I’m well aware that it is probably just me and no doubt it is a genetic flaw in my personality – but is there anyone else out there who, like me, just doesn’t get the cult of celebrity?

You see I just don’t understand why so many people are fixated by so many dreary and untalented individuals just because they appear on TV. Now I have to confess at this point that I have never invested my hard earned money in magazines like Hello and Heat – and the reason is simple. It is because I have absolutely no interest in what so-called celebrities might be doing and even less interest in staring at airbrushed photographs of them at incestuous garden parties.

Now don’t get me wrong – I have no problem with people who are famous for very legitimate reasons (though I still have no desire to look at pictures of them in trendy magazines) but I do have problem with people who have been labelled celebrities just because they happen to have appeared in tiresome and odious reality TV series like ‘Big Brother’ or ‘I’m a celebrity – get me out of here’. For some unfathomable reason, far too complex for my simple brain to understand, these individuals seem to believe that just because their faces have appeared somewhere in the media that they have somehow miraculously acquired overnight celebrity status. In short, they tend to believe they are suddenly ‘more important’ than the rest of us.

When I was at secondary school and thinking about careers one of my best friends decided that he wanted to become an Actor and to his credit worked his way through acting school. After a lot of trudging around London he started to get small bit parts in plays and a few low-key TV appearances. As far as he, and I, was concerned he was an accomplished Actor but nothing more. Today just by virtue of a few TV appearances he would be called a “Star”-but what does ‘Star’ really mean? Is it just a fancy name for what we used to call an Actor or Musician?

My complete bewilderment about celebrity status doesn’t just stop at a mind numbingly boring magazines however. I have to confess that even if the Queen, Brad Pitt and Robbie Williams decided on a whim to come and visit my street I probably couldn’t be bothered to even venture out of my front door. This is not because of any rudeness or disrespect on my part, it is simply because I would be tempted to treat them with the same level of civility as if they were the postman or the guy at the chip shop.

I know that a lot of people might find my attitude to celebrity a bit weird but I guess that’s just the way I am. If you were to ask me to name those people that I look up to and admire then I suppose that my definition of celebrity would be people like the nurses who do an amazing job for very little pay, the soldiers fighting the roots of terrorism in Afghanistan, the unsung heroes who every day risk their lives to help others and other individuals who work for the benefit of humanity without the need to label themselves as ‘stars’ as far too many vain ‘celebrities’ do.

So I’m sorry to all you wannabe pseudo-celebrities desperate for a place in the next series of X factor or Big Brother, and I’m sorry to all the wannabe rap artists desperate for us to decipher their garbled and unintelligible lyrics but I really don’t want your autograph and I don’t really care about what you might want to say to the media about your astonishing rise to fame.

For me, fame and recognition have to be earned and until you are featured in Heat magazine for doing something that has made the world a better place then I think I’ll just stick with The Beano.

Three minutes after takeoff from LaGuardia Airport the plane struck a flock of Canada Geese while still climbing towards its cruising altitude. The bird strike, which occurred just northeast of the George Washington Bridge, resulted in an immediate and complete loss of thrust from both engines.

When the aircrew of the Airbus 320 determined that they would be unable to reliably reach any airfield from the site of the bird strike, they turned it southbound and glided over the Hudson, finally ditching the airliner near the USS Intrepid museum about three minutes after losing power. All 155 occupants safely evacuated the airliner, which was still virtually intact though partially submerged and slowly sinking. Everyone on board was quickly rescued by nearby boats which had witnessed the whole incident.

The entire crew of Flight 1549 was later awarded the Master’s Medal of the Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators. The award was in recognition of the emergency ditching and evacuation, with no loss of life. The Captain in particular was hailed as a hero, averting a potential disaster and central to this unique achievement in aviation history.

Although the incident was reported widely at the time something else happened on that day which has irrevocably changed the way we define ‘news’ – and the repercussions are now changing history.

On that particular day hundreds of people were out taking a morning stroll beside the Hudson River. There were dog walkers, joggers, people going about their daily business and people travelling to work. As the plane started to get into trouble and change course the people on the ground started to reach for their mobile phones to take photos of the descending plane. Others sent text messages describing the unfolding events, some sent messages via Twitter and other social media sites. By the time the formal news channels heard of the incident the plane was already in the water – but already people the world over knew what had happened. In other words by the time CNN and Sky News got their reporters to the scene the incident was already old news.

Later that day, in the boardroom of one of the leading TV News Channels, a Senior Manager was quoted as saying to his team “Gentlemen, as of today we are no longer in charge of the news. It is in the hands of the people.”

On that day ordinary people were sending news updates, images and sound clips around the world from their mobile phones. In other words ordinary people were using mobile phones to spread developing news stories faster than the corporate news channels could ever hope to. Suddenly, the News Channels woke up to the reality that they no longer had a monopoly on the news.

Social media, by which I mean popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and MySpace, have already started to irrevocably change the social and business communication landscape. Now it seems something as reassuringly familiar as the News on TV and Radio is being challenged by the media tools available to all of us. Whether you believe this to be a good thing or a bad thing is obviously a matter of personal opinion. What is undeniably clear, however, is that mobile phone technology is not just changing the way we interact with each other. It is now also changing the way the very fabric of our society operates.

In only a few short years scientists had managed to scale down computers from something that filled a whole room with valves and wires to a small square box that could sit on a desk. Even then computing was really only for the ‘geeks’ that could understand the complex languages needed to make computers do what you wanted them to do. Then a bespectacled schoolboy from Seattle changed the world by inventing a simple interface that almost anyone could use and computing changed forever. His name is Bill Gates and he founded Microsoft, one of the most successful businesses in the world that has totally dominated the world of home computing.

