Nowadays, communication includes the freedom to express opinions in the Internet information environment and the freedom to discover them. That is to say, the freedom to speak and to hear. Moreover, this online environment gives a new perspective to what was once referred to as “word of mouth”.
Now we might be tempted to call it “word of mouse” (…). We can choose among many sources of opinion and there are collaborative tools that allow us to accumulate anonymous experiences and opinions on the internet.
Vint Cerf, Prologue to La Revolucion Horizontal
A couple of weeks ago, some colleagues and I went to Quito, Ecuador, for the Americas Digital Conference . There we met other colleagues from all the different posts in the Americas to talk about digital communications and how to keep getting better and more effective in it.
It was very interesting to see how all these different backgrounds and nationalities melt and converge to achieve, with some small variation, the same objectives. Looking at my notes, I have sentences that begin in English, change to Portuguese and have some Spanish thrown in there too. I know it sounds very confusing at times, but also very representative of what it is to work in this digital landscape.
Mankind has communicated since we first stepped into this world, whenever and however that was. The change is how this communication takes place. As put by Alberto Arebalos, who shared his incredible experience with us, the way people consume information is changing, evolving.
Communicating nowadays is no longer about someone sending a message and someone receiving this message. Communicating nowadays involves a conversation. It is a dynamic exchange of ideas, opinions and views of the world. If you like to go academic, it’s a constant exchange of ontologies and epistemologies.
Information is everywhere and anywhere. And the number of strategies to deal with all of this increases at almost the same pace. The challenge is to digest all of this information and all of these strategies and apply them in our daily work. But, as Arebalos put it quite accurately, once you’ve joined the conversation, you just have to keep talking.