Social media. The network revolution

"Next month the meeting of the alumni of our former high school will be held. We still remember having to organize 50 people through e-mails 10 years ago using a portal as complicated as Terra, a slow, unfriendly and tremendously disorganize system."

This time, however, it has all been much easier. All we had to do was to create an event in Facebook adding all the guests, post it on Twitter; and the same evening
we did that, we received the confirmations on our iPhone.
What has happened in this last 10 years? We have lived through the generalization
of Internet use in our homes, and the burst of more personal means of communication like IRC. In this context, it is interesting to quote Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation,
when in 1977 he said “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in
their home”. In the end, we can safely say that Mr. Olson
was wrong.
We see Google as a clear example of the expansion of internet and the business tied to it. Starting out as a small search engine for the students at Stanford University (California, USA) it grew into a very large company so diversified that it is present in sectors as diverse as Internet advertising and genetics laboratories.
Our day cannot be complete without having checked our wall on Facebook, the seeds of our favorite sites, the video of Messi’s last goal on Youtube, and of course, our e-mail. To our parents it might look like a waste of time and we might hear this expression from them: “You will get square yes from spending so much time looking at the screen”, but the fact is that this new means of communication saves us time and money, plus it makes our lives more comfortable and we are able to access information with just a click.
The easy accessibility to this means of communication makes it not only possible for developed countries to use, but it is a global phenomenon that knows no borders. For instance, last June, in a repressive country as is Iran, students used Youtube, Twitter and Facebook and became a press agency for the Green Revolution. Social networking was used to organize protests as well as to show and explain to the outside world what was happening in Iran after the 2009 presidential elections.
On the other side of the world, during the 2008 presidential elections in the US, social networks turned into a new way of campaigning. The candidates could reach all voters, and a new way of doing politics was
born.
In the academic area, this innovation has allowed a new kind of student-teacher communication as well as means of contact among students. For instance, in sociology class, each week we had to write about and discuss a topic that came out during the lecture in a forum where all the students expressed their opinion. Although the university is starting to use this new means of communication, there is still a long way to go, for example, it would be much more effective to post a tweet or just send an e-mail than to hang a paper outside
the lecture hall saying that there is no class. We don’t send messages in the bottle anymore, so why not start using more efficient ways of communication? But not only are we going to use it in our free time or during our university stage, since every day it is more and more common that all these tools are being used in the professional world. We have examples of LinkedIn that has created a new way to search for job candidates  and Twitter for publishing press releases on, or as mention before, providing a new way of doing politics. Which is the next step? Mobile Internet. As has occurred in Japan, in a couple of years, any child will have Internet access in his or her own mobile phone, causing a widespread shift in the way people communicate. The use of the personal computer will be reduced since, at the end of the day, you will have checked  everything that was pending via cell phone. If to all this we add the future infrastructure LTE that will allow much faster uploading and downloading of data than what we use today, the way of interacting via mobile or portable devices will change the philosophy of modern communication. Some example would be the streaming of live video over the Internet, sending high resolution photos and ultimately sending large amounts of data. It will become less necessary to have software in our own computer since we will work in the cloud with online applications, such as Google Docs or iWork.com. Of course this requires an increase of bandwidth at home and at work. This is more difficult to increase than cell phone coverage, since it would be necessary to wire the entire city at a high cost. All in all, a life more online and less individual.
But all that glitters is not gold, all these innovations have led to a series of problems. Misuse may give rise to major privacy issues or exposure to malicious people. As it happens, people, through ignorance, provide
personal information and images that shouldn’t be published or be in the public domain. Not for this, however, do we have to demonize these services, rather the population has to be informed about the risks. There may be cases of dependence as well, where people end up interacting almost exclusively online, losing human contact, or spending more hours in front of a screen than doing other activities.
As some experts in the field have said, we are living at a point in our history that is comparable to the time when the printing press started a revolution, providing a new way of transmitting the culture and knowledge
that came to light back in the fifteenth century. Undoubtedly, we are at the beginning of a new stage that began with the universal access to Internet and we do not know to where it is going to end up. Sometimes, nowadays we have the sensation that it is very hard to come up with new things, but already in 1899 Charles H. Duell, a commissioner from the U.S. Office of Patents, had a similar impression: “Everything that can be invented has been invented”. Facebook or Youtube didn’t exist in 1899 but neither did the airplane nor the color TV, so let’s just see what happens down the road... We have to leave you because we have just seen a new Italian restaurant well recommended in Rummble where we could celebrate this year’s dinner reunion.