This session although a little vague in it’s title was interesting to here the panellists views on the current state of social trends within technology. There was little detail and only small insight in the future direction of these topics - social networks, technology and the web in general.

Moderator: Laura Moorhead Sr Editor Culture, Wired
Laura Moorhead Sr Editor Culture, Wired
Andrew Blum Contributing Editor, Wired
Robert Fabricant Exec Creative Dir, Frog Design
Eliot Van Buskirk Columnist/Blogger, Wired News
Peter Rojas Engadget
Daniel Raffel Product Mgr, Yahoo!

In today’s society technology is driving social change and with the advent of open information and willingness to share and tell all about the details of ones life it is easier to following the lives of others than ever before. Technological and social change is intricately linked together and it’s pace is unlike any other change seen in modern history.

The latest changes within this trend seems to be the dissolving of location based technologies and the advent of micro trends like widgets and content aggregation now allowing users to choose the content they want and how they want it to be delivered.
Sites like http://plazes.com and http://outside.in provide services to help over come the lack of location in the technology by allowing users to track friends and themselves.

People and especially the new users of emerging technologies do not view privacy the same way as we did historically. With public online persona’s and personal information broadcasted for all to pick and choose what is relevant to them. This begs the question how do corporations use and join the open data debate, a trusted brand can make or break a corporation and would opening up data weaken or strengthen this image the majority of social services out there are new companies that do not have this problem.

The question is will all this free information cause an backlash at some point and will users need to regain control of there identity, history shows us the likely trend will be that at some point the openness of this model will change to a model somewhere between the traditional and the new. The question is which will it be closer to and essentially whether this is a fad or progression.

Social networking has given raise to a tribe like culture which within the mass communication space smaller niche and specialise groups can exist. Also the idealisation of lead figures can be seen with the “who’s on you friend list” and “how many friends do you have”. This does provide and bizarre sense of belonging in an online none physical world.

The monitoring of these niche groups and markets provides business with information on how and who to market to and can lead to new business models and opportunities. This provides the customer with a voice without them knowing it. This follows nicely with the new business model of allowing open access to your product set which in turn allows your customers and user to change your products to suit their needs and as such developing and creating a new product for you.

Interestingly trends in developing and none westernised countries allows us to take a step back from forging forward. In these areas we see large rises in the use of simpler technologies i.e. Mobile phone devices to access the internet and email to snail mail services to allow people to keep in touch with the electronic hungry west. Also the investment in new service industries like call centres bring and provide increased technologies and services to areas that would not have funding to deliver such advancements in such a small space of time.

The use of education is a very interesting topic and one that I believe will be debated greatly going forward. The BBC are doing a fantastic series on this at the moment demonstrating how some schools and stepping up to technology and utilising to engage children. One teacher in this series pointed out how they know that googles knowledge is far greater than any teachers but how the teachers skills are in teaching and that level of human interaction that knowledge it’s self can not provide.