The Era of Social Consciousness: Where Technology Meets Humanity

The Era of Social Consciousness: Where Technology Meets Humanity

The past few decades have been defined by a relentless stream of innovations in technology, many of which have blown in like a bomb cyclone, churning up industries and companies, creating new ones, and destroying others in the process. Never before in history has the cadence of change been so swift or dramatic.

In just a few short decades, technology has evolved from a back-end solution to a ubiquitous element that is as engrained in our lives as the air we breathe. Earlier waves (think mainframes, PCs, client/server computing, the Internet, among others) were primarily about enhancing business productivity and providing information at your fingertips. More recent innovations (social media, IoT, voice recognition, search technology, and the second coming of AI, as examples), however, brought about dramatic new dynamics in communications, connectedness, convenience, personalization, security, and automation. This wave of technology largely focused on individuals, with offerings that made life richer, easier, more convenient, and safer.

When you think about it, it’s astonishing. It wasn’t all that long ago that the idea of carrying a device in your pocket that would enable you to access every kind of information imaginable, take photos, quickly communicate in real time with people anywhere in the world, measure your heart health, and adjust the temperature in your home, would sound more like an episode from The Jetsons than a possible reality. But, on January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs launched the iPhone at Macworld, giving the world “a widescreen iPod with touch control, a revolutionary phone, and a breakthrough Internet communications device.”

Social Media, Cultural Game Changer

Without a doubt, one of the biggest impacts on our culture has been social media, changing everything about how we communicate as a society, how companies engage with customers, and who is in the driver’s seat. Although Facebook has certainly had to confront serious issues related to data privacy, no one can deny the universal connectivity this platform has brought to the more than two billion people around the world who use it.

Think back only to the late 1990s/early 2000s and the powerful role advertising played in companies’ marketing communications strategies. It seems absolutely archaic now to think that organizations relied so heavily (and invested so much) in that one-way, megaphone form of communication that involved virtually no listening or conversations whatsoever.
Social media shifted the focus to dialogue and, along the way, has given consumers the loudest, most important voice in the mix, putting them 

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squarely at the center of everything—where they should be. As social media shifted the power to the hands of consumers, their wants, needs, likes, dislikes, passions, opinions, and concerns about the world have taken center stage. Because of this, technology has helped set the scene for the era of social consciousness, which at its core is about humanity.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the driving forces behind this.