Communication Technology

New technology has given organizations many new opportunities and ways of communicating. The most common of these new tools is probably email, but even email still has many limitations when it comes to communication. With any email, be it for personal or business use, the junk mail, porn, and simply the unimportant messages clutter the inbox, making finding what we are interested in quite overwhelming. As Danielle points out, anyone who has ever tried to organize their email here at Marymount knows how frustrating this can be. And once we do find what we are looking for, trying to find it again becomes another problem. Because email has no search tool, lost emails are a very common problem.

Another problem is redundancy. This is another problem we are familiar with here at Marymount. Sending out a universal email to an entire organization generates too many emails, and again clutters inboxes. And as we have seen, replying to these emails leads to even more clutter, especially when the “reply to all” function is used.

Wikis, weblogs, and aggregators are new technology which have been created in response to these drawbacks, and are now being used in many organizations. Elizabeth gives many great examples of how these tools can be used. Weblogs are used to post messages in a sort of diary format from most recent to oldest. News aggregators are used alongside weblogs in organizations to keep members of the org updated. The aggregator puts posts from many different weblogs in reverse chronological order to connect an entire group of weblogs. A wiki, which means “quick” in Hawaiian, is a type of internal webpage used y an organization. Any member of the org can add comments or delete posts from the single webpage. Because these are inexpensive and almost effortless to use, they are ideal for team projects.