Yes, Facebook addicts, must get out to socialize more!

 

Facebook addicts should get out and socialise more

The Star/Asia News Network

WITH every new level of technology comes a corresponding wave of casualties.

From theft victims careless with their bank ATM cards to gullible folk cheated in online scams, the story is familiar enough.

So today we see the rise of Facebook addicts. The fact that this involves victims without criminal perpetrators does not make it any less serious.

Facebook addiction has been known to affect the psychological and physical health of its victims.

It also affects the personal relationships that victims had, or might have had, with others around them.

It is therefore a personal, domestic and social problem. The affliction is universally acknowledged by health professionals who have dubbed it Facebook Addiction Disorder (FAD).

It is compulsive, invasive of one's personal life, distorts priorities, damages one's capacity to relate to others around them and disorientates one to reality.

There are withdrawal symptoms, pangs of “cold turkey” and it is all downright senseless and wasteful.
How can it then be addressed effectively?

Relying on addicts to stop their addiction is not going to work. Neither will legislation, since Facebook can all too easily be accessed through computers or smartphones.

With children and young adults, FAD is particularly pernicious because it eats away at their health in their formative years.

Yet, it is with young addicts that the problem is perhaps easier to avoid with prudent parental intervention.

Adults as parents or guardians therefore have a responsibility to ensure that those under their care do not fall victim to FAD. And as adults anyway, with or without others under their care, they need to set an example by not falling victim themselves.

If push comes to shove, there is always the off switch.

For Malaysians to “have the most Facebook friends in the world” may at first sound gratifying, but in reality it is a condition ridden with problems and liabilities.

The best friends tend to be those you encounter in the flesh. A “friend” in cyberspace may be very unreal, whether as a notional friend of a friend, a fictional character, or even a predator.

If Malaysians have the most virtual friends in the world, it may well be that we have the least real friends in the world. And that would be another tragedy in itself.



Hi, I was a Facebook addict

I REFER to “Hooked on FB”  (Jan 20), on Facebook Addicton Disorder (FAD), and agree with Dr Nivashinie Mohan’s statement that people with this disorder “continue to go undetected because most addicts do not realise or admit they have a problem”.

If there had been a circle of addicts on the floor at the FAD forum, I would have introduced myself and said: “Hello everyone, I was a Facebook addict”.

When I decided to navigate to the “deactivate account” button last December, I thought I was making the hardest decision I would ever make, having been a Facebook member since 2006.

I did not have hundreds and thousands of friends (most of whom we ignore anyway and just concentrate on the five to ten so-called friends), but it was the excitement of waking up every morning literally dying to know what the rest of the world was up to.

I was an active lurker looking into my friends’ beautifully edited photos of where they went on holiday, what they cooked for their children last night, friends updating their status every five minutes (as if having a huge following on Twitter wasn’t enough) somebody’s wedding, graduation and etc.

After a while, I felt funny. Why is this so important? Why can’t we call, visit or text each other instead? Wouldn’t this be more intimate, more humanly possible to touch base sans the social network?

Aren’t we concerned about the security of our information over the Internet? A paedophile would have a field day ogling at our children’s profiles and the repercussions would be devastating.

And aren’t political and racial updates overly nauseating?

Don’t make me start with friends who actually upload positive thoughts by the dozen until you actually think they are really closet pessimists who crave attention (yes, that is yet another disorder).

Then again, self realisation is the best way to overcome any disorder, and admitting it is the next step to get oneself out of the problem. Who knows, maybe FAD sufferers may get help from support groups or toll free numbers in future.

To each his own, as the old saying goes.

For the majority, it is necessary to maintain one’s Facebook account as it is a vital part of one’s life and we are, as long as we are the ones in control.

For the minority, like me, we choose not to be the norm and will find other alternative communicating routes to get our messages across.

SUZLENE ZAKARIAH,
Seri Kembangan.

Have clear policy on FB for workers 

Bosses must devise solutions to deal with this IT challenge!

