Employees actually hate open offices, everyone knows that. But's it now been scientifically proven that open offices are doing the opposite of what they were intended and causing us more stress. An article in Fast Company points out that they are too symbolically powerful for companies to abandon. What? It’s not just that open offices are cheap—though they are. OK. Open offices signal that people are collaborating and ideas will spark. Not true!
Open offices have become popular at startups and established companies alike, and Facebook even put all 2,800 employees in one 10-acre building! Ugh. The article goes on to point out that these layouts actually lower the percentage of in-person interactions by 70 percent, while emailing and other electronic messaging rises by 50 percent.
Open offices have also been shown to create stress, especially for women who fell like they are on display all of the time. Check that. While sixty-five percent of creative people have said we need quiet or absolute silence to do our best work. Sure enough, open offices changed everything and there's a NetLingo word for it: disruptive technology.
Even CBS News said yep, the latest research shows that most open office plans fail, and that we didn’t need science to prove how much open offices suck the life out of our workday. I can't believe that seventy percent of Americans now work in open offices! That's a lot of people when, they need to have a real conversation or pitch an important client, they have to find a storage closet.
According to the Financial Times, at the trending WeWork co-working offices, the shared desks seem fairly empty, while the private meeting rooms were full. The ultimate sign that the open office is due for some serious rethinking? Companies are now spending $3,500 for portable soundproof pods to let their employees get away from their colleagues and actually do their work. Gang, if you need to get out from under the fluorescent light, check out job sites like Remote.com.
Dear corporations and businesses alike, the time has come. If you have a productive employee who is capable of performing his or her job offsite, and is equipped with all the office technology and collaboration software as needed, and expresses an interest and desire to do so, then c'mon Big Tech, allow your employees the opportunity to work from home, work remotely, work virtually, telecommute... whatever you want to call it. If not, at least bring back the cube farms.
Knowledge Workers: It's Time to Embrace Working Remotely
Why the Gig Economy can be an Online Hell for Workers
The “click-worker” jobs on these platforms can include “filling out questionnaires for academic researchers, transcribing audio, even moderating content for social networks.” These jobs are demanding and require education, yet the people who do them earn an average of only $4.43 an hour, according to a survey of 3,500 workers from 75 countries. That number falls to $3.31 an hour when you factor in unpaid time spent looking for orders, researching clients, and taking qualification tests.
It’s not just workers in poor countries who are paid these wages. Two-thirds of U.S. “Turkers” made less than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. These are “hellish” jobs without even “basic worker protections.” Should a modern society tolerate jobs that come with no worker rights and no possibility of dignified survival? “And even if such jobs are allowed, should they be offered by huge tech companies that provide outsize returns to shareholders?” Shouldn’t gig workers get to live in a world that feels like 2018, not Marx’s 1848?
Congress Doesn't Get Big Tech and Senators Don’t Use E-mail. This Bothers Me.
From Senator Chuck Schumer to Senator Lindsey Graham, many of our elected officials continue to brag about not using email. That's concerning. Even more startling is the fact that Congress doesn't get Big Tech. The Facebook hearing last year made it clear that very few U.S. Senators understand Facebook's business. Most of the questions came from tech-challenged Senators who seemed clueless about how Facebook makes its money and even how the Internet works.
"If a version of Facebook will always be free, how do you sustain a business model in which users don't pay for your service?" Senator Orrin Hatch, the 84-year-old Republican from Utah (who also famously doesn't use email), asked early on in the five-hour hearing. Mark Zuckerberg paused a moment before saying, "Senator, we run ads." He, and his staff sitting behind him, then grinned directly at him. There's a NetLingo word for that Senator Hatch: noob.
Watch this and tell me Congress, do you really want to be laughed at by Big Tech?
Meanwhile Trump is begging Big Tech for free labor to avoid federal hirings, and because of the government shutdown, 45% of employees in the Department of Homeland Security’s newly created Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have been furloughed, in addition to 85% of workers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
This all bothers me so I try to reach out and voice my concern but apparently you need to call, and not email, your legislators. I'm told even if you don’t speak directly to the lawmaker, staff members will often pass the message along in one form or another. Really? With a can and a line of string?
Congress, you cannot afford to be stuck in 1995. As Catherine Rampell from the Washington Post reminds us, the digital revolution is now decades old, affecting virtually every industry and public policy. Senators help make federal laws regulating technology, privacy, cybersecurity, and the digital economy, and for you, ignoring how everyone else in the nation communicates is a form of political malpractice. If you know little or nothing about technology in a technological age, you shouldn't be in the Senate, but if you are, then please hire a consultant like me.
