I just attended Dreamforce, the annual conference for Salesforce, where the topic was all about “cloud, cloud, cloud.”  The whole conference was exhilarating and motivating which got me thinking about the future in a virtual sense.

Marc Benioff’s keynote was a continuous thread of customer success stories featuring Salesforce software through the cloud.  Coca Cola presented a video of the futuristic way of ordering a Coke (walking up to machine and scanning your phone).  Toyota showcased how a car will soon be like a “friend” who drives for you.

Coca Cola’s presentation: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsBeKQ7h9R0>

Alex Williams of TechCrunch reported on the conference“Here’s the switch we are seeing. We are starting to see how society will some day interact more with software than people. Everything will be a node. That future is emerging now as we see how the cloud is used to direct machines. Like the self-driving car Benioff featured in his keynote this morning.”

While everything about cloud communication is exciting and thrilling, it concerns me we may become a society that is too connected to our devices.  The internet, social media and our mobile devices should enable our connection to others at all times.  We plug into our devices everyday so when do we really log off? We are constantly connecting to people online but are we really closer to people now?

The answer is that we are constantly in communication whether it be through nonverbal language , written language or speaking.  Communicating with someone involves some type of common understanding of the issue or topic at hand.  When you are behind a computer screen or on the telephone, so much is lost in that message. Feelings of a topic are lost when all you have to do is answer questions on a computer screen.  As the receiver of information, we do not get to see how that person felt about a certain issue.

This is why communication through email, text or social media is so easy for everyone but does it really mean we are more connected now than ever?

I would have to disagree and say we are un-connected more than ever.  Everything we say is changed, cleaned-up or sugar-coded through an email, text message or facebook post.  It is so easy to portray yourself as anything you’d like behind a screen but getting in front of someone is a whole nother’ ball game.

I don’t think a “car-friend” can offer much to me when I have a bad day.

After reading the PR Daily article titled “This is your brain on Social Media” and seeing the too familiar graphic below, I was having a hard time admitting this is my day-to-day life! PR professionals dealing with IO (information overload), take note.

 

The article continues to explain how we are becoming dumber, less satisfied and unable to handle stress due to our amount of consuming information.

Another article written by Tony Dokoupil of The Daily Beast suggests the web is driving us mad, literally. Tony says, “The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways.”

The article continues to point out that more than a third of mobile users get online before getting out of bed (I’m guilty). The average teen processes an astounding 3,700 texts a month, double the 2007 figure, and more than two-thirds of these people report feeling their phone vibrate when in fact nothing is happening (guilty again!). Researchers call it “phantom-vibration syndrome.”

So, what is the cure to this problem? Unfortunately, I do not have that answer but some apps are trying to help us with our IO problem. Instead of juggling 10 apps for our multi information gathering efforts, developers are creating one app to serve as our one-stop hub for all outlets. Barrett Sheridan of Businessweek recently wrote an article about the new app called Cue, formerly called Greplin, which aims to be the first thing you check in the morning and return to throughout your day.

Say for instance you’re meeting with a new client, Cue will try to find the contact’s latest tweets and Facebook updates. The idea is that if you’re running behind schedule, you can pull up Cue to instantly see where you need to be next, who to call to let them know you’ll be late, and catch up on the other person’s latest Facebook photos, so you can have something intelligent to talk about once you get there.

The app eventually wants to answer the question for us, “Give me the guy I met last week with long hair.” Now, doesn’t that sound nice for us PR multi-tasking pros, slowly making us dumber!

How many times have your checked your phone, email and twitter since reading the beginning of this article? And no lying!