By: Jasmine Elnadeem
Mobile phone technology with Internet connectivity is developing at an extraordinarily rapid pace and is being applied to an increasingly wide range of human activities and the environment in which we live. It brings both benefits and challenges.
Mobile phones have fundamentally changed how we communicate in society.
Your Mobile Isn’t Just a Cell Phone Anymore.
We can see people everywhere accessing social networks from their mobiles, not only to handle their basic person-to-person and conference voice calls, but they also interact with websites, publish blog posts, aggregate RSS feeds, send text messages, send multimedia messages, record/transmit video, record/transmit audio, send email from multiple accounts, take/send pictures, send and receive faxes, edit office documents, and interact with social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.
Technology provides new innovations and inventions that shape the style of the lives of people across the world. It helps integrate new techniques and scientific discoveries into everyday life, which increases the world’s standard of living. Moreover, technology is an ever-changing concept, offering fresh breakthroughs and applications frequently. One form of technology that has taken the world by storm is digitalization, which creates the binary electronic digital systems used in electronics and computing. Digitalization affects nearly every aspect of our lives today.
Digitalization allows people to have access to information instantly. Moreover, it presents opportunities that were unheard of in the past. People from various countries can communicate instantly online or over the telephones.
All of this reminds me with the famous quotes by Mark Comerford:
– Digitalization = societal shift = new industrial revolution.
– Digital will fuck you up. (With an Irish accent)
– Go digital or die.
“The Digital Revolution is having a profound effect on. It is not a technological shift, but rather a deep and fundamental sociological shift in the way we perceive the world around us. It is fast becoming indispensable. In the future, it may be entirely integrated into daily life, to the point that it may no longer seem appropriate to refer to it as a detached and discrete entity. As such, it might disappear into the very fabric of life, much like electricity, which is simply taken for granted.” he said.
He added: “The digital revolution is building to us an Information Society where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge.The widespread translation of cultural life into digitally has now made such words, as “wisdom” appears irrelevant.”
“As communication shift from personal conversations to digital transferring of messages, the interaction of groups and individuals change and help create a more efficient sociological community by connecting individuals who have common interests.” he said.
“We are no longer walking around as isolated individuals. We walk around as invisible posses who are continuously surrounded all around by networks, which are always weaving their way in and out of each other. This means that our connectivity increases a huge amount.” he continued.
Mark pointed out that the expansion of the Internet has created an efficient means of communication and collaboration that has increased the social capital and efficiency in which individuals collaborate in groups by streamlining communication and collaboration, publicly sharing information, and breaking geographic boundaries. And that changed dramatically the way communication is doing.
“The pre-digital era point of departure was everything is private unless I make it public, digital world point of departure is everything is public unless I make it private. And these are very different ways of approaching the world.” he said.
He added: “The make-it-public nature of the digital era is changing everything radically, because if we are already used to do this as individuals, we will demand that our society do the same and adopt the everything is public unless it is made private.”
“This shift in our approach will create conflicts and cause problems to people in power who are not comfortable with it. Online censorship, surveillance, repression are the reactions of the people in power to this shift.” Mark said.
He continued: “Meanwhile, the digital age is in full force on other fronts as well as Search engines are promising to give everybody access to the aggregate knowledge brought forth by human culture.”
“Digital technologies have created a revolution of sorts. They have allowed entrepreneurs to build empires out of fiber and thin air and to establish these empires in a realm without rules. They have challenged governments and their traditional authority—not by design or intent, but purely as a result of technological accident. Because digital technologies allow information to flow seamlessly and invisibly across national borders, they make it very difficult for governments to do many of the things to which they have grown accustomed. Governments can’t patrol their physical territories in cyberspace; they can’t easily enforce property rights over ephemeral ideas and rapidly moving bits; they can’t control information flows; they even may not be able to collect taxes. Such is the nature of politics along the technological frontier.” he said.
The digital change might be overwhelming to some, but other digital innovations were broadly adopted long ago and are in today’s so-called “digital world” taken for granted.
Without digital cell phones, DVD and MP3 technology, digital photo and video cameras, most people’s everyday life wouldn’t be the same anymore. And that’s not to mention the Internet, which has changed both individual life and our entire society fundamentally, playing the key role amid the digital world.
To know more about “Mark Comerford”:
http://memeburn.com/2010/04/the-colour-of-your-shit-can-matter/
Jasmine Elnadeem 
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