I just posted a comment on Lois Gray’s latest post, which celebrated the third birthday of his children rather than his usual stream of quality tech news and insight – having a child at a similar age, I identified with the relationship his kids have with technology, and it made me consider the rate of progress and how institutions in education are going to need to adapt their systems and topics even during the course of a year, and certainly in the course of a child’s time in the school system, rather than over the course of generations as previously seemed to happen.
It also reminded me to post up some interesting stats that have been cropping up and I haven’t had a chance to share – all of which are symptoms of a wider change:
- 1/5 of UK grandparents are using social media – and a lot of them are very active, not just registering and then forgetting about it.
- The Royal Mail is cutting thousands of jobs as the volume of letters sent each day dropped 22% – I can’t remember the last time I sent a letter which wasn’t required for business reasons. I do still send greeting cards, and often mail eBay and Amazon items to people, but if I’m not using email/social networks, the phone is the personal communication choice for me (Either my mobile or Skype these days!)
- 53.5% of US internet users will read blogs this year – Ignoring the argument over what a blog actually is these days (Is Techcrunch a blog or a media site? Is Tumblr blogging or microblogging? Does any normal person actually care about these semantics?) – it’s interesting to note that this prediction by emarketer is despite the huge numbers of people claiming blogging was dead due to Facebook (Which was recently claimed to have lost some users for the first time), and Twitter.
- The UK bought 20% more eBooks last year – That’s only going to increase – I wonder if there are also stats for downloads of free eBooks, and how many more were purchased that weren’t recorded, such as the eBooks almost every marketing blog now offers?
- 42% of UK adults don’t read a daily newspaper – I’ve spent 10 years thinking and talking about the future of print and digital media. The ‘death’ of print always involved overestimating the rate of change and the lack of support for niche print products, but the need for printed news delivered to your door in the morning was initially removed by radio, then television, then the internet, and now the mobile internet.
Steering a course through all of this can be challenging, but the core principles of business,marketing and being a human remain the same… It’s how you achieve them that differs, and how you can improve on them by utilising the most relevant bits of technology.