In a world where instant communications and engagement is rapidly becoming the norm, email is taking on all the traits of a dark lord in the making.
Electronic mail (e-mail) started out as a powerful and useful tool that brought speed and (for the most part) brevity to industrial and corporate communications. However, it is rapidly transforming into the disgruntled Jedi of communications.
Email is a dark art in workplace solutions. A habitual norm. Administratively heavy, it sucks precious time and resources from your everyday.
and yet… for all its operational inefficiencies it still seems to work for the majority.
Mobility has ensured access to the dark lord of ICT communications. Smartphones have ensured access to webmail a standard… in effect minimising the mobile digital divide, by giving cross-generational comfort on these new platforms and devices.
In this form, email is the connector. The access point for new media platforms and devices.
Convergence can only occur where comfort resides.
For the first decade of ‘social’ it has been email, but what’s next…?
What’s able to fill the void? Is SMS or IM enough? or is non-regulation the biggest obstacle here…?
Non-regulation, poor regulation and the non-specific zones of the internet environment are our biggest foes.
Not just for business, but for governments and citizens as well.
There are no robust legal structures in place that currently nurture nor protect the individual online, let alone small business.
In over a decade there has been very little movement towards reform as monetising the internet remains the priority.
LinkedIn – the largest professional network where people have been putting their personal information for free for the last decade is now owned by a multinational corporation in Microsoft.
I find it strange that no one is questioning the personal cost of such a merger… perhaps for the majority of us, we’re not switching on to the reality of the evolution of the social networking platform that profiled, connected and enabled market transfers in human terms…. at what cost are we willing to earn a buck?
Let’s hope someday in the not too distant future we all start thinking about and directly addressing the cost of how we ‘settle’ the wild west of the internet.
What are we really willing to relinquish in order to earn a buck?
If so, what is the true cost to the individual, team or organisation… society?
Sadly, it’s a question very few are willing to articulate, let alone address with a view to answering
Why?
Because in order to do so, we’d have to acknowledge and address not only email as the Dark Lord of the internet, but the deeper, now embedded commercial practices of digital decadence and the new norm of dumbing down and relaxing acceptable standards of entertainment, operations and performance.
Let’s stop being happy with average and strive for great and the impossible again.
Originally posted to how2social.com