Helping your business to do more business
Thursday, 29 October 2009
Over the past few years one of the drivers of the adoption of computers into everyday life has been the invention of the myriad ways that we can communicate with others through our computers. Of course at the root of this revolution has been the internet and the increasingly easy way in which we can connect to it at ever faster speeds.
So let's just take stock of all the options we've got available to us:
Twenty years ago that list was much shorter, we had the Post, Telephones and Fax, but Mobile Phones were relatively new and expensive so few people had them. As for email, well that is one of the older internet related technologies, but relatively few people would have had an email address back then.
About twelve years or so ago the internet finally started to reach the mass market as people realised how much information was available to them via the web and how easy the web (and search engines) made accessing that information. Not forgetting how much easier it was to send an email rather than a letter through the post (a practice which has all but died out), which is probably the biggest driver of early adoption. Since that time many people have become more and more connected, with most of us now having at least one email address. Some will have a web site, while some will also have instant messaging accounts, maybe a Facebook profile or a Twitter account.
It's clear that as a species the ability to communicate is important to us, it can be the only explanation for why the technologies I've highlighted in red have become so popular so relatively quickly (Twitter has only been around for a couple years). All those technologies allow us to communicate with our friends and family for little if any expense, with some of them (such as a web site or a social networking site) extending that to potentially billions of people.
But excepting Instant Messaging which is more like a phone call, these technologies also allow us to dip in and out, change our status, post a quick blog article or message and then leave it to others to find it and view it. That means we can communicate with a large number of people with little effort, far more than most of us could ever hope to either in person or by post or the telephone. So now it is possible for ordinary people to have a voice in a way that they never could have had before, and as more of us communicate in this way perhaps that will eventually lead us to be more tolerant and understanding of our differences. Maybe then our society will become more democratic, then again perhaps it's already happening (think about the furore on Twitter regarding the attempt to cover up the dumping of toxic waste in Africa).