My phone number? Just friend me on facebook instead.

Admit it, you have a Facebook, mySpace, or some form of social media site. The Development of social media sites are not so much a form of technology, but a product of several technologies coming together. Obviously the rapid development of the Internet and widely available access laid the foundation for social media sites to succeed. Along with smart phones, laptops and other Internet accessible devices becoming more common place, social media can be accessed from just about anywhere. Advancements with digital cameras and digital formatted pictures gaining ground as the dominate format for pictures also added to the appeal of social media sites.
Here is some more background info via the wiki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media
Prior to current social media sites like Facebook and mySpace, you had to go to different sites or other channels to comunicate. Hotmail for your email, Photobucket for your pictures, Youtube for videos, Msn messenger for chatting. Well sites like Facebook manage to centralize those functions onto one site. People could share their status, comment on each others pages, and load pictures on the site for their friends to see. Most importantly, it let them link to each other, by means of tagging. It let your network work of friends become inter connected and became a literal network.
I wouldn’t say that social media changed the way i communicated with my family and friends, but it has certainly change where i go to do my messaging, photo sharing, and just plain “facebook stalking”. Admit it, you done it too.
How important have social media sites become? Important enough that having access to your favorite one or multiple was the main theme behind a various mobile phones. For example, Microsoft tried to market a mobile phone centered on social media called the ‘Kin’.
Here is a link to a in-depth review if your interested.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/05/kin-one-and-two-review/

Texting KILLS...no not really.... well kinda.

Well with the convenience of email and portability of pagers and mobile phones, it was destined to happen. As soon as the technology and infrastructure allowed phones and other devices to become portable and cheap enough, text messaging as we know it was born. Here is the usual wiki link to the inner workings and history of text messaging.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_messaging

Text messaging came at a time when you had a few different main options on the ways you could communicate to someone. You could, talk to someone in person, you could call them, , you could page them but they would have to call you back sometime, or you could email or write a regular letter. Calling someone on the phone, whether it be mobile or a land line, meant getting into a involved conversation and if on a mobile phone then you would using up your minutes. A lot can be conveyed through a conversation on the phone but sometimes you don’t really want say too much at all. Email and regular mail meant that you had to be able to receive the mail in question (this being before smart phones were as common as they are today ), which means there could be a large gap of time in between sending the message and the other person actually receiving it. Pagers at the time were somewhat limited in what they could send, and were for the most part one-way, meaning you still had to access a phone to send back a page if you wanted to.
Enter text messaging. Text messaging fills in that gap in between email and paging. As more and more mobile phones were made that supported text messaging, there were more people that could receive texts than had data plans for emails. So people could just text you instead of call you. It was quick and did not require you to say a single word. This by the way is useful when you can not speak at the moment, for example in a meeting or during class. Well text messaging today is now the most popular way of reaching someone. With technology advancing, almost all mobile phones now can send and receive text messages, and its a standard feature on any new phone. Text messaging has become so common and ingrained into our every day life that it actually is a bit of a problem. As seen in this link, text messaging can be a common cause for car accidents.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-06-11-dwt_N.htm

So how does this effect how i talk to my friends and family? I would say, that for short replies or to ask a simple question, text messaging is hard to beat. However i still like to call people or email for more important or in depth matters.

Email with a sprinkle of spam.

Well messaging or just plain sending some sort of info to someone hasn't really changed all that much since craving little pictographs on stone and passing it along. And as technology developed and gave rise to telegraphs and later telephone networks. And with those networks eventually came the ability to transmit data over the networks, more specifically, a message from one computer to another. And thus began the age of email ( If it feels like i am skipping over a lot of details in between, i am, to get to the focus of the blog. Hes a link to a wiki entry of how email works and more background info... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email ). In a relatively short amount of time, we went from waiting a few days to get a message cross country to almost instantly getting our messages across the country. Well that can have a effect on how you communicate with people. When it takes days to send a letter to someone, and few more days to receive a reply, you tend to put more thought and effort into what and how you write. Letters had more character to them, and seemed more personal. If you got a letter from a girl, the letter might carry with it a bit of her perfume, or how her handwriting changed a bit where she was writing something particularly emotional. A letter can convey underlining context than what the words written literally say. Compare that to a email. A email is rather impersonal in the way of how it looks. You can’t hold a email and you don’t get to see the hand writing. You sure can’t smell your girlfriend’s perfume on email. It’s a rather dry format. Since the time it takes to deliver a email is almost instant, you almost expect a quick reply as well. This takes out the waiting and build up of the event of receiving a letter for some people. However, the connivance and efficiency of email is its strongest selling point, and honestly i probably couldn't get by without it in today’s high speed world. In fact email has become so main streamed that many smart phones now have it as a standard feature. As far as how it’s effected communications among my friends and family, i would have to say we write to each other more than i ever have written them but the emails are brief compared to any letter i wrote. I also tend to not write about anything too deep or important in a email either. Topics better saved for a phone conversation or meeting in person.

When i was your age we didnt have ... and walked 2 miles to school in the snow.

With technology advancing every day its hard to imagine everyday life without email or text messaging or phones. If you ask current high school students today, you'd be hard pressed to find one that didn't have the Internet exist in the majority of their life. There are probably more high school and college students that are computer literate than adults. They have also have access or at least know someone who has access to a cellphone. In a relatively short amount of time, technology has changed the ways we normally communicate with each other (I will covering telephone technology only in this post, since email and other data based communications could easily take up one post).

Lets take a quick look back at the past at how we used to communicate. Since the focus of this blog is on new technology, i will only touch on the past. For the most part of history, we communicated orally or by physically marking some object and passed it along(stone tablets, paper, etc...). Then came advances in electricity and we started to send information down wires via simple means such as the telegraph. That gave us a means to send a message a great distance almost instantly, although still just passing a message along. Soon after, Alexander Gram Bell was awarded a patent for the telephone. It let people have a real time conversation over long distances. For a large part of time that form of the telephone hasn't changed much. You had a terminal (phone), a line from your house to the telephone service provider, and the trunking and switching equipment that connects the users. The advances in technology improved quality in service and hardware but people were still tethered to their homes. Even with the adoption of pagers, and could be paged, we still needed to find a regular phone to reach someone. However, the fact that we could send wireless pages out to people meant that it was just a matter of time before we could send voice.

We could send voice over radio waves before, but the equipment to do so was bulky and consumed lots of power. It wasn't until advances in electronics and batteries came around that we were able to shrink the components to something more realistic to be carried around. As seen in this picture is one of the first commercial cellphones.



(Image From Wikipedia)

After which mobile communications have taken off, and each year brings in newer phones and other devices that pack the latest and greatest that technology has to offer. Now we aren't limited to location to have our conversations, or even just our voices (with the next generations of mobile phones like the iPhone 4, video calls are possible). Really cool if you ask me, since i considered a pager that could receive the number '80085' from my buddy the pinnacle of technology while in high school.

Here is a link to some more history of mobile phones
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones

About this blog.

There have been many advances in technology for communication over the years. Each new advance has impacted our lives and the way we communicate amongst ourselves. This blog will focus on how technology has effected the way we communicate and reach out to each other in our daily lives. I'll start out by touching on the technology we used in the past. Its hard to imaging that cellphones and the Internet have only been around a relatively short amount of time. After taking a look back, I will focus the posts towards technology we currently see in day to day life, and explore new and up coming trends and technology that will impact the way we communicate in the future. Feel free to comment on this blog, and I will do my best to answer any questions or add random ranting to any one's random rants.