I WOULD like to share my opinion in relation to “Bosses face problem with workers wasting time on FB” (The Star, Jan 20). The use of social networking websites and its easy accessibility has posed a lot more challenges and problems to the employer than has been pointed out.

Social network, depending on the nature of the work, can be good or bad for productivity. For some it’s one of the most cost and time effective way to promote and achieve sales targets.

Some government agencies and NGOs use it in their work to reach more people and to better know their stakeholders.

For those who work long hours or are on the graveyard shift and are detached from family and friends, it may help reduce stress.

Social networking can be a recruitment tool. Some employers and recruitment agents use it to do background checks on employees.

On the converse, it can severely affect productivity as employees waste countless hours on social networking. When done in the office, it increases unwarranted Internet traffic and slows down office network speed.

A major issue which has got a lot of attention globally is employees making statements about their employers that are considered negative by the employer.

While statements which tend to lower the reputation of the employer in public can be considered libel, it is more complicated when it comes to employment relationships. There are two schools of thought.

In the UK, the employment tribunal upheld a decision by Apple to sack an employee for posting on Facebook his displeasure about his iPhone and various aspects of his company even though his remarks only reached certain people due to the privacy settings.

In the US, the National Labour Relations Board (NLRB) came to an opposite conclusion and found illegal a company’s decision to fire an employee based on disparaging remarks about her employer and on a work place incident she sent from her home computer 
.
I feel the UK approach is better. A negative statement by an employee can severely affect the employer. The company’s reputation is at stake, and it may affect the employer’s business goodwill and profits. Some job seekers might shun the company purely based on hearsay.

And, in a more sinister way, social networking can be used to disrupt industrial harmony by organising illegal strikes to cripple an entire industry and bring down the economy.

I don’t feel that a strict policy on social networking may discourage young ones from joining a particular company.

The main concern for the working young, or everyone for that matter, is the pay and benefits, and of course job satisfaction.

An employee frequently using social network at work should face disciplinary action to serve as a reminder to the perpetrator and to show others how serious the employer views such complacency.

And of course for the company to take disciplinary action it has to have rules to begin with. As long as there are no sanctions, employees will continually flout company rules and slack.

But again some might argue that it may not always be practical in real life as the world and society are addicted to social networking.

Some young employees, fresh to the working world, have no clue on responsible working etiquette and may think that employers don’t mind them engaging in social networking during work hours.

It is important that a clear policy is drawn up by the employers and brought to the attention of employees on how the company feels about it and how it affects them.

The responsibility of discipline at work does not start with the HR/IR practitioners. Our education system should have an active role in educating and shaping young ones who will be joining the work force one day.

Not only institutes of higher education like colleges and universities but schools as well should inculcate responsible work etiquette which includes being on the social network during work hours, among other things. Sadly, this is lacking.

While it is almost impossible to prevent employees from accessing social network sites, as it can be easily accessed through their smart phones, both employers and capable HR/IR practitioners have to come up with proper solutions to deal with whatever challenges advancement of technology throws at them.

JOHN MARK,Segamat.

Related post: 
You addicted to Facebook ?

The natural evolution of markets

THINK ASIAN By ANDREW SHANG 

 

Market change: A general view of ebay headquarters in San Jose, California. Websites like ebay and Alibaba has eliminated geographical space by allowing transactions in rural markets to be done online. —Reuters

Man is a social animal. The 19th century sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel argued that trade and exchange is “one of the purest and most primitive forms of human socialisation.” Last month, while travelling through remote parts of West Timor, in Indonesia, I was able to study first-hand how rural markets operate. I could not help wondering why so-called primitive markets such as these work so well when complex financial markets can be so dysfunctional?

Rural markets in East Timor are wonders of trade. Men and women in tribal costume converge on different villages on different days of the week. Everyone knows when to go to which village for these markets, which typically start at dawn when produce is fresh and often finish by 11am. Economists would surely call this scene of bustling rural commerce a “concentration of liquidity.”

