The Wired Society

Would I let 900 million people read my diary asks Nardi et al. (2004)?  Only if I’m using it as practice for a writing career at some point in my life and I like to write. More than once over the last couple of decades, a good role model for a post-retirement writing career was the late Dame Barbara Cartland.

However, people don’t read books any more – or at least not in the traditional form of a book.  At present, it’s all about e-readers such as the Amazon Kindle in its various iterations (PC Advisor) and then there is Audible (Amazon) to move from the written word into the realm of the spoken word. Actually I think the work of Alexandre Dumas would sound great on Audible. 

Thanks to Web 2.0 and its exponential spread across the globe this century, it’s all about connectivity. The forms of communication have irrevocably changed. The new technology – the Smartphone, the tablet – has contributed considerably to this “wired” lifestyle.  Even at a recent training workshop busy professionals were using every break to check their messages, WhatsApp, and their social media pages whether they were from Latin America or the Caribbean.