Remarkable Reading: #2 CONNECT by John Browne with Robin Nuttall and Tommy Stadlen and DOT COMPLICATED by Randi Zuckerberg

The aim of this section Remarkable Reading is pay a tribute to the books that taught, share trends & insights into where our world in the 21st century is heading in a technology enabled world, and ask the right questions.

Bolded and italics quotes and references do not belong to myself  and belong directly to the author.  The focus is to share valuable insights and teachings from the book to win business for the authors.





The other two themes worthy of mention after reading Connect: How Companies Succeed by Engaging Radically with Society and Randi Zuckerberg's  DOT COMPLICATED: Untangling Our Wired Lives is the topic of language.

Firstly new language that is being developed as a result of the advance of social media and smartphones.  SMS changed the way we connected, and changed the way we use language to communicate - it became common to leave out letters and shorten the way we communicate - "txt u sn" instead of "text you soon".

With Twitter and Hashtags (or #hashtags) we are able to hashtag, literally, anything and when something gets popular it trends (which means a lot of people have used that hashtag).  Hashtags are universal across social networks from Facebook to Instagram, and they are also universal in the sense that it's becoming a common language anyone in the world can understand in English. 

As Randi Zuckerberg states on page 206, chapter 9: "We've also seen, recently, the emergence of a new universal language built around the hashtag"

Randi also  states on Page 208, Chapter 9 - "..by speaking the universal language of food photos"  


The other universal language that's emerged is the language of food. Food photos, food hashtags, food comments, food sharing, food porn, foodie and countless more terms, phrases, and acroynms all associated with the explosion of food.  




The two notable trends are:

1) Food from everywhere in the world is available more and more in the world now. Asian food, and other more authentic cuisines that weren't traditionally available before are more mainstream, affordable and accesssible.  On the other hand we've also had food fusion whereby you'll see cultures fuse and combine their approach such as a Butter Chicken Pie or a Chicken Karaage Burger. 

2) The advances in:

a) availability of travel booking and accomodation being made more convenient and more affordable means we can travel more and experience more food from over the world

b) the advances in smartphone and camera photography means we can now take more photos of food and share them with others in very specific ways and areas such as Instagram

c) our ability to provide feedback on food via social networks such as Zomato, leave recommendations and ratings means that the quality of food and hospitality has improved overall

means that there has been a compound effect and explosion in terms of the amount of time and space we dedicated to food on the internet, and there has also been more depth and quality in both, the content provided on social media and the quality of the food itself.

CONNECT points out  on Page 215, Epilogue, "The second trend is the shift in the economic centre of gravity towards emerging economies, this shift means that the main theater of action in the old world drama of business society relations will be a new world, with attitudes and cultures which are all together different from those of the West".  

This cultural transition may also have an impact on how language (English currently the third most spoken language  in the world) is written, spoken, communicated and evolves over the internet via social  networks. 

You can follow the author of DOT COMPLICATED - Randi Zuckerberg on Twitter here and follow author of CONNECT - Lord John Browne on Twitter here & Tommy Stadlen here.

You can engage in a further conversation with me in the comments section, converse further via email prashanthh2016@gmail.com, and connect on Twitter here.




We will be touching on Robotics and AI, food innovation (Finnovation), convergence of established media and social media, internet necessities and what the future of the 21st century workplace & economy will be like.  My core aim is to study in-depth these areas with a business friend and to write a book.

Thank you.

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