Changing States
>email>texting>tweets>?
There used to be a time when I sent somebody an email and I’d get a response back tout-sweet, within a day. That has changed. I’m not sure I like the change but has in fact changed.
Those of us that grew up with the Internet from 1985 on, embraced email. After all, that’s really all we had to communicate online with. Texting was primarily a European thing. I remember back then when I read that people overseas primarily sent text messages – thousands/millions of them, I couldn’t believe they preferred to send short messages and not emails. This meant they were typing them out on those tiny little keys on the flip-phones. Ack!
Today, email is passé/old, text is the norm, and soon, perhaps a tweet will become the new text. I’ve had several positive experiences getting a quicker response from a tweet than an email or text. With one tweet a response was quickly handled by Time Warner within 24 hrs. pertaining to a returned cable box and bill when many emails, calls and faxes were largely ignored.
What the ‘norm’ is today, can be a curious thing. Nothing stay’s the ‘norm’ for too long anymore. It’s a good and a bad thing depending on what we are talking about. I suspect for younger people, changing norms are a good thing – it gives them the appearance that they are doing something new or different. For older folks, its a bit harder to accept change. In general, change is the best thing around – embraced by few but necessary for many. In truth, change generally happens right under your nose. Those that resist change don’t evolve, those that embrace change do. Most of the time we at least have a choice to go back to what we were comfy with or try the ‘new’ thing that might seem strange at first.
For myself, change appears in many ways; mobile, computers (or less of them), children quickly adapting to technology (an ipad with apps for example), family coming (births) and leaving (deaths), linear TV as we know it, bandwidth speed and what that brings with it (non-linear TV as we know it), and the constant flow of startups – an amazing amount of good and bad ideas (whether they fail or succeed). At least we can try them. Before the Internet really existed, they were simply a twinkle in our eye. ‘Twinkles’ are good as my daughter will tell you – she loves Tinkerbell and her magic wand and that is where she tells me lots of twinkles come from. I’m still looking for my wand – its around here somewhere.
