What are you doing right now?
While resistance to change is common - there seems to be an exceptional negativity to new communication tools where new technologies are ridiculed or avoided. Email, IM, Texting, and Twittering are all just tools for communication. Every new technology takes time to mature and find their community for use. I’m sure that anyone in their 20’s would find it hard to believe that there was a time that email was not ubiquitous and some even doubted why they should use it.
Texting has received plenty of ridicule by those who do not use it. I think back to my teenage days which were before any kids that I knew had cell phones. I used the home phone a lot and many evenings and weekends would involve trying to coordinate where we were getting together or what we were doing. Texting allows for a fast coordination of many people without tying up the home phone or having to linearly go through each friend to find a time and place that works for all. Now for me (and most of my generation), I’m typically either at home or at work, so it’s usually just as easy to email (and that’s what most of my generation does). On the rare occasions where I find myself in a loud concert or bar, texting is a nice option to communicate fast. Texting might be replaced by other mobile chat functionality in the future, but the change in speed and utility of communication is something that the “Millennialls” takes for granted.
STATUS on social networking sites like Facebook. Unlike texting, IM or email where you are sending information to a single person or group - the “what are you doing right now” is one of those features of Facebook that I wasn’t sure what to make of. What do I post? Who cares? Is this just egotistical? I had heard of people documenting their every activity and I like many thought it was inane (really - you showered and brushed your teeth - ooh!). On Facebook, some of my friends used the status field and while it wasn’t necessarily all deep thoughts or profound activities, you got a window into what was important to those people and could find common interests to talk about. I started some of my own postings about travelling that I was doing for work. I could update from the nice Facebook mobile application and posted about places I ate, interesting sites or shared links that I found interesting or funny.
At a conference for work, they were looking for volunteers to post to Twitter about the conference. I signed up in about 2 minutes with “nohype” as my handle (anonymous at first). Twitter is basically very similar to the “status” that I used on Facebook. It’s a very simple website where you can only post 140 characters on each post. Anyone can see the post, but only people that are “following” really see it. After the conference, I didn’t expect that I would use Twitter. I had a few coworkers and other attendees of the conference “follow” my updates and in return, I watched their updates. I probably would have stopped using Twitter after the conference if at the same time Facebook hadn’t updated the Twitter application integration. I could use Twitter to update my Facebook status. This allowed me to keep updates to the new group that I was communicating with although my “tweets” turned to mostly non-work after the conference was done. It’s been an interesting investigation of the technologies. Checking the status of others, sometimes commenting and adding my own little updates definitely becomes a bit addictive.
While some have argued that texting and Twitter reduce interactions to being “less personal”, but my experience is that it can be an additional tool to become connected with more people through “loose” communication. So, the moral of the story - don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. Not every technology is useful for everyone, but we’re also all have different access and needs for the tools and comfort level with public or private notes.
