Why The Phone Was Really Invented?

So any of us reading this blog article have used a telephone. We’ve grown up using it to talk to each other. To leave and check voice mail, weather reports, bank balances, buy things. But that isn’t why Alexander Bell invented the phone. He thought people would use it to listen to music (specifically opera) and get weather reports. That was it.

Certainly Gutenberg when he invented the printing press did not envision newspapers. At that time one of the main reasons people went to church was to get local news. Fast forward a few hundred years to the dawn of the Internet – designed to be a secondary military communications system in case of a nuclear war.

It’s a similar story to Twitter. The inventors did not know how it would be used or become the phenomenon that it has. Facebook was supposed to be just for university students, yet the age range of the average user is in their mid-40′s and skewing older all the time.

My point here is; the intent with which a social media tool is designed is not necessarily the same as how it will end up being used. More importantly, predicting the usage of Social Media as a whole? Impossible until we have more time with it, more data, more case studies…just plain time. Perhaps in part, this is also why business is struggling to understand the uses of Social Media?

What do you think?

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)