NDM Story #40 Is Twitter bad for economic growth?

http://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2015/feb/18/is-twitter-bad-for-economic-growth-bank-of-england?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=dlvr.it

Technology has been our friend in the past but today the impact “may be less benign”, Haldane said in a speech to university students on Tuesday night. Reviewing the factors behind leaps forward in living standards over centuries, he highlighted how our information revolution may be changing our brains to think fast rather than deep. We are clearly in the midst of an information revolution, with close to 99% of the entire stock of information ever created having been generated this century. This has had real benefits. But it may also have had cognitive costs. One of those potential costs is shorter attention spans,” Haldane told the University of East Anglia. “Some societal trends are consistent with that. The tenure of jobs and relationships is declining. The average tenure of Premiership football managers has fallen by one month per year since 1994. On those trends, it will fall below one season by 2020. And what is true of football is true of finance. Average holding periods of assets have fallen tenfold since 1950. The rising incidence of attention deficit disorders, and the rising prominence of Twitter, may be further evidence of shortening attention spans.”

This article shows that Twitter can be a distraction for some and can therefore have an impact on their standards of living. However, i disagree with this viewpoint.