Monday 21 October 2013

Social Networking

Society has been strongly affected by the development of technology, particularly more so in recent years. The introduction of the smart phone has become a recent phenomenon and approximately 91.4 million people in the US own one and in the world smart phones hold a fifth of the total mobile phone population.
These statistics show that people all around the world are becoming increasingly more social and this new technology is helping this develop even further. Smart phones not only enable users to call and send text messages, but the ability to use their 3G mobile data means that people can connect via social networking websites such as Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter. Moreover, smartphones also allow individuals who depend on communication for their work to do this with greater ease: phones such as the Apple iPhone and Samsung Galaxy offer applications such as diaries, reminders and notes which enable users to use the devices as day planners. This makes day to day organisation a lot more convenient as perks such as an alarm when a task must be carried out, rather than manually writing the task down into a diary, avoids going over on lunch break and thus become late for that important meeting.

In conjunction with this, Social Networking has provided both a positive and negative impact on society through the way that it brings people together. Smartphones, coupled with this dependency on social networking have raised issues such as the way people would rather text than talk to friends via good old-fashioned face-to-face communication. Some may argue that the new developments have created a more social environment among teenagers and young adults in particular, as they are able to communicate when face-to-face is not an option, as well as making new 'friends' across the globe and keeping on contact with old friends and those who have moved across country without having to pay an extortionate phone bill. However, as has always been the case since the internet first started up in the early nineties, predators take advantage of the anonymity of the World Wide Web and it has become a much larger problem in recent years, with numerous cases of both cyber-bullying, pedophilia and grooming.

Welcome!

This blog will discuss a variety of different technologies and how they affect both society and business.
Technologies will be fairly new and up to date, with some older technology added in too.