Yesterday, I had the pleasure to hear Thierry Happe, president and cofounder of the Netexplorateur Observatory, talking about the influences of the digital society in the fields of journalism, marketing and education.
He came from France, invited by the IHEC and Wanabe, and as he said, had to limit himself to 3 topics because the subject is too vast.
The changes that Internet is bringing in the fields of communications are a revolution for our society. Now everybody has a voice, can publish his ideas and make himself heard. What used to be the ‘elite of knowledge’, the ones that had the information and the means of diffusing it, the ones that had a voice before, are losing their privileges. So he chose to speak on the impact of these 3 new trends: Crowdmash, VirtuReality and WEBego. Here is a brief description of the trends, mix of what he said and my personal opinions on the matter 🙂
CrowdMash or Wab 2.0 is the interconnection of people in groups not well defined, called crowds, creating not only different business models like crowdsourcing or crowdfunding but also allowing mass wisdom to appear.
VirtuReality is the shrinkage in the limit between our real world and the virtual one. There is an explosion of users that have nowadays a smartphone, device that is carried at all times in the real life and allows to get connected to Internet, retrieve information or tweet. Not only that, but tags are appearing that can be applied to things, connecting those things of our real life to Internet (the Internet of things).
And WEBego is a social phenomenon that is being observed and that, for me, has to be looked up very closely. We have each day better applications to customise and filter our use of Internet. There is so much information, that usually the sites that provide information give us the possibility to put some parameters, keywords of what we are interested in, on what we would like to be informed. We create circles in our virtual life, connecting to persons that have the same interests, that think and act like us. That’s fantastic, but that creates groups of similar people interconnected, where they only see, like in a mirror, their egos. So one of the big changes that Internet brought in the beginning, the possibility to interconnect with basically everybody, with people that couldn’t be reached before, is also allowing the creation of these new ‘silos’. This is something to be watched.
