Blog Social networking

I think literally almost every industry and company is using some form of technology throughout their daily life. We are in a time where technology isn’t something you just think of and ponder about how it could maybe be useful to your business or life, but rather it’s almost becoming a requirement to be used to stay significant [1].

To name a few: Retail businesses are shifting online and are using simple but powerful technologies like Shopify, Squarespace, and Weebly to power their online commerce business. Tax and Accounting businesses basically rely on Excel and 3^rd party software like Turbotax and Quickbooks to help facilitate their tax business. And transportation businesses rely on the smartphone as a means to have access to the conveyance, both on the supply-side (the means of transportation like Uber or the MTA) as well as the demand (the riders). Today if you want to take a taxi you can easily call it from your phone instead of having to go outside and hail one for hours, and when you need to take the train home (LIRR) you can easily just purchase a ticket online and waive it to the conductor rather than having to wait on those long, terrible lines inside of Penn Station to purchase a ticket.

It’s to no surprise that the world is becoming easier to live in and more connected than ever due to technology. Right now you can easily login to Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, Whatsapp, Slack, etc and easily get connected to the news, friends and family, colleagues at work and international contacts as well. Though this may be true I personally feel that the world is almost becoming too connected [2]. Nowadays one honestly doesn’t need to get out of their bed (literally) to do anything – they can obtain all their knowledge through the internet, they can travel virtually, they can shop online and to top it off with all the social media networks one has today, one can basically know when and where anyone within the network is and where he/she is going. That being said, though we now have cutting edge technology like Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence and amazing social media apps, we’re actually becoming more brain dead and intellectually weaker than ever and are actually becoming less humanly social than ever. The internet has certainly caused a social phenomenon to make our lives easier but I also think it is has backfired against us in other, subtler ways then we may be thinking of. It will be interesting to know the stats of person-to-person social interactions from 1996 to 2017 and 2017 onwards so how drastic it is / it is becoming.

Source:

[1] http://freakonomics.com/2008/02/15/is-myspace-good-for-society-a-freakonomics-quorum/

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html