Or how you can misunderstand new technology

Not too long ago I entered the Twitter zone. When new technology is being introduced I always go through the same cycle. I am never one of the early adopters, but I hang around and check it every now and then. So, what made me a Twitter convert? Well, an insight into how micro-blogging can be of use within the enterprise!

After educating Microsoft Word that micro-blogging really is a word, let me continue.

For every new technology I encounter I check my list of 6 steps in technology acceptation:

In the beginning you will always have people who say that it will not work and will never last. It is a useless new technology. I still here myself claiming that the CD-ROM would never make it: who would ever need that much disk space? Or like this discussion between 3 Dutch politicians whether Twitter could be used to stimulate civilian participation in live debates. It could never be useful, since there would be too many reactions to manage (at one point in the conversation) or too little, since nobody was using Twitter yet (at another point in the conversation), or the submissions by civilians would be too inappropriate to publish without censure.

At some point in time Microsoft and several Telco’s tried to start their own internet. They believed that they could limit the freedom of speech to their company network. How easy it is to see in hind sight that they were wrong. But what is happening now with company micro-blogging? Of course, the information shared between colleagues cannot hit the internet without scrutinization, but how are people going to manage multiple micro-blogging accounts? Ping.fm helps you manage multiple accounts, but still people need to learn to tread very carefully.

This morning I read in a newspaper that someone organized an auction over Twitter, collecting money for a good cause. To me that seems a typical example of stage 3 technology acceptance, using a new medium for something you have always been doing. Email is a good example of converting postal mail to the internet. For a long time email was nothing more than writing letters or notes as we grew up with, but in a different medium. We didn’t have to bother putting a stamp on it or actually mail the letter, but what we did, had not changed.

Email went beyond phase 3 when people realized the ease of costless duplication, CC-ing became an art (which I still haven’t mastered, but that’s a story for another time). But it also opened the door for inventive and cheap email phishing and junkmail. An enrichment phase for Twitter could be to integrate into company communication. Within my own consultancy company I notice that Yammer is allowing me access to what my company is doing. Not from a formal KM perspective, but from a human perspective. Where Wiki’s lay claim to the company’s explicit knowledge, micro-blogging might open up the company’s implicit knowledge. And if nothing further, at least I feel more involved with what is happening, without being in the office everyday.

I don’t know. Is the way Twitter was used to organize demonstrations against the Iranian regime transforming the world? I know that wide availability of electricity transformed the world. Old school people will argue micro-blogging has not been around long enough to say. But really, is that an argument anymore? Will micro-blogging be able to achieve such a transformation? I see examples of company’s embedding micro-blogging in their internal processes, connecting people from different departments and giving them the opportunity to talk to each other without having to know which individual to address. Integrating communication between people and products as well. Will this become a real transformation, make a difference?

Technology that is completely transparent, like e.g. a telephone, it will take sometime before micro-blogging reaches that stage, if ever.

Whatever new technology, the following video shows that you do need to know what you are doing and where your information is going:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 10:23 and is filed under Twitter, Web 2.0, information value, knowledge management, micro-blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.