Communication is as simple as it is complicated. We are almost certain most people would agree that this statement could not be any truer with today’s rapid technological advances. It is a foundation for success in both our personal lives and work endeavours and therefore many tech leaders have interesting viewpoints regarding the broad topic of the evolution of communication.
TED, a nonprofit organisation devoted to spreading ideas in the form of short, powerful talks, has many influential leaders leading the conversation in the diverse telecommunication realm. We’ve collected our favorite Ted Talks that shed light on the telecommunication industry in 3 very distinct and thought-provoking ways.
1. The Anthropology of Mobile Phones– Jan Chipchase, a user anthropologist, gives an insightful 15 minute presentation on the ways we interact with mobile technology. His office is the world, travelling to places like Africa and India searching for specific behavioral patterns. He describes that mobile devices are a way to transcend space and time, a great recovery tool, and have become essential to our survival. The theme of the presentation? Connections and consequences. “What is the world going to be like when everyone on the planet is connected?”
2. How Mobile Phones can Fight Poverty– Going mobile can help flourish impoverished communities. Leave it to Iqbal Quadir, an advocate of business as a humanitarian tool, to conquer such a weighty task. In his 15 minute presentation, he tells how his experiences as a kid in poor Bangladesh, and later as a banker in New York, led him to start a mobile phone operator connecting 80 million rural Bangladeshi — and to become a champion of bottom-up development. He proves that connectivity equates to productivity, especially in a poor area where the effect can have an even more dramatic spin in a positive direction.
3. How the Internet Enables Intimacy– Stefana Broadbent, a tech anthropologist, has been studying how our social habits and relationships function and mutate in the digital age. In her 10 minute presentation, she provides examples of how communication tech is capable of cultivating deeper relationships, bringing love across barriers like distance and workplace rules. She points out that with all of our new communication tools; we still mostly communicate to the same small group of 4 to 5 people.
Have these bite-sized videos broadened your mind with how telecom can transform our lives no matter where we are located in this big, beautiful world?
Posted in: Telecom Industry News
