#likeminds - Tiffany St James on technology & social change

Tiffany St James is hammering us with stats – the vast amount of data created every two days, the number of people online, the even larger number of people using mobiles.

What’s the most common reason for using the internet? News, followed by researching products, followed by keeping up with friends (I better the latter will be higher in future surveys – that list parallels the rise of different forms of web content pretty precisely. ).

Pervasive trends:

• Personal
• Social
• Local
• Commercial
• Enterprise
• Mobile

(Source: James Cashmore, Google)

55% of office space is empty says Microsoft (be interested to see if estatesgazette.com agrees…) So they’re working on creating hybrid spaces, because the barrier between home and work is blurring.

Is social networking good for you? Maybe. Plenty of research shows that maintaining relationships is good for you – but does diminished physical contact reduce your health? Is the behaviour that social networking promotes actually changing our brains? (Learning an instrument changes your brain…)

Interesting survey of people’s attitudes to spending time disconnected in the room. The majority would be uncomfortable with completely disconnecting for a week – I’ve rather enjoyed it in the past. A holiday from the internet is great sometimes. But then, there are people in this room who feel uncomfortable with being offline for a day…!

(This presentation is something of a buffet of facts, figures and research, so sorry if this post seems disjointed)

We receive news differently – stories break via Twitter – and we get entertainment streamed to us over the internet.

Is technology enabling democracy or hindering it? The #cnnfail hashtag during the Iranian elections was one form of democratic protest. The fake BP PR twitter account gets more followers than the official. Trafigura, of course. And she’s cut off, because her time is up.

View Tiffany’s Presentation