Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Who says technology has no emotion?

They say technology has no emotions. It is mechanical and only logic works! I disagree with respect.

Technology carries a lot of emotions around itself. Technology is not something happens by itself. There are millions of people who experienced sleepless nights, missed lunches, and challenging hours in their lives. Whilst creating, designing, implementing, deploying, selling and maintaining technology, many emotions are involved. For example, frustration in code writing, bug fixing; anger for crashing codes; fear of not meeting deadlines, fear of understanding complexity and so on. As a person in technology for many years, I experienced anger, fear, sadness, excitement, disappointment, and love of course.

1. What are your emotions related to technology either as a technology person or a user of technology at work?
2. How do those emotions affect you and impact positive change in our business and our lives?
3. How can we turn negative emotions to positive ones for a better mental health, ie fear and anger to love!

Paradox of Open Social and Professional Networks: Conservative vs Diverse

It is interesting to observe two kinds of typical networking patterns in a number of social and professional networking sites.

1. Conservative: those members who want to connect only with the similar, familiar people from the same circle. They are uncomfortable with people from different backgrounds. Common ground is essential for them. They have tighter filters. A small network is sufficient for them.

2. Diverse: those members open to connections from different people, different personalities, different characteristics, new ideas, different cultures, different visions etc. They have more flexible filters and more tolerant to ambiguity. They see each connection as an opportunity. They prefer large, diverse network of people.

I believe our values, expectations and experience with people have a deciding factor for the category we choose.
My personal preference is diverse. I would like to know which category you are or you prefer. Diverse, Conservative or both? Or other combination? What are your key expectations from online social/professional networking?