The Value Of Value
We live in a physical world, and sooner or later someone, somewhere has to make a thing for someone else, somewhere else. Today’s whiz-bang techno-stuff too often can make the appreciation of value difficult.
The theory of value as a result of human labor has been around for quite a while, perhaps even before Protagoras observed that man is the measure of all things. Until not all that long ago, transaction value was experienced by all in a very direct way. Personal relationships at the point of mutual exchange, if not with a producer (e.g., a farmer) then with someone else who’s labor added value (e.g., a merchant).
The role software played in these exchanges, in the early days at least, was more or less as a multiplier of labor and, thus, of value. Automating something not only made the process more efficient, but made the labor component more productive. The economic history of the US of A has been one where capital has always been cheap relative to deploying labor, in sharp contrast to, say, Europe with its long experience in fixed land and primogeniture.
A corollary to this is that something with little labor content has little value, which is one consequence of the anonymity of the WWW, ranging from social networks to sites of sites that aggregate but provide no original content.
More particularly, if a site operator has no human contact with either a visitor/customer or a vendor/supplier, than what little value the operator brings to, say, a purchase that is fulfilled by someone else, can easily be projected to the perceived value of anonymous customers and remote suppliers.
This can manifest itself in many ways, some subtle, some glaring. Using a font with a name that many would find objectionable, and some find insulting and repulsive, is easy to do when there’s no direct feedback. A more tangible example is having a high product return rate because the customer’s monitor has different color characteristics than that of the site’s designer.
Value only has, well, real value when there’s an exchange between real people; the software that enables the technology to accomplish such a transaction is merely a medium by which it occurs.