Summarise what you know and think about the influence of technology on society in general and specifically on organisations. What are some of the main points organisations have to consider that they may not have had to consider in the past?

First of all, whenever we speak about technology, whatever we say is out of date. What happened in the 1990s with the development of the Internet seems like a long time ago in technological terms (Schwerdtfeger, 2013) . This is because technology develops very rapidly. Once things take hold, they are used and they become common; then developments and innovations start to happen very rapidly. This is the case with technology in all facets of society, as well as in organisations.

In the 1990s, there was a big uplift in the influence of technology because of the Internet. However, since then, we have had social media, artificial intelligence, virtual reality: all new technologies that can be used in organisations, for communication, for giving roles to employees, for fulfilling tasks more efficiently (Van Dijck, 2018).

Before the pandemic happened in 2020, we could not have imagined how much of our life would be on Zoom (Zote, 2021), how much we would be sitting down in front of a screen holding meetings, teaching, communicating with our peers, and our students, in all sorts of different ways. Video conferencing happened before the pandemic, but the circumstances created the right conditions whereby that technology became pivotal to the organisation, to the functioning of society, to everything. Now technology is becoming more personalised. Software is becoming more intelligent. Big data is happening: there are data banks that log and process information every time we use the Internet, every time we use social media, every time we send a message to anyone. All of that is logged somewhere, and can be used to calculate who we are, what our preferences are, etc. Now that there is voice recording, we can say things that can be heard by someone else unknown to us.

The amount of penetration technology can have in our everyday lives almost makes the traditional idea of an organisation being a building with people, all separate, all doing their work, but having a definite identity that they work there, seem like a thing of the past. Even that traditional idea of organisations is becoming redundant. We can sit at home with such power on our phone, or our tablet, our computer, and we can do the whole job. We can do everything from home without going anywhere.

That is the reality of technology, it is advancing like a spider web, going everywhere into society, so much so that it is hard to define what is an authentic real society any more. For example, in a restaurant, people are sitting looking at their phones, they are not talking to each other.

You can take advantage of the positive aspects of technology in organisations, for example, the fact that it captures our attention, the fact that there are so many options to understand what everybody is doing. It is like a good-evil choice. What do organisations do with the control technology has over people’s lives? Do they use it for a good cause, where everybody works in it somehow? Or do they use it to control people’s lives through this great power that we all have hooking up with social media, hooking up with video, all these data banks to feed us what we think the organisation wants from us?

Regarding organisational structures, everything can be made more efficient; power can be distributed much more easily over all these different media platforms. The concept of a boss telling employees what to do becomes irrelevant because nowadays this information is relayed via Email.

Or we get a message through our social media account.

The big questions are:

What values do we really have in an organisation or in society? How can we actually keep society alive beyond these technological invasions? How do we keep a normality in society when at all times everything is being invaded by social media?

References

Schwerdtfeger, P. (2013, March 18) What is Web 2.0? What is Social Media? What comes next?? [Video]. YouTube