about the numbers and this makes it crucially important to double (and triple) check where I get my numbers from. Technology largely affects micro and macroeconomics, and it is widely considered to be the driving force behind long term economic growth.

When talking about economics, it is important to consider some of the more credible and established sources that talk about this topic. Although this blog will mostly focus on microeconomics, it will be impossible to avoid the larger spectrum of macroeconomics. For a few years now, one of my favorite publications has been The Economist magazine. This magazine has been one of my primary go-to sources when I connect real-life examples with the theories I learn in class. Not only is the publication a strong resource on its own, it is also a great way to find out about other credible sources in the field of economics. Generally when I get this magazine, I tend to focus on all of the technology articles anyway, so I hope to be able to relay a lot of the things I learn from there to my blog discussions. 

I hope to be able to support my topics with scholarly articles that I'll pick up from various databases like JStor and ebscohost. When talking about economics, it's imperative to stick with professional studies and research and separate it from a lot of the word-of-mouth stuff that so commonly goes hand in hand with the topic. Generally speaking, numbers are often thrown around and accepted by others as true for the mere fact that they are "numbers." Moving forward, I will cite all figures that I post in this blog. It's the only way to establish credibility, and it will only make this blog more interesting. 

My Thoughts on "Internet Satisfaction"

The concept of "online satisfaction" is an interesting one. Liu and LaRose argue that the internet can help individuals build positive moods which support social support and relationship development. They use these characteristics to develop judgement about the 195 subjects they surveyed. In their survey, they measure online self efficacy, online social outcome expectations, extroversion, perceived social online support, school life satisfaction, and overall internet use. They readily mention in their research that there is little to no literature about this subject out there today. I acknowledge their efforts, but I have some some reservations about the overall strength of the research. For starters, measuring intangible characteristics like extroversion and using this as a large part of their research can be risky. Aside from this, there wasn't much I could find in the research about the background and the overall upbringing of a lot of these subjects. When I consider the overall effects of internet use in my academic life, I attribute a lot of it to information I've learned along the way. 

Because of this, I decided to take a look at a study which went further in analysis of the overall background of test subjects while taking a look at a similar concept. It was conducted by George Bradford and Shelly Wyatt at the University of Central Florida, and it's titled: "Online learning and student satisfaction: Academic standing, ethnicity and their influence on facilitated learning, engagement, and information fluency." In their study, Bradford and Wyatt examined the overall satisfaction of distance learning vs. traditional in-class students, and looked at factors such as ethnicity and academic standing to examine their effect. As it relates to our Information 3.0 class, there was survey section for "information fluency" which examined simple factors like the student's previous online experience facilitating the student's ability to be able to take in information in an academic environment.  Bradford and Wyatt concluded that ethnicity, for one, has little to no effect in the student satisfaction section of online learning. This is most definitely an interesting finding, but I wish the study had taken more different ethnicities into consideration to see how they varied from one another. I understand this was not the point of the study, but I definitely have found a topic for further research. 

Technology and Money: a (brief) Historical Perspective.

For as long as we've been alive, technology has made our world go round. In this competitive world of ours, technology is too often directly interlocked with economic incentives. Today, our endless pursuit of economic profit has poured billions of dollars into funding research and development, not to mention advertising. In every aspect of life, deeper investment in technology has generally resulted in larger monetary profits for corporations and individuals alike.

As a whole, economists have grown to associate long-term economic growth with steady technological progress in a society. The time period leading up to the industrial revolution brought our society  a large amount the breakthrough inventions that changed the world as we know it today. As I sat in the student union yesterday talking to one of my classmates from an accounting class last semester, we talked about the topic of this specific blog post, he asked something along the lines of: "are you going to write about how everything that can be invented, already has been?" This got me to think about the commonality of this specific idea. Reading through different opinions and forums online, I realized there is a widespread feeling of conformity with today's technology as "everything has already been invented." In my opinion, we're not going to have "breakthrough" inventions like the wheel and printing press nearly as frequently as our society once did, but its more about the microinventions and additions to existing technology that our going to take our society to the next level. It's not so much about inventions that change our world immediately, as much as it is the developments and improvements to our existing technology. There can never be enough technology in areas like energy and medicine. One could say we've only just begun.

Case Study: Online Advertising

Economics are a broad topic. "Technology" itself is a broad topic. Heck, the internet itself can be considered a broad topic when talking about technology and economics. Because of this, I specifically wanted to focus in one area of the internet that I hope to address with frequency in this blog in the near future, and that is online advertising. Without advertising, there are no profits to be made. What better way to do it than through the portal visible to billions of individuals on a daily basis? We all know about advertising giant, Google. Sweet, sweet Google. The internet search engine that has become a verb in our everyday vocabulary. Some believe that search engines aren't the most profitable of ventures. On the surface, that would seem reasonable, as all it does is virtually spit back thousands of results relating to a specific keyword you may have given it. Advertising, however, is what drives google's profits through the roof. They have seemingly mastered the art of online advertising. AdWords, AdSense, Sponsored Links...they're everywhere! This got me to thinking about some of Google's predecessors and their inevitable downfall upon running into Google.

 Looking back about 10 or 15 years, we had a cluster of search engines that seemingly lacked a real vision, or simply couldn't get a grasp of the market as quickly as Google did. Magellan, InfoSeek, Snap, Altavista, all hoped to get close to the level of success that Google has had, but came up just a bit short. Back then, all that was important was to receive a decent enough list of internet page results upon entering a specific keyword. Something that each of these could do relatively well, but not as quickly as Google could upon it's inception. Having mastered the art of the search for the search engine had Google up and running in the right direction. Shortly thereafter came the monster of online advertising...which I will breakdown in the continuation of this blog post. Word limits...