Google, Facebook, and Amazon: A Second Gilded Age of New Monopolies
- Google dominates search, video, and online ads and has an 885 market share in search advertising in the U.S.
- Facebook and its major subsidiaries—Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger—account for 77% of mobile social media traffic.
- Almost $1 of every $2 in online retail sales goes through Amazon.
Flush with revenues of tens of billions of dollars, each company has heavily expanded into other industries:
- Google dominates video (through YouTube), mapping, and personal email;
- Facebook is building consumer drones and virtual reality sets;
- Amazon recently bought the upscale grocery chain Whole Foods for $13.4 billion.
So, what’s wrong with monopolies you may ask? When companies control a market, they tend to use their power to eliminate competition—often to the detriment of consumers. They can force suppliers to lower their prices, cutting their profits, and can bankrupt their rivals by undercutting them—or simply buy them out. Massive companies can also use economies of scale to eliminate jobs—particularly in the digital era, when much work can be automated. All this can result in reduced consumer choice, depressed wages, and a concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer people in fewer locations.
And is that actually occurring? Yes...
- Amazon accounts for 52% of all U.S. book sales, 43 percent of all online commerce, and 45 percent of the fast-growing cloud-computing market. The Seattle-based company has put most brick-and-mortar bookstores out of business, and last year had online sales six times higher than those of Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Nordstrom, Home Depot, Macy’s, Kohl’s, and Costco combined! The self-proclaimed “Everything Store” has absorbed many of its competitors, buying the largest online shoe retailer (Zappos), the most popular live-streaming video platform (Twitch), and the market leader in baby products (Diapers.com). When the latter initially refused to sell, Amazon simply slashed its prices for its own baby products until Diapers.com capitulated.
- Facebook boasts 2 billion active users—more than a quarter of the human race. When CEO Mark Zuckerberg saw a social media threat from Instagram and WhatsApp, he spent $20 billion to buy them. A third social media competitor, Snapchat, rejected an offer of $3 billion, so Facebook launched a feature on Instagram essentially replicating Snapchat’s self-deleting videos and photos. Within a year, Instagram Stories has already attracted more daily users than its rival.
- Google’s parent company, Alphabet, acquires an average of one company a week. More than 1 billion people worldwide use Gmail. For Google, Amazon, and Facebook’s stockholders and executives, this staggering level of success has created enormous wealth, and the companies’ customers benefit from the unprecedented convenience their various services provide.
- The newspaper industry is one example. Facebook and Google control more than 70% of the $73 billion digital advertising market in the U.S. Many of those dollars used to go to media companies: Between 2006 and 2016, U.S. newspaper advertising revenue plummeted from $50 billion to $18 billion, and the number of jobs in the industry has been cut by more than half, from 411,000 in 2001 to 174,000 in 2016. Journalism websites, too, are struggling to survive, because Facebook and Google eat up most of the online ad dollars.
- Department stores and malls are another example. Hundreds of major retail stores have shut their doors because of the shift to online shopping, and dozens of malls have gone dark or are half empty. That, in turn, has damaged the vitality of downtowns and surrounding communities. “The communities wither away, and they never come back,” said Howard Davidowitz, an investment banker and consultant to the retail industry.
Facebook, Google, and Amazon argue that they’re not true monopolies, because their much smaller competitors are only a click away—something that wasn’t the case with, say, AT&T before it was broken up. And the Big Tech beasts spend vast sums keeping lawmakers on their side: Facebook alone poured $3.2 million into federal lobbying in one quarter alone. But this is neither true nor fair to the American public.
Ultimately, consumers will have to rebel en masse against these companies before U.S. lawmakers or regulators will take any action—and there’s no sign that will happen, so one of my New Year's resolutions will be to figure out a way to contact elected officials and educate you as to how the Internet actually works and why Big Tech needs regulation.
Brain Hacking – Top Internet Term of 2018: Big Tech Gets Us Addicted
Each year I
identify the Top Internet Jargon of the Year, the Top Internet Acronym of the
Year, the worthy terms that made the Top 10 List, and 5 online trends to look
for in the coming year.
The Internet
term of 2018 is brain hacking, and the Top Internet Acronym of the Year is NSFW
– Not Safe For Work; the rest of the list includes: clap back, co-working,
FIRE, woke, lawnmower parent, QAnon, #TFA and blockchain. Check it out! HOW
MANY HAVE YOU HEARD OF?