But it is not just home computing that has radically changed the world of communication and revolutionised our lives. In the later part of the same decade – the 1980’s – other visionaries were removing the wires from the back of telephones and using radio waves to transmit audio signals. The era of the mobile phone had also begun and suddenly you could talk to other people all over the world from a small gadget that fitted into your pocket. These two radical developments in technology have now totally changed the fabric of society and indeed changed the way we communicate and interact with the rest of the world.

The actual pace of change in both technologies has been staggering since the first fledgling prototypes were launched into the media only two decades ago. Computers have got increasingly smaller and yet more powerful with increased ‘processing power’ and almost unimaginable amounts of ‘memory’. They have turned into multimedia machines with thousands of ‘applications’ now available to do everything from home shopping to watching full length feature films and from fighting in ‘virtual wars’ to finding a job.

Similarly the humble phone, designed to bring two people together by voice, now includes satellite navigation, movie camera technology, calculators, electronic games, message ‘texting’ and even electronic banking – and a whole host more.
There are two elements of this electronic revolution though, that have probably overshadowed everything else and that is the phenomenal growth of e-mailing and the Internet. Interestingly both of these concepts actually took time to become established but once the implications and opportunities were better understood they literally exploded across the globe. The idea of e-mail had been around for a while but was viewed just as another medium to transmit messages. At first it was just used in the business environment until home computer users started to realise how it could be used to contact thousands of ‘strangers’ and communicate ideas.
The internet also began as a widely fragmented ‘islands’ of information that could be accessed individually until someone came up with idea of linking all this information together by creating a ‘search engine’ to help locate whatever you wanted to find. Like Microsoft, ‘Google’ had foreseen the future and then helped to create it.

Gradually the distinctions between the power of the personal computer and the mobile phone started to blur and by the dawn of the new millennium phones were essentially mini computers and home computers were also communication devices.

Today the rate of change shows no sign of stopping and the exponential growth of these amazing technologies is creating new social phenomena that even the most visionary commentators did not foresee. Instead of business leaders driving the new revolution it is teenagers that have seen the future and are pushing the boundaries. They have taken the idea of a ‘daily diary’ to new heights through ‘blogging’, created their own persona’s through the medium of ‘My Space’ and ‘Facebook’ and displayed their personality and talents through ‘You Tube’. And now even the older generation have discovered how to use Twitter and the revolution shows no sign of stopping.

Everyday new applications arrive on our desktop computers that are set to change the way we think about everything. We now use our computers for on-line banking, electronic shopping, watching films, e-mailing each other and communicating in a thousand different and innovative ways. In two decades technology has not only radically changed the way businesses are run it has actually changed the way we run our lives. As one media business commentator recently put it “these days if you are not on the net then your business doesn’t exist”.

And, come to think of it, whether we agree or not the same might be said of our private lives too.

Social networking is a catch all phrase for the way we use the internet to communicate socially and is one of the fastest growing trends in the computing industry.

Even a year or two ago social networking was still in its infancy and most of the websites that offered this facility were considered as nothing more than time wasters for teenagers. How things have changed! Today websites like “Facebook”, “My Space” and “You Tube” are considered to be mainstream applications and are only the tip of a rapidly growing iceberg.

Even a simple idea like writing a daily diary in 140 characters or less has led to the truly phenomenal growth of “Twitter” – a website that even President Obama regularly updates! Today we can communicate virtually instantaneously with anyone in the world who has internet access. We can upload videos, music and photos. We can join interactive “chat rooms” on almost any subject and even apply for jobs using online networking websites. The world is more ‘connected’ than ever before and we now have a bewildering array of new social networking sites to give us the ultimate “online presence”. But what is this new medium of communication all about and why should we care?

Like all ideas some of the most simple turn out to be the best. The power of the net shows no signs of slowing down and although the early years tended to be more business focused with ‘transmission of information’ being the obvious manifestation there has been a gentle but steady growth in simple general communication tools. One of the first set of users to exploit the net to bring people together was the numerous dating websites that used the power of the internet to bring partner-seeking individuals together. Then the brilliant “Friends Reunited” site was launched enabling us to find long lost old school buddies with phenomenal success. This site has now expanded into other areas like old work colleagues and suddenly we are all starting to reconnect with people that we had lost touch with years ago.

Very soon other entrepreneurs started to build on this idea and created websites that were designed to give people somewhere to share their ideas, thoughts and even photos with friends and relatives across the world. One of the reasons that teenagers were the first to exploit this opportunity was simply because they could rarely afford to have their own websites built so instead used social networking sites as their own ‘virtual website’. Over the last few years the use of web camera’s (webcams) and facilities like Skype have enabled real-time video transmissions to be used with ease to ‘talk’ to friends the other side of the world. Even the movie cameras integral to mobile phones can be used to make easy films that can be then transmitted over the web. Amateur musicians can now film their own performances and have instant world wide exposure. Songs can be downloaded directly onto iPods and MP3 players which has put the whole music industry into turmoil and suddenly everyone can have a ‘voice’ in the world to express ideas and opinions. Even electronic books (e-books) have started to totally revolutionise the book industry.

The most recent shock though has been the sudden awakening of businesses and organisations to the power of social networking. It is as though big business suddenly woke up to the fact that all these new concepts were not just the preserve of bored teenagers. Instead they have begun to realise how these websites can be exploited for business purposes, to spread marketing messages, attract new sales, find new customers and sales outlets, communicate in new unorthodox ways and use the net as another corporate communication medium.

What is indisputable is that social networking is not only here to stay but it is growing, adapting and bringing us exciting new ways of interacting with other people and is set to fundamentally change the way we communicate in an increasingly wired world.