Digital Age Transformation: current issues and future scenarios

If we look back 40 to 50 years ago, technology nowadays looks very advanced and sophisticated that it may amaze people from the past. People of the past might not believe their eyes if they see television with color, screen that can be touched, wireless charging, cloud storage and many more today’s technologies that seem unimaginable for them. These technologies show us that how much digital technologies have improved over these past decades. We can say that we are very comfortable with today’s technologies and we may not need any major improvement in the future. But believe me, various researches and developments have been done by scientists and engineers nowadays to make our technologies more advanced than now in the future. It is not impossible if someday we will witness flying cars, teleportation machine and augmented reality glasses are wandering around us and we act like nothing spectacular happen because it will be a normal life for us. We have to know that technology development will not stop and it will be moving forward day by day and thus, we have to keep up with its pace to make sure we will survive living in the future world.

Firstly, let us talk about features of future technology that may be become reality in the future. There are many ideas on how future technology will look like. The features of future digital technology are; tactile virtual reality, internet for everyone, heart-monitoring t-shirt, AI scientist, smart needles in medical field, artificial neurons on silicon chips and your brain print as password. For (Science Focus, 2019). Furthermore, with the vast use of wearable devices such as smart watches and fit band, technology like heart-monitoring t-shirt might be one of the technology that people will use widely in the future. Not only that, medical field nowadays also starting to benefit the use of digital technology in their devices. With the use of AI scientist to predict and analyse what diseases a human body has and sophisticated tools such as smart needles to recognise cancer also silicon chips to predict the possibilities of getting dangerous diseases, it is not impossible that these technology will take place in society to provide many advantages to human kind. It is true that some of these technologies already exist in this era. However, for sure in the future, these technologies will become vital and necessary in our everyday lives.

One of the most important thing that we will be discussing is the issues that digital technology are facing currently. There are several current issues related to digital technology such as; i) phishing, ii) digital preservation, and iii) digital literacy. Phishing is an action where someone especially scammers attempt to acquire our personal information such as usernames, passwords and credit cards details for mischievous reasons by pretending to be reliable organisation in digital platform like email and short message service. The second one, digital preservation is being discussed on how digital preservationists find ways to maintain digital content nowadays to be relevant in the future so that it will not become vulnerable to eradication. Lastly, this famous issue of digital literacy shows us about how people nowadays be able to adapt with digital knowledge, skills and manners to make sure they can survive with future era of digital technology (Haris, 2016). In all, these issues whether they are good or bad, are very important to be tackled so that these insignificant issues can be mitigated in the future.

Moreover, the second matter is future issues related to digital technology. There are five of the future issues of digital technology which are; i) artificial intelligence and machine learning, ii) automation and robotics, iii) crypto-currency and blockchain, iv) internet of things, and v) big data. For AI and machine learning also automation and robotics, the big issue that is related to these two is there will be a potential that they will replace human workers. Human will lose their job and there will be greater possibility that AI and robots will take over more complex job such as doctors and engineers. Correspondingly, for crypto-currency such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, there will be major security problem that might be involving hacker and fraud that will risk the economy in the digital world. Lastly, internet of things need more secure and safer big data management that will be lead by AI so that security breach will not be happening (Lovatt, 2019). In brief, as we are moving towards the future, the use of AI and automation in our everyday lives will be necessary and this will need bigger data management also safer security protection.

However, it is not completed if we do not anticipate what are the effects of digital technology in the future. So, what the future effects of digital technology that will be happened? In this case, I will divide the effects into three aspects which are society impacts, economic impacts and environmental impacts. Digital technology in the future will affect society in term of adoption, adaptability and living pace. Society will need to adopt and adapt to the changes to digital technology that will be occur in the future. Everything will use digital device and living pace will be faster. If our society do not take the adaptation to the digital technology as something serious, they will be definitely left behind. Moreover, digital technology will affect our economy. World Bank and International Monetary Fund will need to reorganise their policy in order to keep up with economic activities that mostly will happen digitally. Human jobs will change drastically in order to give room for AI and automation and this will lead to faster and harder economic race (Mühleisen, 2018). Additionally, digital technology will destruct the environment to make sure manufacture and production of digital devices takes place as usual. Besides, data infrastructures such as server farms will need bigger consumption of energy and will produce more greenhouse gas emissions in the future. Not only that, dismantling and disposing process will cost us our environment, the ‘e-waste’ will lead to greater pollution, contamination and toxic waste all around the world (Selwyn, 2018). To sum up, digital technology will affect us in both positive and negative impacts, but it is more important if we can see the disadvantages of the digital technology so that it will never cost us our relationship among human, our economy and our lovely environment.

In conclusion, we will never be able to disallow the development of technology. Not before, not now and never in the future. It is because technology development especially digital technology will be evolved time by time, day by day. Accordingly, it is our responsibility as a human and the resident of this world to make sure the digital age transformation will bring us more advantages and will not harm us with its drawbacks in the future so that we can experience living in better and futuristic world.

References

Haris, A. R., 2016. Issues In Digital Era. Selangor, Malaysia: Universiti Teknologi MARA.

Lovatt, C., 2019. 5 Big Technology Challenges For Enterprises In The Future. [Online]
Available at: https://blog.cutover.com/technology-challenges-enterprises-future
[Accessed 23 December 2019].

Mühleisen, M., 2018. The Long and Short of The Digital Revolution. FINANCE & DEVELOPMENT, 55(2).

Science Focus, 2019. Future technology: 22 ideas about to change our world. [Online]
Available at: https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/future-technology-22-ideas-about-to-change-our-world/
[Accessed 23 December 2019].

