Social media has changed the world we live in much more radically than any of us can have imagined less than a decade ago. The teenage daughter of a close friend of mine told me recently she rarely if ever uses her mobile phone actually to speak to anyone. “You see, on the phone I only get to speak to one person,” she explained. “This way I can have loads of different conversations going on at the same time.” Conversation over, she returned to her Blackberry, punching out a rapid succession of instant messages to any number of different friends.
Every advance in new technology has had an impact on the way in which we communicate. The invention of the telephone sounded the death knell for the posted letter, which now in turn has been more or less killed off by email. So it is that sms and other forms of instant messaging have dramatically reduced the amount of time we talk on the phone. On my bus to work every morning we’re all “talking” to any number of people but never to one another.
It is for sociologists and others to assess the impact that this kind of social media is having on our social relationships. They already say that your number of Facebook friends has a direct correlation to your own sense of self-worth, that is to say the more friends you have the more likely you are to be a complete narcissist. It seems to me that social media has both shortened and lengthened the chains of communication between people. It has certainly given us all the impression that we’re much more closely
interconnected.
The point was made to me forcefully at last month’s FRESH in Copenhagen, where the annual conference event for the European fresh produce business organised by Eurofruit and Freshfel Europe looked at developments in the Nordic fresh fruit and vegetable business.
Claus Meyer, the charismatic co-founder of the Copenhagen restaurant Noma that has won all kinds of accolades for its cooking and has been voted the world’s best restaurant over the last several years, sung the praises of locally grown food. Metaphorically speaking, he had us eating out of the palm of his hand.
And yet a fresh delegate from a major international fresh produce business collared me after Meyer’s talk and made a very good point. “Listen, you’ve got to understand that the internet means everything is local nowadays. You go online and you’ve got the information there for you. It’s available to you instantly, right in front of you. It’s local,” he said.
The challenge for fresh fruit and vegetable suppliers from all over the world is to harness all the positives of ‘local’ and apply them to their own products too. Think about it, and he’s absolutely right: the internet and social media have given us the impression that everything is closer to home.
I can hear about a place, investigate it online, and book a trip there in an instant with just a few strokes of a computer keyboard or, more likely, a short succession of finger taps on my iPhone. Suddenly, I really am living in Marshall McLuhan’s global village.
Mobile communication brings us in direct, instant contact with the rest of the world. It’s all available to you and, literally, it is in the palm of your hand. How we harness this technology to connect consumers to producers all over the world is one of the big challenges of our time. The big advantage is that consumers already feel that the world is a lot smaller.
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