This morning I was contacted by a customer by email, then a text message, a phone call and even a twitter mention, all from the same person. It struck me that 20 years ago, he would not have been able to get hold of me on any of those communication platforms. Indeed, it would only have been more impressive had he also left a Facebook wall message and commented on one of my photographs on flickr!
You could argue, he would have been able to contact me by phone 20 years ago, but not on the mobile he actually called me on and in any case, back in the “old days” calls to work were kind of limited.
We really do take for granted the exceptionally clever ways we can communicate these days, with the plethora of social media platforms, mobile phones, the internet in general and numerous other ways we can chat, discuss and argue the days hot topics. In some ways its a shame that the local park has been replaced by MSN or the local pub has been replaced by farmville, but what is important is that we are cable to harness all of this communicational power and yet still dont.
I have a lot of friends who I rarely see on a day to day basis and yet even with them sitting on my Facebook account we still dont talk anywhere near the amount we did 20 years ago. Why is this? Well, although we have a multitude of different outlets to communicate these days, we are still shockingly bad at doing it. Not everyone you understand, but certainly my generation of 30 somethings could do a lot better.
My eldest daughter however was born in to a world which already had ipods, internet and msn and she see’s these things as a means to an end, they allow her to talk to her friends at all times of the day (and usually night) whenever she feels like it. There is no arranging to meet at a certain time, specific place and taking appropriate funds to do so, its just hopping on the laptop and seeing whos about.
This generation will be the first to fully harness the power of the internet and the communication tools it affords us and when that happens, what we think of as being huge now (facebook and twitter for example) will be a mere drop in the ocean compared to what the next generation of internet users have up their sleeves and in their brains.
When challenged recently to answer the question of “What age do we live in?” now, I was hard pressed to answer. Especially when you consider things like the industrial revolution in the 1800’s or even further back to things like the bronze age, but this week, I can comfortably say, we are at a the dawn of The Communication Age.
