bad habits in a shrinking world

As the saying goes, the world is getting smaller with the advancement of technology. Along with that, I can see many bad habits being formed. When text messaging was first introduced, it was free. I remember this because everyone was texting everyone regardless of their proximity or of the value of the message. It became both amusing yet annoying and even silly.

Technology has increased tremendously since then. One change I like very much is how we can call people up using the internet. It has little respect for geography. It costs the same for me to call my siblings in the next room of our house as it does for me to call my sister studying abroad. We can chat, talk and use our webcams to make faces at each other at a low cost and even better, none of this gets taxed as exhorbitantly as our calls through the traditional phones. :)

Yet, even when our family was all together for the christmas break in Paranaque, some of our habits stuck. There were times that I caught myself sending Instant Messages to my siblings instead of walking over to whichever part of the house they were or even just hollering out to them. It's learned behaviour, I think.

For families, behaviour like this is mostly just something we laugh at. We all get forced to get together anyway since we can't email food to each other. But for companies, this may be a concern. Over the long run it may lead to ineffeciency and in turn translate into losses. When it comes to communicating, nothing beats seeing the person face to face. Body language is important to convey messages clearly. If within companies, bad habits like this take over traditional means of communication, we may see tiny errors or small misunderstandings multiplied over great scales over the long term amounting to significant losses. It sounds very speculative, but I've seen it happen while I was working. Technology is a double edged sword.