As the late Stanford economist John McMillan argued, the market is a human construction- a tool. The market has features to make it work smoothly: mechanisms to organise buying and selling; channels for information flow; laws that define property rights, and self-regulating rules that govern behaviour.

Most rural markets are much more complex than they appear. They sell everything needed for daily life and have their own hierarchies. The stalls of wealthier, established traders are sheltered and in the best locations, while poorer traders just spread their wares on the ground. Specialisation is evident even in this basic setting there are designated places to buy textiles, fresh meat or fish, vegetables or household goods. These markets also function efficiently as information exchanges. Prices differ depending on who you are and what you know. Tourists pay more because they do not know the local language or rules, while locals bargain vigorously.

In these basic markets, you can observe the entire range of business evolution, from simple production, to wholesaling to final sale. Everything is designed for convenience and to reduce transaction costs. For instance, there are no roadside petrol pumps. Instead, petrol is sold in small bottles because the most common transport are motorbike taxis that carry as many as three passengers plus the occasional chicken or bag of rice.

The permeation of technologies like mobile phones and the internet even into these remote rural areas has accelerated the speed at which information travels through these markets. This means even lower transaction costs between business, between consumers, and from businesses to consumers. In some instances, use of websites like eBay and Alibaba have eliminated geographical space by allowing transactions in such markets to be done online.

With technology ending the isolation of rural markets and linking them to global markets, the production and marketing game is changing beyond recognition. A similar phenomenon occurred in the airline industry. Budget airlines use the internet to sell forward excess capacity at below average cost, thus filling their planes to capacity and maximising profits. This created a new market because before, many people could not afford to fly.

You see the effect of high transportation costs clearly in rural markets. Here, locally produced goods are ludicrously cheap, but imported good are very expensive.

The study of modern, sophisticated supply chains enables us to appreciate the fact that producers do not necessarily make most of their money in the product-to-consumer chain. The rule of thumb is that if a product costs US$1 to make, the distribution and transportation costs may account for US$3 of the US$4 final sale price to the consumer. Common conceptions of innovation still focus largely on creating new products, whereas services or process innovation are probably much more profitable and add more value than is generally understood.

To illustrate, the global trade regime still has a “hardware” focus, concentrating on physical trade rather than the more complex and less measured services trade. Apple innovated not in manufacturing, but in design and lifestyle. This means that it can sell a product at much higher prices than its competitors. Once it has captured a market, value creation comes from downloading new apps for the iPhone and iPad.

Financial services have emerged as one of the most profitable businesses, certainly until the last financial crisis. For a time before the 2007 crisis, the turn on capital in the financial sector was 20% per annum, significantly higher than for manufacturing and other real sector businesses.

With the benefit of hindsight, we now know there were two major reasons for the large profits in finance. The first is that the physical cost of creation of a financial derivative is almost zero, as it is an abstract product of its creator's imagination. For many, the reason to buy a derivative is to hedge and reduce risk. If a buyer believes that the hedge is useful, which it can be under specific circumstances then he or she will be willing to pay a premium for that hedge. A second reason is leverage. The greater the leverage, the larger the profits are for both lender and borrower. But there is a catch it adds systemic risk to the entire market and can be fatal to the over-leveraged borrower.

The FX Accummulator is a good example. It is a financial product that looks and feels like a wonderful foreign exchange hedge that yields good profits for the speculator. However, many were not aware that at certain price levels, the amount of margin called by the lender could be greater than the total assets held by the speculator. Thus, what appears to be a “safe” hedge can turn out to be toxic, particularly when markets are volatile.

This raises the question whether financial markets have evolved beyond the limits of social safety. University of Southampton Professor Richard Werner is one of the first to point out that there are two aspects of credit creation one that contributes to real value creation and one that does not. Financial markets have evolved into highly complex systems that consumers, financial experts or regulators do not fully understand. Increasingly, they contribute less to social utility and become systemically fragile.

As McMillan presciently pointed out, “markets are not miraculous. There are problems they cannot address. Left to themselves, markets can fail. Viewed as tools, markets need be neither revered nor reviled just allowed to operate where they are useful.”

