Say Hello! to a smaller world: Bridging the virtual divide

No control IS in control.

As of late, I’ve been reading and researching on the effects of online community development. Of course you’ve heard about Youtube, twitter, Facebook, Flickr and etc…

Essentially it is very interesting to see how our society and culture have continued to embrace innovation in every direction – regardless of being in the real world or virtual. Today we can see the explosive growth of online communities. Beginning with offline nature of society to find fame, connect and broadcast every second of our lives, we’ve found a new playground to interact and share our experiences through the various tools available in the virtual world.

Indeed our world is getting smaller by the day. Internet and Email infiltrated the house of typewriters and national libraries. As of time of writing, I cannot even keep count the various tools available at our disposal in an attempt to share every bits and pieces of our lives and information to strangers who are lurking at every corner of the internet in hope that they’d find something interesting to spend 10 minutes of their lives participating in the discussion.

Welcome to the new age of social interaction.

Gone were the days of “Howdy neighbour! How are you doing?” Today, we are given the technological capabilities to connect with anybody at anytime around the world. Cross border knowledge transfer is quickly become a norm with what The McKinsey Quarterly called – “distributed cocreation”.

We’re talking about information dissemination and sharing (not that we don’t know that already). But what I am truly curious is the direction we’re heading. At this moment in time, it seems that almost everyone is jumping on Facebook, interacting on Messenger, updating their Twitter, or even sharing their favourite sites on del.icio.us at every moment in their living breathing lives. Essentially we’ve relinquished control over content and left it all to sheer communal discussion to shape our beliefs.

Where do we go from here?

We’re truly at a dawn of a new era in terms of social networks. It took us thousands of years to develop an appreciation for societal understanding (far from it actually as the war in Iraq can attest to this) and now we’re given the opportunity and privilege to be at the edge of what happens next.

However, basic issues such as privacy remains unaccounted for when we explore the latest fad in social networking and media. Who will protect us from being exploited when all of our thoughts, details and behaviours are available and tagged online? Are we allowing search engines such as Google wield an incredible amount of power over our daily routines?

Complete article here

Don’t get me wrong. I am all for technological innovation. Being a self-confessed geek, I dread a day that goes by without me checking my email or even reading the latest blog on politics, economics and etc. However, as I immerse myself into this new world of virtual reality, I find it hard to fathom that this pattern has instinctively seeped itself into the very veins of my basic behaviour.

I find that we’re increasingly sharing things that are not tangible and simultaneously putting a high price on such intangibles. Are we heading for another bubble? Are we getting too far ahead of ourselves or could it be that we’ve learned from our mistakes during the dotcom bust and have now reinvent the way we approach new media?

Either way, it looks like we will see interesting times in the years ahead as we look forward to clearer directions in establishing an even greater online civilization.