It is an unspoken fact that Singaporeans are crazy about numbers. That lucky draw/ raffle ticket number could be your next inspiration for 4-D or Toto bet. Accidents on the road causes massive traffic jams, not because it was that major an accident, but because every single passing car is slowing down to copy down the car plate number to buy 4-D/ Toto later.
It is no different in the working environment. Numbers speaks volumes. It was a constant struggle between qualitative and quantitative. I attended this sharing sessionby David Gurteen yesterday and he talked about social tools. We later split into groups for a session of what he calls Knowledge Cafe, where there is no right or wrong answers, and everyone just shares.
We were talking about blogs as a social tool in our group and how we track the effectiveness of it all since is is used as a tool to desseminate information in one of the institutions. One of its major indicators is through the number of hits.
Another member of the group who came from the same institution pointed out 2 very interesting points: one being that we should stop looking at statistics and numbers as key indicators and effectiveness and the other is that,"how can we use social tools when we cannot even build up a social network?"
In other words, he was trying to say that: one, some people do not have the necessary social skills to build social networks and two, social tools/technology are making people void of socialising skills.
I totally agree with him and while, I am all for embracing new media and technology, I am also worried about the side effects that it is going to bring upon our society.
While I am already sucked into this new media frenzy (blogs, mp3 players and so on), I am one who is always for intangible things. One cannot just become a reader, one grows to become one.
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