Since the Industrial Revolution, the world has had a love affair with efficiency. Faster equals more convenient. Today, our affection for speed is more prevalent than ever. Technological advancements, namely the Internet with all its bells and whistles, allow us to consume information and communicate with one another at an unprecedented rate. At this moment, people everywhere are simultaneously answering emails, transferring money, and chatting with friends half way around the world – all via mobile phone. What’s not to love?
John Freeman thinks there’s plenty. Author of The Tyranny of E-mail, he argues “reacting to demands on our time by simply speeding up has canceled out many of the benefits of the Internet.” Moreover, he believes innovation has “isolated us from the people with whom we live” and makes it more difficult to “listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget.”
Did you hear that? It was the sound of generation X-ers and Y-ers everywhere collectively rolling their eyes. But Freeman’s manifesto for slow communication isn’t without some merit. Since the late 18th century, it seems progress has favored quantity over quality. The most popular means of communication currently are good examples. Take Twitter. Can we really expect to send meaningful messages in just 140 characters? Then there are platforms like Facebook. As more and more people rely on social networking to keep in touch, handshakes are replaced by friend requests and human emotions are reduced to animated emoticons.
It’s a valid argument – relevance has diminished and face-to-face interactions have dwindled. But in the end Freeman’s ideals end up sounding archaic and nostalgic. The web is evolving and social media platforms are the cause. According to Erik Qualman, founder of the theory of Socialnomics™, social media represents a “fundamental shift in the way people interact.” Consider just a sample of his statistical research: Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres have more followers than the entire population of Ireland, Norway, and Panama; it only took Facebook nine months to acquire 50 million users (to put it into perspective, it took television 13 years); and there are over 200,000,000 million blogs with more than half of the bloggers posting content or “Tweeting” daily. By the time you finish reading this, those numbers will likely have increased. In short, the world runs – and will continue running – on the web.
The Social Media Revolution depicted by Qualman represents the most significant societal change since the Industrial Revolution. Fast talk is just a byproduct of that evolution. Freeman would warn that the rate at which we communicate is diminishing the value of those communications. Maybe. But the advantages of innovation far outweigh the disadvantages. We are interconnected like never before, seamlessly communicating with friends, families, and colleagues whenever, wherever. Facts, opinions, and information alike flow freely 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Companies that offer real value to consumers scale overnight, while imposters disappear with the blink of an eye. With upsides like those, the revolution can’t turn fast enough.
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