Jordan
Over the past few decades, technology has drastically improved in a variety of ways that have greatly changed how we communicate with each other. Interactions nowadays are vastly different than those from even a mere twenty years ago. Think about it – only about twenty years ago, we were just learning about text messaging and had to do it on a small keypad on a tiny flip phone. With the technology changes in the past few decades, we now have mini-computers in our hands at all hours of the day, even on our wrists.
Technological Improvements
Technology has vastly improved, thus changing how we communicate with each other. Nearly everyone has a smartphone or access to a tablet or computer. Young children find themselves glued to their Ipads or tablets whenever possible, watching movies or playing games. A majority of people now communicate with each other through text messages and emails rather than face to face interactions or even a simple phone call.
As the digital world continues to improve, we find ourselves embedding our lives into social media apps, creating and uploading videos to get views, and living in an age where being an influencer is a job. As we change the way we interact with technology, then we must ask ourselves, how will we communicate in the future? There are both ways that technology is helping us and also ways as to how it will continue to enhance our future.
How We Interact
The ways that we interact in 2020 are vastly different than how we interacted even a decade ago. With the entire world in quarantine for most of the year, our interactions have become even more technologically advanced. With the addition of the Zoom app on everyone’s phones and laptops, the digital era is advancing how we communicate.
Listed here are the top seven ways that technology has changed the ways we interact:
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More Options
First and foremost, one of the greatest benefits of technological advancement is that there are more options for staying in touch with each other. We can have a phone call, video call, or meeting on Zoom. We can text each other or even voice text with one another. There are a million messaging apps as well as your phone’s text message capabilities. We also have emails, video classes, online schools, etc.
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Faster Communication
Remember the days when you had to run home to check your answering machine for any messages from your friends or loved ones? Now, we can send a text, email or make a phone call to reach someone within seconds. We can add emotion to our text messages and send pictures at any time.
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Less Expensive Communication
Technology has also changed the price of our communication. We can save on texting fees by using free texting apps, such as Whatsapp or Line, among others. These apps help bridge the distance between the people we need to talk to without any stress or hindrances.
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Social Media
Social media has given us the ability to communicate with each other through pictures and even live updates. We’ve learned to communicate within a certain amount of words, thanks to apps such as Twitter.
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Facetime and Video Calls
We can also communicate through video conferences, calls, and even video chats. This has greatly changed how we can communicate with people from all over the country and from all over the world.
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Working from Home
With the advancements in technology, we are also able to work remotely more easily. With Zoom conferences and video chats, we can work from the comfort of our own homes.
We can even communicate with customer service teams through text messages. Now that most of the world has lived through some sort of quarantine and companies have adapted to most of their staff working remotely, it will be interesting to see how working from home trends in the future when the pandemic is over.
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An Open World
The world is more open now than ever before. Even in the remote villages of Laos, you can find a few smartphones lying around. This gives a much larger population access to news, social media, and socializing with people all over the world than ever before. Even those without electricity, such as most of the rural population of Namibia, now have access to small solar panels in order to charge their devices.
With all of the rapid advances in the digital age, we can also wonder how things will change in the future. We can meet in virtual worlds using virtual reality systems, creating characters for ourselves, and holding meetings in these types of worlds. No matter what happens, technology will continue to improve our abilities to communicate with each other.
