A friend of mine posed an interesting question: Is it appropriate for someone to use Facebook to chastise a co-worker?
To me, it’s not. But who’s to say? The more I study how people use the tool as a blending device that connects work habits with real life, the more diverse their intentions and motivatons seem.
To some Facebook is a daily high school reunion. To others, it’s a family brag-site or an innocent place to chatter. Anyone who’s spent time tapping keys onto Facebook pages realizes there are dozens more motivations behind using it than an octopus has arms.
Personally, I think a social networking site should be exactly that — social — and not a workplace dartboard.
But my friend’s question caused me to backtrack through the historical explosions of technology that changed how the world lives. Some of what I discovered is good. Some is bad. Here are some fun things to know and share. Decide for yourself what they mean.
One-fourth of today’s workers have been on the job less than a year, half with their companies less than five. People starting a career today will cycle through 10-14 jobs by age 38. Theirs is a digital world, the complexity of which will soon dramatically deepen.
Today’s work environments and digitial social marketplace drive 31 billion Google searches a month, which begs two questions: Why have we become so curious, and where did people seek answers before relying on computers?
The dark ages before computers were not that long ago. In 1984 there were 1,000 internet devices. By 1992 there were 1,000,000. In 2008 the total passed one billion. Broadband penetration is globally widespread and definitely not an American strength. We rank just 19th. Japan is #22. Number one in the world (as if anyone addicted to staying connected would possibly need an excuse to visit) …. the world’s most connected country is …. drum roll, please …. the gorgeous island of Bermuda!
The velocity and tools we use to exchange information are equally as remarkable. The first text message was sent in December, 1992. Today, less than two decades later, people lives their lives looking down more than up; and over the next 24 hours more text messages will be sent worldwide than there are people on the planet.
In case you’re wondering, today’s estimated global population is 6.8 billion. What this fact reveals to me is that my daughter and her accomplices are determined to push forward the chains of digitital possibility.
MySpace and Facebook drove the social networking craze, for which Twitter is now a caboose. MySpace sites number 200 million. Facebook went from nobody to 50 million in twenty-four months, a record pace, and is now at 250 million. Daily visitors average 100 million who spend an average of 3 billion Facebook minutes a day online.
Facebook is also a repository. It houses more than 10 billion private photos despite the the company’s legal right to sell every one. Microsoft (with a 1.6% ownership share) is a minority partner with full access to everyone’s personal information.
Twitter, on the other hand, is a relative digital communication neophyte, a vehicle of choice for those fond of digital shorthand (140 total characters, max). Twitter’s most accepted cities, in order, are: New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco, and Boston. Two-thirds of Tweeters are under 25 years old with 81% 29 or less. Five percent of Twitter users account for 75 percent of its activity. Half do not Tweet in a week and 85 percent update less than once a day. Half of Tweeters follow 10 others or less. A mere 0.68% have 1,000 or more followers.
Surely this chaos must slow down, right?
Wrong!
NTT Japan has already tested a fiber strand capable of handling 14 trillion bits of information per second, which is the equivalent of 210 million phone calls. For those more musically inclined, this is also the equivalent of 2,660 CDs per second.
Computer genius is expanding, too. By 2013 — approximately 1,000 days — supercomputers will exist that exceed the computation capacity of the brain.
The inside of my noggin rattles like tabletop foosball just thinking about all this.
The true measure of technology, I have decided, rests in its ability to bring people closer together, not drive them further apart.
Even in romance technology has had an impact: One of every eight couples who married last year met on-line. Half will probably get divorced because of what their partner finds out while snooping on-line after the honeymoon, but that’s fodder for another column.
In the meantime, it’s springtime! Let love be in the air, and magic in your fingertips. Happy networking!