Who knew when I first got online in... maybe 1993? and text-chatted for the first time with a distant friend using a text-based chat program called ytalk that I was starting to engage in the now trendy trend of Social Networking? I keep reminding myself of my office-mate's impression at the time.
"Dave! Check this out! I'm actually talking to a friend – in NEW YORK! Look! I'm typing, and she sees what I'm typing, and then I can see what she types!"
Dave nodded sagely. "I heard about another way to do that, where you punch in a series of digits and can then actually talk to the other person via voice."
"REALLY!?"
He grinned and pointed to the telephone. Groan! Gotta love tech-savvy luddites for keeping gear-giddiness in check.
MOO was next, with the announcement of the grand opening of schMOOze University for teachers and non-native speaking students of English. I started forming my long-standing hypothesis that human interaction was the best thing about the internet, and a key factor in any attempt at online learning.
In the past couple years, online human interaction seems to have finally come into its own as the web melded with the Internet, as apps got easier to use, and as more and more older people got online. My mom's got a facebook account, for goodness sake, and chats with us via gtalk using her webcam.
Social networking – used to be geeks and academics, now it's everyone.
So I'm finding it strange to have been at least a little bit of a pioneer in using the Internet for communication (as opposed to the old "information superhighway" idea of its main purpose being information retrieval) – and now feeling like a bit of a noob trying to figure out how to use it correctly for marketing. I've been using it forever to collaborate on projects, to co-author articles, to provide language learners with opportunities to interact in English, to communicate and share with my friends, but I'm feeling like a bit of a latecomer in trying to use it for marketing.
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