How Social Media affects our Technologies

I am quite fascinated by the transformation we are going through, often without noticing. In a very short period of time, we have become either slaves of technology or masters of connectivity. It does not matter that you feel more like the former or the latter, you are part of a new world and as a result our lives and our innovation have changed.

In 30 years we went from very homes with a personal computer at home to a digital era. Over 75% of homes have a computer. Many kids I know have their own laptop before they are 10. People are sometimes questioning having a landline, but they would not stand a day with no cell phone. We are getting used to having our emails stick with us wherever we go. We are setting the expectation that an answer is due in hours when it used to be days. With twitter, we can also post updates on where we are, what we do or what is going on around us, all real-time. We are publishing our lives, and technology needs to follow, to accommodate those expectations.

That makes me think of collaboration. When workflow came out, it was some kind of revolution. Cases could be dispatched to workers. The rudimentary aspect of what we called then workflow is somewhat laughable now. Basically it was a database where we pulled records from… Not rocket science. It was a great step forward for collaboration though. A few innovative features such as electronic sticky notes made it more personable, more social. With time came other considerations, for techies, it was the emergence of “collaboration tools” for code sharing, code management, etc. The technologies may have existed before but the collaboration trend made them more relevant to the modern IT ecosystem, part of the processes.

The need for interactions, for collaboration translated into BPM technologies that govern the processes we want to enforce consistently. Combining machine to machine automation with human to human interactions, it helps create a fabric for functional entities within an organization to work together, to collaborate. We may have codified a bit too much those interactions, not taking into account the human factor, treating the person as a system with a given function.

I was listening to NPR yesterday. They had a couple of interviews on newly released books on loneliness. This made me think. Is twitter a solution to remedy for the lack of human emotions in our systems? Are we likely to post on those mini-blogs to express our feelings? I find it great to take the pulse of the industry but this is definitely more than a media channel. Although limited to 140-chars, those little posts transpire happiness, surprise, mockery or sadness. The tweeple empathize and provide some kind of support network.

Don’t you wonder what that means for our next generation systems? Will we see a wave of new applications that deal with the human aspect as being more than a data entry person? Is collaboration going to remain the main focus? How about reputation? Trend setting? The whole social media story?