news details |
|
|
| The Science Fiction of Yesterday Becomes the Reality of Today!!! | | An Insight into the Age of Networking!!! | | Dr. Pragya Khanna
I came across an old
advertisement from
1983 of a computer based company named 'CompuServe' whose opening line 'Welcome to Someday' not only caught my attention but made me capture the fact that often in the past few decades we have seen the fiction of yesterday becoming a reality of today. The words of the ad read as "Someday, in the comfort of your home, you'll be able to shop and bank electronically, read instantly updated newswires, analyze the performance of a stock that interests you, send electronic mail across the country, then play bridge with three strangers in la, Chicago and Dallas".
Whoa! It's not someday anymore it is TODAY! And I started contemplating the rise of social media from the past few decades…..SOCIAL MEDIA! That is another such reality which again seemed a fiction few years back.
Thanks to Pinterest, SnapChat and Instagram, if you're not sharing your photos while taking your food, while being in a mall, being with your pets, while driving your new car.........etc. etc. you're missing out. 2013 was the year the word 'SELFIE', 'the act of taking a photo of yourself with your phone' was added to the Oxford English Dictionary and declared "word of the year". Each day, 350 million photos are uploaded to Facebook, while more than 45 million photos are taken using Instagram every day.
Social media has become a ubiquitous part of daily life, but this growth and evolution was not in the works before 70s. Today, social media has changed the way we communicate, gather and share information, and has given rise to a connected global society. In fact the "Golden Era" of social media started in 2001. Since that time there was a constant flow of social innovation that started with the first crowd sourced encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Wikipedia was followed by Friendster, MySpace, Facebook in 2004, and Twitter in 2006. While Facebook and Twitter are the two top social media platforms today, MySpace has undergone several pivots and is still in quiet operation.
YES!!! Can you believe it's only been 14-15 years since Facebook was founded? Same goes for YouTube, which made video accessibility and sharing online as simple as can be. And Twitter, for that matter sponsored tweets that have only been around since 2010! It's interesting to look back at these iconic moments in the last 2 decades of social media history.
During mid-nineties when I was in college computers were a far rarer commodity and I was amongst a few students to learn computers alongside my regular studies. Believe me when I say the machines' language was bewildering, and their potential seemingly limited. What's more, this whole sitting-in-front-of-a-keyboard thing was so… isolationistic. Put all this together and you had a medium where only the most zealous enthusiasts and techno-babbling hobbyists or boring reclusive geeks dared step into. Yet it also was during this time that the very magnanimous perception of social networking had taken its first steps towards becoming the all-pervading cultural phenomenon we know and love.
As expected, the ubiquitous Facebook now leads the global social networking pack. Founded, like many social networking sites, by university students who initially promoted their product to other university students, Facebook launched in 2004 as a Harvard-only exercise and remained a campus-oriented site for two full years before finally opening to the general public in 2006. Yet, even by that time, Facebook was considered big business. So much so that, by 2009, Silicon Valley bigwigs such as Paypal co-founder and billionaire Peter Thiel invested tens of millions of dollars just to see it prosper.
The secret of Facebook's success, WOW! The site currently boasts more than 1.3 billion active users, is a subject of much debate. Some point to its ease of use, others to its multitude of easily-accessed features, and still others, to its memorable name. Regardless, there's worldwide conformity on one thing: Facebook promotes both honesty and openness. It seems people really enjoy being themselves, and throwing that openness out there for all to see.
The other key to success was Facebook's ubiquitous 'Like' button, which broke free from the bounds of the site and began appearing all over the Internet. Now you can 'like' or "tweet' just about everything even when you're not on Facebook or Twitter. Realizing the power of social networking, Google decided to launch its own social network (Google+) in 2007. It differed from Facebook and Twitter in that it wasn't necessarily a full-featured networking site, but rather a social "layer" of the overall Google experience.
