There is a delicate balance when it comes to the technologies which are around at the moment. I am talking about, but not exclusively, Social Networking and Mobile Devices.
What do I mean by delicate balance then? Well, thinking of it this way:
- There has been a lot of talk recently about companies banning the use of “social software” while at work, even during lunchtime / breaks.
- The use of Blackberry Devices, iPhones and other Smartphones allow you to get emails and phone calls wherever you are. In fact, some big companies give Blackberry devices out to employees so that they are more likely to become dependent on them and are more likely to answer an email or a call outside of working hours.
- The working at home / telecommuting mode of thought: you find yourself reading emails or checking out new information about something-or-other (trust me, I am in this situation almost every day - even weekends).
- Calculating and Storing stuff is now easier and cheaper to do.
We have two things going on here:
Taking into consideration points (2) and (3)
More information is available, more information overload, higher stress levels, more of a need to organise stuff, more of a need to get rid of stuff. [tongue-in-cheek-point]More of a need for a Semantic Web[/tongue-in-cheek-point]
Taking into consideration point (1)
Companies that have started banning the use of social software, even during lunchtime could be damaging something quite useful. A few points I want to make here:
- Companies that ban Social Software tend to be the same companies that have old style marketing techniques.
- A good company will see the use in Social Software as a new/fresh marketing technique, or try to find some other innovative way of utilising the concept.
- Social Software could also be used as a collaboration techniques. There are plenty of companies using collaboration software, to generate ideas or to plan something or to develop something (the whole reason for “Extreme Programming”/”Agile Development” is to create stuff quickly with a lot of communication at the same time)
Taking into consideration point (4)
Point 4 is an interesting one, and it can make people go one of at least two ways:
- People can focus on more intellectually demanding stuff because their basic information is stored in a nice format, in an easy to access place.
- People can focus on too much “recreational” stuff, and can start to become a lot more dumb, and/or start having a silly attitude like “fashun an’ carz an’ gurlz are evrythn. I got my devize to store my bling data, so I can focuz on my evrythns”
I think obviously my first bullet point here is more desirable, and obviously there will need to be easier/quicker ways to access information the more we get into the future ([tongue-in-cheek]which brings us back to a Semantic Web solution such as Virtuoso, where you can organise your data into a structure and query/access it how you want to[/tongue-in-cheek]).
But this also does mean that its more likely for people (such as clients of technology services) to know slightly more about the technology they think they need. In which case, the old “sales” type marketing partly goes out of the window as they can only give the very basics to what a particular solution can offer.
In comes the ever-increasing-in-popularity role of the Technology Evangelist. The Technology Evangelist, will know about the technical components within the solutions provided by the represented company, he/she will know how it works. The Technology Evangelist will also have an understanding of whats out there as an alternative, and understand how that works to, and how it is similar/different to the solutions being pitched. (bah, I’ve gone into selling my role now…. going back to making my original points now…)
Summary
So you can see there are areas that people and businesses need to get right, and I am very sure that there are many more that I haven’t listed here. I urge you all to be careful with information, don’t get too overloaded and don’t get too stressed. I do suggest you use software to store some information in an organised fashion (the semantic web is a good place to start, and I urge you to look at Virtuoso for storage solutions and ODS for social networking / collaboration solutions).
Technorati Tags: information, overload, technology, socialnetworking, balance, stress
[UPDATE]
For more information, I agree with some of the points that Ben Goertzel makes in his blog post titled “The Global Nincompoop Awakens“.
Ben Goertzel is a researcher/developer/thinker in the Artificial Intelligence field. However he does a lot of controversial work on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and “Friendly AI”. At the moment, I am unsure what my feelings are on AGI but I know that I definitely disagree with some of the statements that he has made previously… this is because it contradicts some of the more traditional symbolic and connectionist methods of AI. However I am keeping an eye on his blog. I am sure I’ll blog about this in the future.
[/UPDATE]