Everyone's
talking tech this year, from POTUS to Congress and Millennials to Big Tech.
Here are the Top 10 Internet Terms for 2018. Explanations of the linked terms
are on NetLingo.com:
1. brain hacking - 2018
Jargon of the Year, big
tech is hooking us by making smartphones a habit, even Silicon Valley is
ditching their devices due to Internet addiction,
digital detox and
child tech
addiction. ADULTS: Please take this 8-question quiz, and for your KIDS: please ask them this 12-question quiz. The term "brain hacking" comes from hijacking peoples' minds to form a habit and
it specifically refers to the way Silicon Valley is engineering smartphones, apps and social media to get us hooked, and to
get you and your family to feel the need to check in constantly. You know when
you're on a mobile social media site and you pull
down on the news feed to get it to refresh, and
you see that little circle scrolling clockwise... that's called the pull-down refresh and the guy who
invented it, is sorry he did because people are now addicted. Read the full story here.
2. NSFW - 2018 Acronym of the
Year "Not Safe For Work" from post-#MeToo movements to celebrities
tweeting “NSFW headlines” it inspired the new book “NSFW:
The Little Black Book of Acronyms”
3. clap back - If Oxford’s word
is toxic, then the twitterverse
is clapping back… it’s a noun, it’s a verb, it’s never been used more than NOW
as influencers continue
to perfect the art of the clapback, thx Ja Rule
4. co-working – sharing
workplaces, it’s a millennial
trend with co-living
and co-sharing;
working in the industry and living in urban areas is impacting people’s lives
and creating new business opportunities
5. FIRE – it means
"Financial Independence, Retire Early" bravo to millennial crusaders
who are geeking out
calculating compound interest and blowing up the whole concept of career and
retirement
6. woke – young and old are
becoming aware, like a man who’s a feminist, or a person's awareness of current
affairs, it implies knowledge and empathy as in "You’re woke, so now
things are, you know, real."
7. lawnmower parent
– first tiger,
then elephant, helicopter, dolphin, attachment, free-range,
lawnmowers "mow down" a path for their snowflakes removing all
obstacles that may cause a struggle
8. QAnon – what started as a cryptic post grew into a sprawling
alternative theory about all things fake
9. #TFA – Omarosa said “they'd
just hashtag it ‘TFA’
and move on when Trump did something insane,” it refers to the Twenty Fifth
Amendment, as in the removal of the POTUS in the event of
impairment…
10. blockchain – the muscle
behind bitcoin (which
Scrabble just added) it makes bitcoin transactions secure, reliable, and
anonymous, it fueled a cryptocurrency
craze and helps with ocean plastic too!
Read more
about the bold terms on NetLingo.com and the Top 5 Online Trends to Watch in
2019:
1. deepfake / facial recognition
/ faceprint – OMG
deepfake wait until you see the photo
2. social credit / social scoring / reputation score
– scary stuff from China, wait it’s from big tech too
3. AI / artificial
intelligence / machine
learning / robotics
– unbelievable developments
4. YIMBY & JOMO - Yes In My Back Yard
& Joy Of Missing Out – new attitude (not NIMBY & FOMO)
5. CBD – yes, as in the
oil, it’s not an actual acronym
because it stands for Cannabidiol
The Top 10
Internet Terms of the Year, compiled by Erin
Jansen, founder of NetLingo.com
Subscribe to
the NetLingo Blog via Email or RSS here
Follow @netlingo on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook
Please copy and distribute! Our purpose is to educate and
entertain :)
DatingNews.com: Get "NSFW" to Decode Flirtatious Slang for Sexty Singles