Rural markets arise from communities that have organised their commerce in such a way that reinforces social utility and stability. The Holy Grail of financial theory and practice in the world's advanced economies is to identify at what level of complexity financial markets exceed the limits of social stability.

Andrew Sheng is President of Fung Global Institute.

Auditing in hard times

OPTIMISTICALLY CAUTIOUS By ERROL OH

HOW bad will things be this year? Everybody has some thoughts on that, but nobody really knows, of course. But if you're thinking of turning to the accountants and auditors for some reassurance and optimism amid the gloom, you're definitely barking up the wrong tree.

The fact is, this fraternity is already bracing for the worst and is calling upon members to be on the lookout for signs of trouble as they carry out their work.

On Dec 28, the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB), the New York-based independent standard-setting body, issued a press release to draw attention to the challenges that accounts preparers and auditors currently face.

“The global economy continues to experience difficult conditions as the effects of the financial crisis for example, on corporate cash flows and access to credit persist. Volatility in capital markets, and issues including measurement and disclosure of exposures to sovereign debt of distressed countries, continue to create uncertainty,” says the board.

“The impact of these issues and uncertainty has wide-ranging financial reporting implications that often extend beyond national borders.”

The IAASB points out that such conditions make it challenging for management of entities, those charged with governance, and auditors to do their jobs.

According to the board, among the tough aspects of this groups' responsibilities are assessing an entity's ability to continue as a going concern and making relevant disclosures in the financial statements and auditor's report.



(In accounting, the going-concern concept assumes that an entity will continue operating indefinitely. Therefore, its accounts are prepared accordingly and there's no need to reflect the possibility that the entity will soon grind to a halt and its assets sold off.)

The board reminds auditors of the requirements of the International Standards on Auditing (ISAs). It adds that in every assignment, an auditor must weigh whether it's appropriate for the management to use the going-concern assumption.

Said IAASB chairman Professor Arnold Schilder: “Difficult economic conditions give rise to many important audit considerations, but none more important or more difficult than evaluating management's assessment of an entity's ability to continue as a going concern and determining the appropriate auditor reporting in the circumstances.”

What's interesting is that the board has asked auditors to refer to a three-year-old document titled Audit Considerations in Respect of Going Concern in the Current Economic Environment.\

“While this Audit Practice Alert was released in context of the 2008-2009 credit crisis, many of the matters addressed in it are equally relevant today,” said Schilder.

“For example, an entity may be experiencing a decline in its financial health, or may have material uncertainties arising from direct or indirect exposures to sovereign debt of distressed countries. Auditors are therefore encouraged to review the Alert and, importantly, the relevant requirements in the ISAs.”

On Wednesday, the Malaysian Institute of Accountants (MIA) came out with a circular that's largely based on the IAASB press release.

Says MIA executive director Ho Foong Moi in the circular: “Auditors in Malaysia similarly should take cognisance of the currently-challenging global economy and accordingly must remain alert throughout the audit to identify and critically examine evidence of events or conditions that may exist nationally or globally which may cast significant doubt on an entity's ability to continue as a going concern.

“Auditors must continue to exercise professional scepticism and judgment in evaluating financial-statement disclosures and the implications for the auditor's report when a material-uncertainty exists relating to events or conditions that, individually or collectively, may cast significant doubt on the entity's ability to continue as a going concern.”

So, the message is clear these days, auditors have to be more questioning about the standard-management assumption that a business is in a position to go on and on. After all, which management will readily admit that the entity is reaching the end of the road?

The truth is, many businesses fail, even in the best of times. And when the economies and industries go through rough patches, it's harder to hide flaws in business models and weaknesses in how businesses are run. And when this happens, many people depend on the accountants and auditors to raise the red flags.

Therefore, the huge economic uncertainties we're experiencing now are as much a test of the profession's alertness and integrity as they are a test of the businesses' strength and resilience.

Executive editor Errol Oh didn't like tests when he was in school and that hasn't changed. But now he at least recognises that testing serves a purpose.