One of the things I enjoy about being an older guy is that I have had the experience of watching human dynamics through a number of cycles. This creates a perspective if one is willing to use it. I was giving an interview to a newspaper yesterday and the writer asked me a number of great questions about management issues with social technologies – things like,
- Can’t this become a huge time waster?
- Isn’t it dangerous for people to be able to write about their company and post it to millions with a click of a button?
- Isn’t it an issue that companies cannot control how people use social tools?
As I answered I found myself going back in history over and over because I heard all of these things twice before. When PC’s first came out, we asked almost the exact same questions. When the Internet hit organizations, we heard the same thing. In other words, every time we get a new technology tool that enables us in some way, many people in organizations fear the potential negatives, more than they seek to leverage the positives! I guess another thing that happens when you get older is you get grumpier because I am pretty tired of dealing with people that focus more on stemming the tide, then in simply managing the negatives so they are under control.
Social technologies and Web 2.0 applications are going to change us more than we realize. I don’t think it has really set in that any one human being can now communicate with 2 billion people for free and in an instant. We have not really grasped what that will mean to society. I don’t thing we really understand how many walls get broken down with communities can form with no regard to geography, language, or politics. The geopolitical implications of this are massive. The fact that our online reputations will have a massive impact on our ability to be successful has not set it. People really do not understand that transparency happens when everyone around you tells stories about you, rates your skills, and uploads information about you – whether you like it or not.
It does not end there… People really have little foresight into how the world will change now that we have a way to harvest massive amounts of information EVERY DAY and dump it into our minds. This ability to do continuous learning is dramatically larger than what we had even five years ago. Even the most basic tenet of social networking, the ability to connect with thousands of people from our past that we would have never connected with again is changing lives every hour. And as with any tool, it is used for the positive and the negative. For all the people that are uplifted by connected to friends from the past, there are people that are getting divorced over spouses trying to relive their past relationships.
Television changed the world in massive ways that we probably do not fully understand today. PC’s changed the world as well when computing power was handed to the individual. The Internet connected us all and again, is supporting massive changes. Now social technologies comes along and once again, just like its predecessors, we have the unenlightened standing on the corners shouting that we should block it, control it, or burn it at the stake. Give me a break… When are we going to learn that new technology paradigms will come in waves, and they are just tools that can be used for good or for bad. It is the human that controls them and makes that decision – think fire and guns…
Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com