Luddite Redux?
Personally, I find it rather disheartening to hear these “Luddite” kind of arguments being thrown out at new technology, specially when some of us are aware of the fact that the increasing number of users is merely fueling the ability of the developers to crank out more and more features, and getting some decision makers to start thinking about these “fads” as real business tools, which can help people communicate with each other – and make money in the process.
Today’s argument came from what I’ve come to consider as the proverbial well, Twitter:
@SocialMediaList Social networking: Filling a need or creating one? http://bit.ly/3o5k49 …. 3 minutes ago from twitterfeed
Upon review of the article on the link, penned by Dave Churchill, and after finding that his main angle merely derived on some early adopters now perhaps having moved on to the latest and greatest craze – precisely because of them being early adopters, perhaps?
So this simple fact gave Dave the ammunition to tell himself that, “For my part, I’m going to risk life without social networking…” an argument much like the ones we used to hear – and still do, believe me! – about more mature technologies such as email, texting, and uploading videos to the web (which according to the heads at Google, is not only worth the hassle and money of expanding one of the largest infrastructures ever deployed out in the cloud, as the adage about “a thousand words” echoes in the clips and snippets loaded to it every minute) which, if we are to believe half the hype of certain product launches, are key to key consumer demographics.
Point being, every time I personally hear someone decrying the push others have imposed on them, as in Dave’s case it was a matter of both challenging his age, but also, challenging his need to expand outside the boundaries of what he used to consider to be his job, I can vividly depict the many instances in the history of technology, specially in the last few centuries, where a group of established users challenged the advantages of newer technologies.
Not that I was glad to read his work on the online edition of his publication, which allowed me to get in touch with his point of view at the click of a mouse, but that as we all hear the bad news about the newspaper industry settling into the latter chapters of its history, and as many others have been reshaped by the Internet, is there room nowadays to disregard the advent of such changes?
I for one try to at least find out the “angle” or better, the rationale behind why not only millions of users are congregating in these “watering holes” of information, but also, why are corporations putting their money, sometimes subtly or sometimes with a lot of gusto and bravado, behind them?
In the case of Social Media, a recent article in Fortune stated, much like I’ve been mentioning since I started getting more and more into the application functionality of Facebook, that the time for corporations to start asking for these feature sets in their Enterprise Groupware was near, as those of us in technology know how comfortable it would be to migrate from a large and distributed Exchange organization, for example, onto an SaaS (Software-as-a-Service, the newest moniker for the old ASP, or Application Service Provider business model of the late nineties), thin-client and mobile enabled private, secure version of that same software that we learned to use so well, whilst being facetious with our friends?
[CRACKBERRI BEEPS…]
[ANOTHER FACEBOOK NOTIFICATION AWAITS]
… or was it a work notification in there?
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