Week 5: ICT Past, Present and Future

Brief Overview:

This week’s class focused on Information, Communication and Technology: Past, Present and Future. It’s always good to start from the beginning. Communication’s most basic form was word of mouth. Then came longer range communication such as smoke signals, books, radio and soon television. There was one problem though, all these forms of communication made the ones receiving the info passive recipients. The first form of the internet began that way too, until we reached Web 2.0. Today’s internet depends a lot on user created content: Facebook, Youtube and Twitter all would be ghost towns with nothing to offer if no users posted anything there. Web 2.0 is the era of 2-way communication where users not only receive information and content but create it as well. Our lesson also touched on the various aspects of ICT today such as: social networking, crowdsourcing, gaming, wireless technology, information systems, cloud computing and knowledge management.

Interesting Observations:

The Present:

The Millenium Development Goals were established in the year 2000 at the Millenium Summit of the United Nations. That meeting saw the participants of UN agreeing to meet the MDGs by the year 2015. How has ICT helped reach the MDGs? One of the MDGs is alleviating poverty and the rise in telephone usage around the world has linked the poor farmer with access to info he never dreamt could have! With mobile phones, poor farmers can find out the market price of his goods, gain access to weather reports and also communicate easier with other farmers or contacts downstream. Our man can now find better ways of farming from his peers and never be shortchanged by middlemen again!

Advancements of ICT has altered the way think about development. The same example of mobile telephony applies. Bangladesh overcame the obstacles of expensive fixed-line telecommunications infrastructure by expanding its mobile phone networks industry. We can kiss the long-winded processes of building towers for telephone cables goodbye. (Their fixed-line teledensity was only at 1%)

Bangladesh’s mobile market passed 100 million subscribers in early 2013 as penetration reached 67% - Source here

                

The Future:

During the session, we were discussing the integration of all the devices we currently have. Web 3.0 would be an era not only of vast amounts of human-to-human interaction but one with just as much device-to-device communication. Companies’ services would actively collect data on the consumers’ preferences and likes based on the information posted on social networks and plot out the people’s itineraries. If person A likes laksa, the next time person A is on the road, his device would “recommend”  a popular laksa joint to him. We can just imagine the possibilities where the devices help us to keep track of almost everything we do and all we need to do sit back and enjoy.

This is not without its drawbacks though. By allowing our devices to have this much interactivity and become almost interdependent on each other, we are putting all of our eggs in one basket. There will always be hackers lurking around the corner. Almost all of our devices: from our phones, cars, washing machines and refrigerators would contain data about us at that time. Should any of our devices get compromised, the hacker would have access to all our personal data and identities. The hacker now has a greater choice of targets to choose from. Unless all the hackers suddenly decide to turn over a new leaf, all of us, companies included, would have to ramp up security and hope for the best.

              

Key Takeaways

              ICT has come a long way. From being tools simply to help mankind and get his message across, one of ICT’s greatest achievements is creating a platform for the greatest amount of information sharing and social interaction. The world is shrinking as there are now fewer strangers in the world. Social networking allows us to meet friends through friends almost seamlessly. Need a question answered? With crowdsourcing anyone around the world can help you. The world is moving to one with no boundaries where potentially, anyone can connect with everyone no matter where he or she is.

               ICT is growing so fast, services that we never thought we need have surfaced. Dropbox, a form of cloud computing, allows users to access their files and folders from any device they have sol long as they saved in Dropbox’s cloud folder. Knowledge management services exist because the amount of data on the internet is so vast that it would be impossible to sift through it all to find exactly what you’re looking for without some difficulty. As with everything, ever changing circumstances bring ever new challenges. New challenges always mean new opportunities.

Ratings for the class:

The content of the class was engaging and interesting (this might a bit biased). Time was managed quite well and the presentations from the other students were pretty good. This class gets 8/10.