User:StaceyHamilton/BlogEntry: 2009 February 06 11:27:32 EST
From sasCommunity
OMG! Guest blogger John West discovers Facebook
At the behest of a good friend who said that I needed to get with it, I recently joined Facebook. I’ve always considered myself too old to join Facebook, that it was for a much younger demographic, though at 47, I’m not exactly ready for the old folks’ home. To my amazement, I’ve become addicted to the social media site. Well, with seven friends, I guess you wouldn’t exactly say that I’m addicted, but I have discovered that there’s a huge subculture where you poke, tag, write on walls, and generally tell the world, or not, about your life. A bit disconcerting at first, knowing that your life’s an open book, but the more I delve into the nuances of social media, the more I realize that “staying connected” has a whole new meaning, not to mention that it’s just plain fun.
Facebook also reminds me that our appetite for all kinds of information 24x7 is insatiable, and all of that information can be accessed with hand-held devices that are changing the world as we know it. Nothing brought this point home more for me than, of all things, a TV show. In a segment titled “Media Is Changing, but Some Things Endure” on CBS Sunday Morning last week, senior political correspondent Jeff Greenfield talked about how media has changed since the Sunday morning news magazine first aired in 1979:
. . . When Sunday Morning was born—every kind of information came in a different form. If you read mail, it came in an envelope. If you wanted to listen to news, you had to buy a radio. If you wanted to play music at home, you needed a phonograph and records. You wanted to read a newspaper? You needed the paper. A movie? That was a trip to the theatre, or a VCR. A phone call away from home? A pay phone. Write a report? Get a typewriter, and find a copier and a mailbox to send it around the world.
Now (to use the buzz word) "convergence" is here. Every conceivable kind of information—"information" in the broadest sense—comes to us on a raft of devices. Take the iPhone, which can be a newspaper, a TV screen, a camera, a theatre, a file cabinet, a radio, a Walkman, Yellow Pages, an edit room, and a travel agency.
And at root, this revolution has shifted massive amounts of power away from the providers to the users of information. You don't want to watch a program when it's on? Hey, it's always on somewhere. You like one song, but not an album? iTunes will oblige. You don't want to buy a newspaper? Read it for free (one reason why newspapers as we know them may not be around much longer).
At SAS Press, we’re working hard to stay ahead of the social media curve to deliver content to our customers when they want it and how they want it. No easy task in a digital age that’s changing by leaps and bounds!
