This is a fact of life: everything evolves. Things get better. That general rule has governed technological growth for tens and hundreds of years now. Consumer computers have become smaller and faster. Even in transportation, moving from point A to point B has gotten less or a nuisance and, in fact, faster. And for that matter, sending messages has evolved from the ever-slow continental snail mail and telegrams to instant communication in email and instant messaging.
Wait. Is email the means of communicating today? Do you still have casual conversations over email, or is THAT even delayed communication?
A New Means of Communication
When thinking about communication, a new wave of sites might come to mind. Specifically, with the social networking movement, Facebook and MySpace. As with many websites out there, it might have been appropriate to assume that this movement is a short-lived phenomenon. But to many, including presidents and founders of Social networking sites, the movement goes far deeper than that. Specifically, this movement is often labeled as a possible new main mean of communication — replacing the venerable email system as our main form of communication. That is quite extraordinary — how the way we communicate things can go through a single company on a single website. The president of Scriptovia.com, Asheem Badshas, mentioned as much: “For me even IM died, and was replaced by text messaging. Facebook will replace e-mail for communicating with certain people.” As a new means of communication, do we simply check Facebook or MySpace everyday to find out how people are doing, or to catch up on friends?
Furthermore, what are some of the ways that social networking sites have affected its users? Does it extend far beyond a simple means of communication?
When you look back at communication by telegrams and snail mail, you can clearly see a difference. Those means of communicating with one another relied on physical transportation which is much slower. There was a tendency to be able to wait on exchange of information. In addition, writing a letter as opposed to typing keys into a program injected a noted level of authenticity in conveying yourself. Granted, you convey more about what you’re talking about when meeting with someone face to face, talking to that person right in front of them. However, text in a program is a series of codes that have no emotional or conveying value. It’s just a series of 0′s and 1′s. What’s to come from that?
A Shift in Social Attitudes
In any computing site, whether it be Facebook, Microsoft’s Wallop, or MySpace, there is “instant gratification.” In short, the time you convey your thoughts to the time that you get a response is so little that you can satiate curiosities instantaneously. Now, instead of waiting for a response from a person who may be tentative about spending the time to write and send a letter, you can instead, use your mouse and keyboard to convey everything you need to. It seems, as a result of this instant exchange of information, that there is more perceived pressure to keep up with everything. You don’t necessarily have to keep mining around, hear rumors, and talk to people anymore — rather, you need to spend more time in front of your computers on any social networking site to soak up information. What used to be a word-of-mouth exchange of information is now up to bits of data on the Internet.
Be Heard
A part of any Web 2.0 branch is the ability to be heard. The individual user on the Internet has the power to broadcast his/her voice in varied formats. In YouTube, this manifests itself through the sharing of digital videos. For blogs, you can broadcast your own feelings and thoughts. And similarly with social networking sites, you can control the content that you post and read and you can be heard. The ability to make you heard is easier now that the world has “shrunk” as a result of instant communication. Some previous examples range from someone dancing to a Dragostea Din Tei clip to declaring interest in running for the Presidency in the upcoming 2008 election. On Facebook and MySpace, users have even declared engagements through profiles. Quite simply, it’s a powerful medium to be heard and is a large addition to information technology.
My Thoughts: New Communication or a Social Shift?
In the generation where the Internet allows instant communication, I think that many more Web 2.0 services are possible. More specifically, the concept of the new web where you can be heard allows for people throughout the world to be the audience of a service. To me, the movement goes beyond a simple new means of communication. Surely, I still check my email often and communicate frequently using it and social networking sites. However, the simple concept of a world-wide audience allows for many more opportunities to be the “next great movement.” Social networking happens to be one of them right now. And this definitely has implications throughout normal society and life more than just simply your Internet personality. To be armed with the amount of power the Internet has to offer today, any movement is possible.
I’ll leave you all with a quote from the late Peter Drucker: “The new information technology, Internet and e-mail, have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.”
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i agree, email is being rapidly replaced by facebook private messaging for me, with the friends that have a facebook profile
It is both “New Communication” and a “Social Shift” for particular cases and persons. Sometimes I’ve found myself into a situation where someone in my workplace who knew me, and wanted to be a friend in facebook, but didn’t even give me a greeting when passing by, like he/she doesn’t know me at all. But most of the time it is truly a new way of communication, where we can extend more of our already established real (physical) social network.