Over the course of the past couple of years, "Fourth screen" technology, smartphones, tablets, etc. has changed social networking and the way we communicate with one another utterly and entirely. What used to sit on our desks now conveniently fits in the palm of our hands, allowing us to effortlessly and fluently utilize and employ functionality wherever we go.
Given the sudden rise in mobile computing, it's not surprising the most popular social media platforms of the past several years depend on the capabilities of smartphones. Photo and video-sharing applications such as Snapchat and Instagram, the latter of which has now acquired an astounding 20 billion images since the app's initial inception in October 2010, exist almost entirely on mobile.
I remember being in college when I first heard of email without realizing that this new means of communication would help me connect to people sitting across distant shores within seconds. Kids today find it difficult to digest that not too long ago, we would actually wait to hear from one another. And even that was a luxury because cell phones weren't available and landline phones were a luxury for most people in my country.
YES! Technology has taken over completely, with the social media sites making the greatest difference to our lifestyles.
One tweet, status update or pin is all you need to tell all your acquaintances about where you had been holidaying last week, what is going on in your personal life, your professional achievements and setbacks, your mood swings, the goals scored by your favourite cricketer and a lot more.
The reach of these sites is awesome, and connectivity is instant. To top it, this instant connectivity comes virtually for no cost at all! Besides connecting to a cross-section of people (friends, ex-classmates, existing and past colleagues, professional contacts and family) with just a few taps on the keyboard in spite of the huge oceans and long distances, users across these sites can now connect even to brand owners and business houses.
With thriving online communities, Facebook pages and Twitter profiles for brands have helped businesses reach out to wider audiences. This has allowed social media savvy brands and businesses get connected to their real or existing customers on a more personal level. Without the man on the street realizing it, social media has today become an extension of eCommerce. Latest products, offers, deals and discounts can be promoted to users across these channels with a single post, tweet or pin.
Social causes are also taken up across these platforms to create awareness campaigns and to enlighten the masses. The huge public sympathy and support in the wake of floods, fire breakouts or the like shows how social media can help in times of distress.
Reasons for loving social media could run into several pages, but wait. There is another side of the picture too which needs to be looked into.
There is a flip side to social media too. The manner in which we interact and the amount of time we had at our disposal has been seriously affected by the springing up of these sites. The fact that a massive amount of users are active over more than one of these sites further cuts down on the time they have for interacting with the people sitting next to them.
Social networking has really taken a toll on our inter-personal relationships. It's not surprising anymore to find signs reading weird things about people who are obsessed about their mobile phones and its apps, viz., "In Case of Fire EXIT Building Before Tweeting about it" and "PAY ATTENTION WHILE DRIVING OR WALKING! YOUR FACEBOOK STATUS CAN WAIT"!!!! so on and so forth.
As pointed out by a few years old write-up on Forbes, which is still relevant though the statistics might have changed, "Every relevant metric shows that we are interacting at breakneck speed and frequency through social media. But are we really communicating? With 93% of our communication context stripped away, we are now attempting to forge relationships and make decisions based on phrases, Abbreviations, Snippets, Emoticons which may or may not be accurate representations of the truth."
The Facebook mania and WhatsApp fever is tightening its grip to the extent that one of the pre-requisites before checking into a hotel is: Do they offer free Wi-fi access?
Besides affecting the degree and level of communication, productivity is taking a serious dip too! I have often cursed myself for checking out my Facebook wall and wasting multiple hours without realization.
Over sharing over networking sites and ease in which one can get connected to rank strangers (often operating under fake id's) has led to a spurt in social media related crimes.
Therefore, social media can be said to be having a good side, a bad side and an ugly side. It is up to us to use it to bring in the best. We can only speculate about what the future of social networking may look in the next decade or even 100 years from now, but it seems clear that it will exist in some form for as long as humans are alive. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
STOCK UPDATE |
|
|
 |
| BSE
Sensex |
 |
| NSE
Nifty |
|
|
| |
CRICKET UPDATE |
|
|
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
