Recently there have been quite a few articles about how the Social Media revolution is the Industrial Revolution of our time. The Internet revolution has changed the face of the world forever and the social media revolution is changing the face of the Internet… Maybe it is more of an evolution than a revolution though.
What has to be evaluated now is how we avoid the mistakes of the industrial revolution, or in some cases undo them. Almost our entire world was rebuilt around the industrial revolution, changing it forever (often for the worse). The industrial revolution has been over for decades and we are still living with the consequences of this time. Our education system is geared to this revolution, our cities were built to accommodate the factories (though now many have expanded to over-run the factories and are in dire need of restructuring) and our world has been plundered to feed the furnaces of ‘technology’.
So now in our time of the next revolution how are we going to make sure that our ‘advances’ echo for eternity as real advances and not things that will forever come back to haunt us. Don’t get me wrong, many amazing things came out of the industrial revolution and much of the world was changed for the better, but there are also a great many things that are proving very difficult to change now that they have been embedded for so long.
So in our time of social upheaval let us constantly think of what effect our revolution is having on our world that is more connected and easily changed than before.
