Think all the banter on Twitter and in blog comments is for naught? Here’s how social envy and the competition of ideas it generates will lead to faster innovation.
Jason Fidler has posted a very interesting rebuttal to my recent blog post on the envy effect. I originally argued that the e-social revolution will likely lead to more competition among people, because increasing transparency makes it easier to compare attributes.
Fidler suggests my argument is flawed because competition for pay (and other things in the economic world) is based on actual transparency, while competition for social media dominance is based on “selective” transparency. In other words, we are transparent in social media only to the point we permit ourselves to be, choosing either to disclose or not to disclose different personal attributes.
Moreover, he says, the economic comparisons required by the SEC led to actual improvements in CEO pay, while “it is safe to assume that few have truly better personal lives because of their activity on social networks.”
More of the Fast Company article from Don Peppers
