 We can now communicate on Facebook, Twitter, Email, Text, YouTube as well as our permanently attached mobile phones! With the latest gadgets you can share photos, videos, snippets of news from any or every website in the world. A social networking website like Facebook or MySpace becomes your journal, your newsletter, your personal website, your communications device, a personal recording of your discussions, thoughts and all the events happening around you.You can now easily share with friends by invitation, and friends of friends are included, automatic seeking software begins to match other people you know via email traces or matching locations and interests. Eventually, (with your permission), you can establish an enormous exponentially growing network of everyone you know, have ever known, and all their contacts too! It's the fastest way to become popular, if that's your choice, or for those who choose to do so, a way to keep a private journal of thoughts, events, pictures, videos and news clippings. Is it an effective way to communicate? Or, does it matter whether or not it's effective?
Ever since the home internet became as compelling to have as a set of knives and forks in your kitchen, I'm certain there are a few of us who became curious about having a website of our own. A place to express creativity and pride, display photographs of travel, cars, children, occasions, write stories and describe events. And with the web - your audience becomes the entire online world. It's a lot like the annual family newsletter which can become a boring expose of life. The slide nights back in the sixties and seventies. Entertaining at first, and saved having to repeat the same stories by snail mail or person to person. Well history has repeated again... the same boring stories are now online. But is this different? Is it just because it's new that makes it acceptable? Typical of all generational mediums, it may appear to somehow be more tasteful than the family newsletter or slide night, and I'm not sure how that is possible. There is enormous peer pressure guidance to make sure submissions stay in check. Unwritten codes of conduct and converted meanings of words like "wall" and "tag". Even if you don't know what these terms actually mean - it just doesn't matter! You can smile and nod, while deceptively acknowledging your awareness and web 2.0 savvy. As a web designer and programmer (yes just smile and nod and humour me at least!) I am on a massive learning curve with this new technology. This new phase in our ever changing world could be best described as... 'anything goes, as long as you don't get killed in the process'. And about the usefulness for business?
I believe that if a social technology networker, (which means someone making a post on the likes of FaceBook), a blogger, and an author of an email can influence their peers by just being online, randomly posting stuff, saying good things, saying bad things, speaking their mind and it just seems to make the modern day wheels turn somehow. This may mean this new technology is becoming the most effective communications tool ever. Major corporations to lonely individuals are entertaining the medium - so I suppose, if you have the time and the patience... just google stuff, speak your mind, and go share it online. |
