The United Nations has been advocating making “Right to Internet access” a human right, which some countries like Estonia, France, Finland, Greece and Spain have already implemented. This got me thinking about how we would look at “Right to Internet use”, e.g. social networking.
We all know the power of Social networking, its adaption and growth; Facebook statistics say that they have more than 500 million users who spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook. However not many of us could have imagined its impact on reshaping the political landscape of countries. Most talked about example is that of a 26-year-old woman worried about the state of her country wrote on Facebook, "People, I am going to Tahrir Square". The message was soon to snowball into a movement to oust Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. China’s reaction to what’s called as the “Jasmine revolution” was swift with filtering and monitoring on popular social media websites and services.
Lots is being talked about the CSM (Cloud, Social Media, Mobile) phenomenon which is reshaping the world of Internet. It’s already established that social networking has overtaken search as the primary reason for users to access the internet, Facebook has more than 200 million active users who use mobile for access and these users are twice as active as non-mobile users.
I wrote about Consumerzation of the Enterprise in the earlier post, that combined with the CSM phenomenon and recent political events makes me feel that this is not just about adaption of new technologies but more about changes and impact on the history of mankind. It’s not just about using new technologies and models to provide better services at lower cost to a larger user base, but it’s about a medium to communicate, participate and influence changes in the world.
One can think of several positive and negative uses of this phenomenon, if used well this can be used to bring about change and revolutions. This can also be used to spread panic and lead to concepts like “Social networking terrorism”.
The CSM phenomenon is too strong and important for anyone of us to ignore, would censoring of this medium be possible? More likely than not like the internet, CSM too could be considered as a human right, leading to positions on “right to internet use”.
At an Enterprise level, blocking and not adopting CSM is not a risk management control which is sustainable. Users and business would not accept this posture. We would need to find answers for the two main reasons why some Enterprises are staying away from adoption of CSM, which are “Confusion and Fear”.
