The last time society was as seismically shaken as this one, was during the Industrial Revolution. There is a debate about when it first began, similar to the disagreement over when this new Digital Age began.
Change happens every two years. Of course this was a comment by Moore on the doubling of transistor densities, enabling technology to produce computers with increasingly better performance. This has been true for 40 years, technological and social change in that time having been significantly driven forward, and that pace is expected to continue for at least another decade.
A new IDC Digital Universe Study sponsored by EMC estimates data growing faster than Moore's Law to 1.8 Zettabytes of data in 2011 and predicts that enterprises to manage 50X more data and files to grow 75X in next decade. (2x-moores-law)
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| FIRST INTEL PROCESSOR |
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| 1984 APPLE MACINTOSH |
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| FIRST SILICON CHIP |
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| FIRST LAPTOP - 1982 Commodore Executive |
With two billion internet users worldwide, (United Nations International Telecommunications Union), the number of mobile phone users worldwide has breached five billion, with close to one billion of these 3G subscribers.
The Earth's population is 6.8 billion, so approximately one in three global citizens now access the web, while mobile phone ownership has skyrocketed.
In December 1992 the first ever text was sent by Neil Papworth when he sent "Merry Christmas' to a friend. Texting is on the rise is proven by a new study by Nielsen which indicates voice calls are declining while data and app usage has quadrupled.
30 million Facebook usersin the UK (or half the population). Facebook’s popularity has accelerated sharply, highlighting changing trends in the way we use the internet and what propels us to go online.
72% of under 25's comment on TV shows via Facebook while 79% of students say a media blackout for a day would cause stress, confusion and isolation. There are three times as many smartphones activated every minute as babies being born according to H. Vestberg, CEO of Ericsson.
YouTube claims 3 billion videos are viewed every day, more video is uploaded to You-Tube than the three top US networks created in 60 years. In 2010 they achieved over 700 billion playbacks.
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Using these representational diagrams, the growth exponential of original communications can be visualised.Sarnoff was representational of the Analogue broadcasting to a niche audience.
The Reed Loop included the use of telecommunications.
Metcalf represents the phenomenal possibilities of this new interactive virtual space in which to play like MMS, Hashtag trends and statweestics.
Studies about social networking reveal a distinct generation gap. On average, a typical user under 25 years old would have an abundance of friends, usually about 1000 online friends.
A mature user, however has a modest amount of friends which usually does not exceed twenty.
There is marked difference between those people born around the coming of the 'WWW' after 1997 who could be termed as Digital Natives and those born before who have had to become 'adapted' as if immigrants to the Digital Age.
Behaviour and attitudes to technology can almost be defined by age and this is evident by the way younger people approach learning and communication. Even the way they think is defined by the technology they can access and use.
One 12 year old who embodies the notion of a 'digital native' is Thomas Suarez, a successful app designer. He is genuinely an able, confident young person who while he is without a doubt very gifted and intelligent.
The question still remains however, is he actually a digital native? He appears to answer this question himself, in his address by revealing the effort he had to go through in order to attain his goal of creating apps.
App designing did not come naturally to him, but through determination and perseverance and most likely benefitted from a lot of help from adults who had the perception to realise the potential ability of this young man.
In the Postmodern era, possibilities seem endless and it seems that now the internet is one huge playground in which to explore and play.
Jane McGonigle thinks reality is broken and society should invest in games in order to fix it. Her alternative reality games challenges society's negative view of games and claims that games can be world-changing and can function as an important tool to help fix whatever problems people suffer.
Jean Baudrillard comments on the notion of Virtual Reality. That virtuality is now so pervasive that reality is now secondary and that we all now inhabit a 'Simulacra". We lack the ability to tell the difference between the real world and the virtual world because of contemporary media, urbanisation, consumerism and our ideologies. These increasingly are tools which take us further and further from reality.
As the line between reality and virtuality is blurred so the distinctions between the public and private have become undefined. This is clearly demonstrated by 'celebrity lifestyles' that many are eager to participate in as published in Facebook and other social networking sites.
Anthropologist Appadurai differentiates five dimensions of global "scopes";
ethnoscapes - the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which people live
technoscapes - the global configuration of technologies moving at high speeds across previously impermeable borders
financescape - the global grid of currency speculation and capital transfer
mediascapes - the distribution of the capabilities to produce and disseminate information and the large complex repertoire of images and narratives generated by these capabilities
ideoscapes - ideologies of states and counter-ideologies of movements, around which nation-states have organised their political cultures.
Appadurai explores how electronic media offer new everyday resources and disciplines for the imagination of the self and the world that imagination has broken out of the expressive space of art, myth, and ritual, and has become a part of the everyday life and practices of ordinary people, who formerly were excluded.
Time and space, according to I. Chambers in 'The Aural Walk' is also affected by the transformation of how and where we can listen.
He believes 'music on the move is being continually decontextualized and recontextualized in the inclusive acoustic and symbolic flux of everyday life”.
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