As the activities of human life evolve and change, so does technology follow the lead to meet demands for better communication and human connection. While smartphones might have disconnected us from each other at their onset, technology has made improvements to our personal experiences in more ways than ever before. No longer is faster communication limited to sharing photos and texts. Today, we can invite the world in to share our life journey.
Communication also changes how we work together, and as job roles shift (think remote employees, side hustles, and self-employment), technology provides new ways to connect. Here are four ways tech changes the way we interact, learn, and work with each other.
Social Story-Telling
When social media first came on the scene, people discovered a whole new way to connect to friends and family. We reconnected with old friends and met like-minded people. Today, alongside photos and status updates, social story-telling has become the trend. Sharing life experiences through video snippets lets us participate visually and audibly to enhance engagement and feel part of the moment.
In the future, we’ll see businesses continue to adopt story-telling as a marketing method in order to humanize the conversation and relate to their customers and clients.
Live Streaming
Live streaming puts us right in front of each other via a screen and takes distance out of the equation. It can be a lot of fun to watch an artist create in real-time or be virtually present at Thanksgiving dinner when you’re actually hundreds of miles away.
Live streaming opens up education opportunities by enabling screen sharing to teach and train in a whole new way. Students can learn from teachers around the world and participate through streamlined communication and interaction to make learning fun and dynamic.
Augmented Reality
Photo via Flickr by turkletom
Unlike virtual reality (VR) technology that replaces your idea of the world, augmented reality (AR) adds to your current experience. Virtual reality requires a headset that covers your eyes to immerse you in a different world while AR is experienced through an app via a screen. Say someone hands you a business card. With AR, you use an app to “look” at the card and have a video pop up with more information. The use of augmented reality will give us a new way to communicate and move around each other’s worlds by animating an inanimate environment.
Language Meets Tech
Thanks to the internet and social media, the world has grown smaller. We can travel virtually to experience a new culture or discover a cultural pastime. Today’s translation services let us communicate in exciting ways that break down language barriers and get us talking to each other. Innovations like machine translation (MT) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) are just two ways technology is crossing borders to allow us to speak to each other regardless of our native language.
Technology takes down borders and opens communication in new and innovative ways. Advancements keep improving the ways we stay together no matter the distance. Innovations in technology have come a long way in the past 20 years and will probably surpass expectations in the coming 20 years. No matter how much faster or better we make it, technology will recognize the human need for social connection.