One aspect of business growth that I failed to mention in my last entry was the invention of cell phones. Cell phones allow people to get in touch with you anywhere at anytime. This allows people to do things such as take conference calls with other countries while driving to work, check an email the second the get it and allows them to be on call when they are needed.
Cell phones can cause problems in some cases though. As this video demonstrates, cell phones can create a sense of isolation from those around you and can harm business relationships.
General Business Etiquette:
How can the misuse of my cell phone affect my business relationships?
Sociologically, this is a negative thing because it creates a more isolated society. The United States is already extremely dependent on energy technology and the cell phone is another technology to add to that dependency.
This article goes on to discuss how greatly cell phone use affects our society. Especially in the business world, where males tend to use their cell phones as a sign of their status according to the article. Also mentioned in this article is the sociological view that extreme cell phone usage causes extreme disengagement from society. Later on Goffman is discussed. This sociologist had a theory that in an interaction between two people, they must both be available to react to each other. If one or the other does not fulfill this interaction it as seen as hostile. In the case of cell phones, if someone answers a phone call or text while talking to another person, it can be seen as that person is not important enough to keep your attention. So while cell phones allow business to expand much more easily, the way they are used is just as important.
First off, good post. Technology, especially cellphones make the world much flatter place. People any where in the world can connect to each other with a touch of a few buttons. This greatly speeds up our communication abilities resulting in more things getting done in less time. However, this has made the cell phone so powerful that people in the business world pretty much rely totally on it. The more time you spend on our cell phone, the less time you spend actually talking and interacting with individuals causing potential problems in the future. The cell phone is a nice tool too have, but should be the tool exclusively used for communicating.
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