Technology 2012: Four tech trends to watch

2. Generation hashtag: Social technologies will continue to inform and inspire

Tokyo Electric Power Co./AP/File
In this file photo released this past March by Tokyo Electric Power Co., smoke billows from Unit 3 among four housings covering four reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex in Okuma, Fukushima Prefecture, northeastern Japan. Many people received the first news of the earthquake via social networks.

The year 2011 may be the first for which people remember learning about world-changing events in a tweet. News of the earthquake off the Japanese coast, and links to video of the ensuing tsunami, spread within hours over social networks – as did ways to aid disaster-relief efforts. People up and down the East Coast interrupted their workdays to ask Facebook friends whether they, too, had felt the Virginia-based earthquake that shook their office. And the Occupy Wall Street movement used social media as its bullhorn, inspiring activists across America to organize local protests.

Still less than a decade old, social technologies have rewritten the rules of media, marketing, and customer interaction. Expect companies to replace static blogs with active social streams in 2012. Using social media on the job – often a no-no on company time – will instead become routine for many workers. With consumers expecting everything to have a social presence, social-savvy employees will represent the public face of their company or its products: chatting with fans, offering followers exclusive deals, or fielding complaints.

The next step is to blend the social media experience with immersion technologies like those now offered through online gaming. With workgroups increasingly scattered across different continents, people will scan internal company social networks for project updates or use avatars to represent themselves in meetings.

Outside of work, users’ trust in social media as their first source for news and opinion will continue to rise. The battle for votes in the 2012 presidential election is already raging on social networks. The campaign will be broadcast on social media from the front lines and magnified through users’ comments and retweets through Election Day.

Whether for business or to share breaking news, social networks will be our instant-gratification information source for round-the-clock updates. Just don’t let your boss catch you ... yet.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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