The future of social relations with the impact of technology.

Some people think technology is ruining human lives because of different reasons, such as: taking away our time, creating workaholic people and increasing distances in our social relations. I believe the opposite, as we created technology we will lead it to human race evolution.

This post will describe my optimistic view of the impact of technology in our evolution, through the impact in social Interactions and relations. The arguments will show how Technological developments will continue creating new opportunities to overcome obstacles created by space and time, and these advances will continue educating, thus pushing social relations to be more transparent, honest and authentic, essential elements to reach freedom and evolution.

Technology trends will continue to shorten time and distance in our social interactions

Internet will continue to consolidate as a public service (like water and light). Accompanying this trend, interactions through mobile devices will also continue increasing exponentially, because we will need to maximize our time more than ever. Competitiveness will continue to push people to “work smarter”, by doing more in the downtime that is, otherwise, wasted on travelling.  We will see more interactions while on the move, accessing information, communicating, navigating, creating and sharing content.

Social Networks are the current most important technology impact for social interactions. This industry will continue consolidating. Still, it is not clear if we will have few Social Networks for everything, or many different purposes. In any of the scenarios, Social Networks will be more intelligent administrators of human relations. Communications (voice and data) will be fully integrated and unified to social platforms, making social Interactions and collaborations easier and faster. Making and maintaining relations with friends, business partners, work colleagues, among others, will be impressively easier.

Technology trends will lead social relations to be more transparent, honest and authentic

Transparency in social relations will increase because information control will be unattainable to politicians, companies or common citizens.  With social platform consolidation, collective power of people to contribute and share contents, experiences and ideas will continue increasing. New applications will emerge to help common Citizens be more involved in justice, and social awareness will be more important than ever before. Companies will be more consumer centric, with larger numbers of prosumers (customers that actively participate in the creation and modification of the products they consume). People’s lives will be recorded and shared: being non-social will be uncommon, unaccepted and non-transparent.

The matrix of society will be on-line, and this Transparency will educate people to reach a higher level ofHonesty. Reputation will be known by everyone before an interaction and as it always has been, a clean background is the first step towards generating trust.

Honesty and tolerance will lead to more Authenticity inpeople, interactions and relations. Acceptance and tolerance of human differences will continue increasing and humankind will cross boundaries.

Final thoughts

As we have seen throughout this brief, technology will educate humankind to be more transparent, honest and authentic, key elements to reach happiness, freedom and evolution. In the end, however, our values and awareness will determine whether we will attain these states of consciousness; technology will just help interaction and expand opportunities.

In the near future, Generation Y will be the dominant workforce. They are already affecting the world with their increased Social Awareness. Is the new life paradigm of this generation, along with the effects of technology on collaborative social interaction, going to save the world? I am optimist about it.