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQFY7CY_In3mgpkuPcQFe38fIm7vODdyJkLgYy0biRoBz9jCTMzyFBcjWxI8zDkBSZzVW78w-xzTmBQWp-gD46AVdCurhTSiwIH-2pqYXJQ87rmr83ZeBRxqpzUlLrbzdSKs_SUQ/s1600/NSFW_NetLingo_DatingNews_feature.jpg)
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivbAbWg_MDZOejpM4CtuBN63FhXHkh0MQwm8115Js8uBFsEQKwJExrfBiZUOIBhx8bdRaJxXsF6obGL38m3iTlgdZjHRnrBy63CB5-8-wKB0rvG-kKBGZn7iv_uPHL9XTQOL5n5Q/s320/erinandmarthatalkingmed.jpg)
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLjKIK7xxpg_3p9nnec1gIfLuYsmgjAdFtGS5ydSs1zOUIiVN0F48CT8P0UL4JZZjsN_veNMnn0BY1dJNoPTfFG9IpSv3MjHlz68rp4sAmljQLGRQRjUlLobuxp8m2NhzuaPvoVw/s1600/naughty-or-nice-netlingo.jpg)
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDnT_EPXwppNsZjWSu-7-uwQeq1T7U6-EsgZuCwXomEBMcr8Ld27sV8bwLcFnfI6FKlpYRZzH8UaRdsQ2uq5hDLzf4k_5nn-d8pR82uA8Dn6VpPd0WeNPMDqayGw8MXfRO7pIJbA/s200/bighug.png)
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSv04pCjzfI7ZlT32XmXSFyeJJ2OfV-ILLKiidmvrEYidWacFD__zxScBLHEUXSta1mleX-_k35ff_VyEWdoJoj9qXrvhqkGa_CSZRvOhMrSS9u9NqG7Kpym2lrKw_LO2xtpPI4g/s200/Busted-NSFW.png)
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMniGRaXrT6sxGvjVhyNF44SwVkwI2k3wiYiHTeGZcW6b4ioEHdvNMUzyPxLPvNNC4dK59U6QHeJcTwzfFO56KgzDlk_1VMN1L0qDFvCjJodtlkINVZAiQ0zMy7azocQyCt9FNaw/s1600/NSFW-on-tablet.jpg)
Hayley is the Editor-in-Chief of DatingNews, and she handles editorial schedules, interviews, social media, and partnerships, among other things. She's been in the dating industry for more than six years, and her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Bustle, Cosmo, the Huffington Post, AskMen, and Entrepreneur.
Whether They’re Naughty or Nice, NetLingo has Your Holiday Gifts Covered
Sex Sells. Let’s A/B Test that Puppy and See Who Bites
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqjcCpAN6mTefkQB1KQ4NRc_4fWGmymkotzamAPdw-EW4mTapI97LCeSgj5_L7Mg0IIttQ430L4IzOKhyuGY44EoUJ84GmReAGMWcZ410GpGfFU4OoOmi7d43gKMQ_UKBoW1Chdw/s1600/nsfw-blog-post.jpg)
WTF? He Told You the Motive on Social Media: No More “Hopes and Prayers”
Big Tech has a Saudi Arabia Problem: Apple's Hypocrisy
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjpnvImqqInVcpStqgVDFjt6XxKwfQL5CWGrmCzuDTrExBCF1zJ-vb9Yjp3I4V0tYHedu4pS4Xva2edhLC1Le5rIAGmU-PE0aAHbxIZbgH9Eh_op9foQjAFxCz8DbubrOfRpNeLA/s1600/apple-saudis.jpg)
Investment in Saudi Arabia will prove controversial for Apple. With its draconian form of sharia law, Saudi Arabia’s autocratic government is consistently rated among “the worst of the worst” human rights offenders. Its gender apartheid system treats women as second-class citizens, shrouded in fabric, dependent on male chaperones, and barred from going out alone and from any form of public life. The country has notoriously strict anti-LGBT laws as opposed to Apple's pro-LGBT stances in the U.S. and elsewhere. There’s no freedom of religion. The press is censored. They're covering up the killing of one of their own nationals in their own embassy, allegedly sawing his limbs off and desolving him in acid. Brutal, public floggings and stonings are the penalty for committing adultery. Those arrested are routinely tortured to extract confessions. They've jailed the country's elite inside the Ritz Carlton, for years. Last year, Saudi Arabia put to death 146 people for crimes including murder and drug dealing; most of the executions were beheadings. Not to mention the U.S.-backed military campaign in neighboring Yemen which is killing thousands and putting millions of people at risk of starvation, including whatever else we don't know...? It's not worth it.
China is Beating Us at Our Own AI Game = Not Good for Your Grandkids
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgciROV9cG4p6vZEw3jLP2lP2PEF4SsUWmQetOEwqP3gByn2r2XhFh7LuIRovr9V8L0KdLI4uC0NZuGp0x8HyxXl0NhjYDTWSW3cn33URoYc_KLUsm3PYm10bl5q5TRwpHzKNBvsQ/s1600/china-usa-ai.jpg)