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ePaper created 2018-01-31, 10:01:59 | version 1.38.0
| opinion 2018—Changing the way we communicate Chris Barrow, UK It is always simultaneously tempting and dangerous to make predictions about the future of dentistry. A re- cent personal review of the articles I have written over the years revealed that I seem to get things right half the time. The challenge is figuring out which half! So, looking at 2018, what does the landscape look like? I am conscious that you, dear readers, are an inter- national community and so I will resist the temptation to have a good old-fashioned moan about post-Brexit Britain moving into the Dark Ages while our politicians attempt to leave the EU without leaving it. Or, for that matter, riffs and rants about dictatorial pothead leaders playing dice with our futures to further their own agen- das, whether that is in politics, media or sport. © a-image/Shutterstock.com Actually, what I want to talk about is us, you and me, ordinary folk going about our business, pursuing careers, raising families and trying our best to make sense of the world around us. What I want to address is how I think our lives are going to change in the next 12 months, as dental practice owners, managers and team members, but also as members of the public. 06 CAD/CAM 1 2018 The Internet of things The smartphone has changed the way we live (Apple-manufactured or otherwise), and the most dom - inant economic forces on earth are no longer nation economies; they are Google, Microsoft, Amazon, You- Tube and Facebook (and let us not forget WeChat— the largest social media platform in China). The figures for the combined revenues of and cash mountains owned by these organisations are mind-boggling, and the way in which those financial reserves are rein- vested will have the biggest impact on the world we live in by Christmas this year. I recently returned from a dental lecture tour in In- dia, whose 1.2 billion population has overtaken the US to become the largest nation of Facebook users in the world, with around 250 million Indians checking into their profiles every day. It is hardly surprising that my Delhi hotel was populated by fresh-faced young Americans sporting Facebook employee T-shirts, no doubt building a commercial base to accommodate the demands of this new and expanding audience. Globally, figures for e-commerce over Christmas 2017 were a record, and as we learn to purchase ev- ery conceivable commodity online, the high street trembles, looking at those real estate and staff costs under the watchful eye of their investors and accoun- tants. There is more to it than just e-commerce though. We are learning to live online, reading, watching, lis- tening, reviewing, commenting, liking and connecting to an extent that our parents could never have imag- ined. Buying more and more. India is registering 40 million new smartphones ev- ery 12 weeks and is representative of a connective revolution that is gender, age, religion and socio-eco- nomically egalitarian—everyone is getting online. With over 75 per cent of website visits to my cli- ents’ dental sites now taking place via smartphones, how your website looks on a desktop no longer mat-