I’ll be there, not every day as I will be with my daughter. However I will be speaking on the Wednesday “Identity, Reputation & Privacy in the Organisational Context” 🙂
Looking forward to it and can’t wait to meet other alumni. The 3 day programme is here.
Karens birthday post got me thinking a bit…
But one should never forget that what you think and what you say needs not to be the same. Writing on a blog might get people to be more direct with their thoughts, but in this day where everything needs to be online as soon as it happens, people go off posting their imediate thoughts on everything. Facebook and Twitter, who encourages short comments (“What are you doing now?”, “What’s happening?”) are prime examples of this. We’ve had examples of politicians and celebrities ending up in the news because their quick, spontaneous postings have been i’ll formulated and interpreted in a bad way (perhaps the correct way, but probably with an unwanted effect). There is little risk in ending up ridiculed in the newspapers for the majority of bloggers, but the risk is still that you come of looking like an idiot or worse when you’re just posting your immediate thoughts on complex subjects.
Yes that’s right, today is my birthday! And it feels amazing to be… well on the other side of 45, getting closer to 50, and yet a part of this amazing information age with you!
I was thinking how much things have changed on my birthday over the years. This morning when my dear daughter woke me, the first thing I did after feed her, was go down and make tea, go to my study and work on my MBA paper. Well the making tea bit is quite a normal day, in fact, as is the studying, but before the study bit I couldn’t resist going online to check Facebook. Here my friends had already started posting on my Wall birthday greetings from Australia, Middle East and UK, and it is only 6AM here in Sweden 😀
And this is what has changed, despite all its warts, Facebook enables my “friends” to share in my special day. Give me a great feeling that others are interested in what is happening in my life. In fact it doesn’t matter how lonely we may have felt in our life before Facebook, now, today in this most amazing information society that we are all a part of, we will never be lonely again. We get so many “flowers” as it is called in some European cultures (which means nice words) when we login. We are all a part of a conversation. This conversation enables each one of us to feel part of a community, a community that matters, where each on of us have a voice and where we can be sure that someone out there is listening and interested in hearing what you and me have to say.
I just love this quote from Mena Trott, President of Six Apart…..
“Many ordinary people are scared of blogging because they feel that they have nothing to say. Yet mundane is interesting; it’s OK to talk about your sandwich. To a handful of people in the world it may mean a lot.”
This just about sums up the beauty not just of blogging, but of social networking. It has changed over the last 10 years the dynamics of how everything is working in our world. The world is smaller, cultural boundaries are being crossed, it is almost as though we have found a common language to speak, and this is not just English but something more profound. True many of us are communicating online in English, an abbreviated version, spelling and grammatics have lost their importance. We can write blog posts, post how we are feeling on Facebook, or twitter, or both. We are communicating with pictures, audio, video, everything that enables us to reach out and share how we are feeling and seeing the world outside of the boundaries created by the language that we may be imprisoned by, or empowered by. And this is what is so amazing!