Week 13: Technological processes and changing communication environments

This week lecture involves heavily about technologies, something that most of us can relate. It started off by describing the timeline of the technological changes from before 20^th century until now. The new technologies allows faster transmission, allow communication among geographical dispersed participants, allow asynchronous communication, allows the choice of being anonymous, big memory storage and easy retrieval features and differ in terms of cues that are available in the communication process. However, technologies may have provided much advantages to communication but it does brings some disadvantages such as the lack of non-verbal cues that may cause confusion due to the inability of knowing the other person’s emotions and ‘data smog’ where too much of information are everywhere in your emails, spams, mobiles and etc. When an organisation inhabits technology that does not requires leaders to be physically present, it bring less sense of connection with the group and it changes the way group decision making as people are given time to respond which causes slower process but the respond produced are higher in quality. 

Globalisation brings time and space compression where this change communication patterns and perceptions. It also enhances sense of global consciousness and reflexivity that bring awareness of different culture. Globalisation causes disembodied organisations and people as behaviour and interactions lifted from local context and restructured across time and space. Globalisation has brought the possibility of outsourcing and having branches and manufacturing plants worldwide. With globalization, it is more important now for companies to have an identity as the company needs to provide certain distinctiveness that allows the organisation to create and legitimize itself. Due to global economy and increased technology, it weakened labour unions and competitive organisational environment thus leads to the age of disposable workforce where there is an increase of temporary workers or freelances, partiming and self-employment. However, this will cause lack of organisational identification but a constant supply of fresh new ideas.

This week tutorial, we are asked to reflect on changes in communication technology during our lifetime and interview our parents on their thoughts about technology. We separate the presentation into two parts where part one are based on our own opinions and experiences in technological changes. Though we have only been in the world for about 2 decades, we have gone through some radical changes in technology as we grew up during the years where technologies are drastically being introduces and evolving almost every day.  We remember on the times when floppy disk were the only way to save files from a computer but now usb drives are even smaller in size but have a bigger storage space as compared to floppy disk. Smartphones was once used to be for the rich but now it seemed affordable to anyone even kids in primary school. For the interview, we shoot a video to show in class. The video also include a section where we see how parents work with new technologies. Please watch the video below.