Читать книгу @stickyJesus - Toni Birdsong - Страница 16

It's fun to skip a rock across the history of this cultural phenomenon of social networking. Remember the BBSs (bulletin board systems) of the 1980s as the primitive network messaging boards that allowed users text-only discussions, file sharing, and online games? BBS pioneers (geeks, coders, and gamers) gained momentum throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s when Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL logged on to the action and stepped up the interface a notch for a monthly or even hourly fee. The social side of those networks stimulated Web sites such as Friendster.com, Classmates.com, and SixDegrees.com, where everyone on the planet was determined to trace his or her social lineage within six people, or connections, of Kevin Bacon. It was a seemingly wild but absolutely probable notion that sparked a quest for faster, deeper, and higher degrees of social connection. These rudimentary social platforms were baby steps toward meeting our need to connect online.

The globalization of the world economy—faster, better communication technology between all countries—encouraged this overall social connectivity. Over the course of thirty years, the social networking phenomenon went from crawling to standing upright with Netscape's browsing capability, which opened the door for Aunt Fran to surf for holiday recipes and cures for her sciatica. Then, as the general public became more reliant on technology, the press outrageously compared Google to God. After all, the talking tech heads of the day reasoned coyly that Google is wireless (everywhere), knows everything, and can answer any question that anyone asks. And if information is power, then Google's ranking is right up there next to God, right?²

Just because a technology evolves, there is no guarantee that a demand will support it—at least not to the degree that social media exists today. Remember the Microsoft Zune? The Apple Cube? How about electronic currency? You don't remember the technology failures because, well, they pretty much...failed. Multiple factors can be attributed to why social media hit overdrive in the past several years, including cheaper broadband, a fire to innovate, and the global economy shift. As unprecedented economic, political, and social factors continue to fragment continents, cities, and even homes, words such as connection, community, and relationship increasingly dominate the conversation.

The evolution of globalization is the progress of ideas. It's the anticipated economic equalizer brought on by relatively inexpensive Internet, browsers, and the fact that no one owns the Internet (yet). All of this has linked us all closer than anyone could have imagined just a few decades ago. This moment in time is the perfect communications storm—a global shift, economically and socially, that has leading thinkers today rendering the world more flat than round and shrinking by the moment.

Connectivity, content, and community—the three Cs—are changing the very shape of the planet. To be heard from this point forward, individuals, companies, organizations, and governments with essential (and profitable) messages to communicate must develop strategies that fit the global realities, or as Bloomberg.com warns: "catch up...or catch you later."³