Facebook, which started in February 2004 claims to has more than 400 million active users world wide now. Flickr, which started in February 2004 claims to host more than 4 billion images now. YouTube, which started in February 2005 claims to serve more than two billion videos a day now. Twitter, which started in 2006 claims to has more than 100 million users world wide now.
(Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org)
All these cool applications now allow us to keep a close relationship with our relatives, friends, find friends who we haven't met for years, find new friend world wide, get to know about exiting things, get to know about important things, etc all on-line. Some times you may find your next door neighbor on Facebook who you may have never met in person before :). Also I found some people who are running business completely based on this new paradigm (http://www.logannathan.com.au/).
It is very evident that these technology innovation are causing a major tremble effect on every one. While some has seen the potential and using it to create opportunities, some has take this by surprise and treat it as a threat. There are organizations who has blocked access to these social media sites to the staff.
While thinking through this I come to think of, how each generation has taken this up. Generation Z who have born in to this finds all these very natural. Generation Y are the ones mostly coming up with all these innovations and they demonstrates really good ability to adopt new things. Generation X who appreciates all these new innovations from generation Y mostly facilitate all these and they demonstrates good maturity in empathizing the situation. Generation Baby Boom are the ones who are mostly struggling and culturally shaken. Some of them has taken these as a threat and really struggling to empathize the next generation.
I think the issue here is that the whole world his going through some rapid generation changes and its accelerating. There could be a time in the future even generation X will find it difficult to cope up with these changes. Since typical leaders in the society are from older generations this issue could continue to exist. Then, could there be a danger of an electronic civil unrest?
