I never realized how interelated social behaviors are to the adaptation of new technology. How many factors of critical mass and advertising are connected to whether or not I have a PC on the internet in my home. This feels a little to me like Big Brother and it isn't an individual decision to buy an MP3 player, that there is Government, Advertisers and peer pressure involved, without us, the consumer even aware of it!

This paper is very similar to my research paper on the evolution of individualized or selective media (TiVo, Cable On Demand and iFilm) and how it has affected media content creation. I am looking into what will be the next wave of media creation, how will advertising evolve if no one watches commercials. How will TV shows evolve without the time constraint of 21 or 52 minutes?

Back to the paper:
"Our concern is more with the human and social impacts than the technology itself". Williams, Stover and Grant state in their paper. I find this very interesting in relation to how technology is what it is today. I like the model of "uses and gratification" this is all very obvious, and something that I just never realized. If something fits into the social structure and can find good uses for it, such as e-mail, then it adapts. Its funny to see predictions that do not always comethrough because another piece of technology beat it to it. "An application of Markus' (1987) theory of critical mass suggests that fax machines may one day be as common as telephones in our homes." I guess this probably would have been true had email not beat the fax machine to it.

I kind of would like to rebel aginst this "critical mass". What if I don't want to buy an iPod or use email at work. Well on one hand I can get by without an iPod -for now- but I guess I would have to use email at work or else I would probably get fired or annoy a lot of coworkers. And well the more I think of it, its easier to use email than it is to call or talk to someone face to face. Which is another reason that technology adapts.

Disruptive technology. To some that is all technology. As I was reading the social paper and they were saying that in order for communication technology to work you need two ends to it. A fax machine to communicate with another fax machine, I was thinking about Skype and why more people aren't using it. And well I'm pretty "techy" and I haven't the slightest idea of how to get my voice across my computer. It would be great to talk my grandmother in Montreal for free over the internet, but well she doesn't have a computer.

So as far as being a disruptive technology I can see why the big companies are jumping in the way of this being further developed, but I don't think it will become mainstream anytime soon. But maybe in five years, when grandma gets a PDA.

But as far as Skype and Friedman's Flat world are concerned the two go hand in hand. Skype is definitely furthering the idea of flat by giving out international numbers and having people able to have a phone number in essentially any country. Wow we'd have absolutely no idea where any company is.