Before the Internet we had two main ways of communicating with people - phone and written letters. I still remember writing letters to my parents when making an international call was prohibitively expensive for a college kid. International calls were reserved for special occasions such as birthdays, Christmas, and New Year's eve. The internet has changed all that, and it has shortened the distances. It has also changed our relationships with friends, family, and co-workers.
Nowadays, I can call my relatives overseas using the Skype app in my i-Phone, which is something I did this past weekend during my trip to Boston.
Email is the other tool we often use, and which has replaced letters and most phone calls. The vast majority of my daily tasks at work are assigned to me via email. Before email entered the work place, those same tasks were assigned to me by phone or by memo. Email, however, has its own sets of rules that we should abide by. Email etiquette at work, for example, is something that we should always practice. We need to remind ourselves that an email is a written record, which can be easily forwarded to anybody.
Smart phones have made texting one of the most popular ways of communication amongst teenagers and adults alike. Texting, though, as well as most of the Internet tools discussed here, can lead to decreased social skills, as face-to-face contact is no longer a requirement.
Social networking sites such as Facebook, TwItter, Linkedin, Google Circles, and others before them such as Orkut and Myspace have changed the way people interact with one another. Social networking provided a way for people to communicate and share their lives and daily activities with hundreds and sometimes thousands of people.
There are pros and cons related to the use of social networking. On the plus side, social networks can have a positive impact on getting people's attention to a common cause. A good example of that were the events leading up to the Arab spring in 2011. In places like Tunisia and Egypt the people's uprising against the government was coordinated through Tweeter and Facebook. TwItter was also used in 2010 during a protest against the government by civilians in Teheran, in which a video of a woman being killed during the protest became viral and hit the headlines across the world.
One of the downsides related to the use of social networks is obviously the invasion of one's privacy as everything that one posts about his/her personal life becomes public. The other downside associated with social networks is the spam resulting from an excessive number of messages posted several times a day by some users about every minor aspect of their lives. The other form of spam is the constant posting of chain messages with a religious connotation, or of any type of chain message.
