Social Media Is Here to Stay

Social Media is Here to Stay

In the article by Nicholas Carr, he tries to make the point of that history repeats itself. That the world economic cycle is cyclical and will always have economic booms and then eventually become obsolete. He feels that data storage, transport and processing has lost its ubiquity and that because it's become less scarce IT will eventually die out. Given that he wrote the article almost ten years ago in 2003 he couldn't have been any more wrong. Granted that he could not have seen the participatory & social participatory cultures that we now live in, with social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn they now encompass the day-to-day functions of most the world's population and almost all companies. Carr makes the argument that IT will go through the "the boom-to-bust-cycle", which at the time his thinking seems to be logical because it has always happened before, such as inventions such as the radio. But this is bigger than anyone could've imagined, it took 38 years for 50 million people to have radios and it took less then a year to have 200 million Facebook users. The world of interface is exploding and in the business world if you do not have top tier IT and CIO's your company will fail. Social media, IT, cloud systems, ERP's are not hype, they are the fact that this will be a corner stone of business that will be built even further upon to expand and make business move seamlessly. Carr says "Hardly a dollar or a euro changes hands anymore without the aid of a computer" and he's right, this is the world of commerce we now live in, its more efficient than humanly possible and is no way a fad; this is a game changer. The world now revolves around social media because it is peer reviewed and the public no longer trusts shady and elaborate advertisements. They almost exclusively listen to what they read on blogs and Twitter rather what was in the newspaper the next day. In the video it made the point that we no long seek the news the news comes to us, and it could not be anymore true, the pace of information spreading today compared to 10 years ago is astronomical. Carr makes the point elaborately that infrastructural technology changes and that it should not be invested in so heavily, but in this case the world has used what IT has given us revamped it and evolved it. ERP's like the system that Wal-Mart use have completely changed the way business is done because of their completely new technical infrastructure, and is no way "temporary". They invested millions into it and now have created billions. Today when you apply for a job companies ask you for your Facebook & Twitter accounts, some companies and even all government employees are now forced to hand over their accounts and passwords just for companies to look at and make a decision whether or not to hire that particular person