On Silver surfer day I’m proud to be one of the great greying masses whose web presence (as well as the number of years on the biological clock) is rapidly increasing daily.
As the hordes of those now web savvy get older and older its a foregone conclusion that the proportion of wrinklies twittering and posting on Youtube will be doing this from a comfortable armchair armed only with a cup of tea and a hob nob.
Yet there still are and always will be , those who adamantly refuse to ‘get connected’ (hate that phrase).
Their loss really, and it also means we can blog and twitter to our hearts content about them because they will never read it anyway.
Lets face it, much of the innovation and technology it is no longer new; and as we all grow older we are becoming wiser anyway if not a bit doo-lally judging from the facebook comments I get.
There are still attempts to censure free speech – what we proudly call ours as a right in any democratic society. China’s filtering of Google searches and Pakistan’s banning of Youtube. But this only illustrates how the internet has irrevocably engaged both Politics and Global Socialization
I am actually attempting to make a serious point about all of this, that is there is a paradigm change – not just in business which has been snowballing for a long time, but in all our social involvements.
A recent report showed that we are now spending 65% more time online than we did three years ago. The driving force in this change has been social networking perhaps unsurprisingly -and the more familiar we get the less scarry it becomes and the more we seem to be embracing it.
There is the other extreme - take a look at sites like Chatroulette (or perhaps you shouldn’t) where webcam communication is randomly selected (via your IP) and peer to peer. Perhaps the lack of control is a bit scarry ( the only rules are to keep your clothes on – as if!).
Sites like these will have their place – and when they don’t they will quickly fold. Its all part of our libertarian society and we do bang on about freedom of speech don’t we?
The web has always been said to mirror society closely- and the more sophisticated it becomes the more inclusive it will become for us all. John Lennon’s vision for a truly people powered global society coming of age perhaps?
The old saying ‘Information is power’ has never been more true in the Online environment. With Search Engines and Social Media sites ratcheting up billions in advertising revenue simply by collating all the data that is freely available out there, its becoming quite a literally ‘a free for all’.