Selwyn, N., 2018. EdTech is killing us all: facing up to the environmental consequences of digital education. [Online]
Available at: https://www.aare.edu.au/blog/?p=3293
[Accessed 23 December 2019].

Digital immigrants or digital natives (or both?)

In this era, we cannot run from being associated with digital lifestyle. There are terms for this case. Have you heard about either ‘digital immigrants’ or ‘digital natives’ or both? The real definition of digital is, all data and information are being stored using a series of positive and negative represented by ones and zeros respectively. Computer which is a digital device, can read the information as number either 1 or 0. This is what we can call, binary system (Tech Terms, 2019). For the immigrant, the word ‘immigrant’ and ’emigrant’, both came from Latin migrare which means to move from one place to another. As compared to the Latin definition, the English definition of ‘immigrant’ is that a person moves to a country and lives as a permanent resident (Merriam-Webster, 2019). In other hand, the definition of native is, a person who is born in a particular place and being related to the place of birth, whether eventually resident there or not (Lexico, 2019). As of now, we already know the formal meaning behind all these words, making us more clearly understand what is the real meaning for both ‘digital immigrants’ and ‘digital natives’ terms.

From my understanding, ‘digital immigrants’ can be defined as the person who experiences changes in modern technology from common and conventional outdated ways to advanced and more sophisticated digital cultures of life. During the era which is not far behind, most of the works existed are being managed manually. For instance, in information sector, data are being stored manually, may be written on pieces of paper. In contrary to that, all data and information nowadays can be secured digitally in a computer, even they can be kept online in internet. Digital immigrants experience both era. Likewise, the term ‘digital natives’ can be clarified as a person who is born in this modern and digital era. They are being surrounded by digital gadgets such as computers, laptops, smart phones and the internet. In short, we can hypothetically say that digital natives are more capable and adapted to live in online world compare to digital immigrants who are originally not from the digital era.

But first, let us talk about generations and relationship with digital technology. There are several nicknames have been labelled for some generations such as baby boomers, generation X, generation Y, generation Z and generation Alpha. ‘Baby boomers’ term is referred to those who have born after World War II which is specifically in 1943, until 1960 and succeeded by generation X, who are born in the early or mid-year of 1960 up to early 1980. For generation Y, the other name for it, is millenials and they are born in the early 1980 until the year 1995. Generation Z is the term for those who are born in 1995 until 2010 while generation Alpha is labelled to children who are just born in the year 2010 until now (Barr, 2019). From these generation timelines, we even can make an assumption on those who are linked the most to the digital technology. Since generation Alpha children are about to be 10 years old next year, I still think they are still young for the digital technology. In my opinion, millenials and generation Z are the ones who are using digital technology significantly. From a report that organised by a technology company LivePerson, found that as much as 65% of millenials and generation Z are communicating with each other digitally more than they do in real world. However in United States and United Kingdom, the number is outstandingly bigger with 73.7% and 74.4% respectively (Sulleyman, 2017). In brief, millenials and generation Z also generation Alpha might be associated with our topic, either digital immigrants or digital natives.

We can be surprised that if we know in fact computer is invented long time ago, 150 years ago to be exact. The first computer which is not a real computer just like we know nowadays, it is called analytical engine which is developed and designed by British mathematician, Charles Babbage between 1833 until 1871. The early purpose of this first ‘computer’ was to perform computations and calculations which is hardly done manually (Harris, 2011). However, the idea of modern computer was suggested by Alan Turing in his 1936 paper. In his paper, he verified that a machine would be capable to compute anything that can be computed by conducting some programs stored on tape (Wikipedia, 2019). This is called programmable computer which is practically similar as our modern computer nowadays. The first functional program-controlled computer or digital computer, called Z3 was first invented by a German engineer, Konrad Zuse in 1941 (The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, 2019). Accordingly, with the existence of computer for 20 years, the first practicable prototype of internet was founded in the late 1960, named Advanced Research Program Agency Network as known as ARPANET (Andrews, 2019). This historical issues let us know that digital technology has existed since more than 50 years ago. Nevertheless, in this modern era, vast use of the internet and digital gadgets cause this topic of digital immigrants and digital natives to be relevant to talk about.

Personally, I think the access to the internet has become a lot easier and approachable since the creation of smartphone. We already know that the first iPhone was introduced in 2007 where everyone was going crazy about the touch screen technology. But did you know that the first smartphone was invented longer than that? Yes, the first smartphone was introduced by IBM in the year 1992 and met their consumers in 1994. It included the basic criteria of a smartphone which are; touch screen, internet connection, email, basic applications and other widgets that would become widespread years later (Andrew, 2018). In 2007, the history of digital technology started to change. The first iPhone introduced by Steve Jobs at Macwood change the perspective of digital technology. More advanced touch screen technology, applications and more complex tasks we can do just using our own palms. With the introduction of android smartphone in 2008, the race of smartphone technology becomes vital and now, we can grab a smartphone with our own preferences from stores with just a couple hundreds pounds. This shows us that the use of smartphone nowadays becomes a necessity for various levels of age. To sum up, it does not matter how old are you, old or young, you must be one of 3 billions smartphone users in the world right now and the number is increasing since the access of the smartphone is easy as pie.

Now, back to the main discussion. Who are considered as digital immigrants and digital natives? For me, it depends on how first you are being introduced to the digital technology. Even though computers and internet are invented long time ago, I still believe that a very tiny number of people from baby boomers and generation X get used to the digital technology. Yet, from my perspective I can see that some of the millenials know how to handle digital technology very well but as long as it is very simple to deal with. Otherwise, people from generation Z, most of them know how to organise digital technology very well and some of them are even considered tech-savvy. In my case, as I am a generation Z youth, I can classify my skills of handling digital media as better than millenials but barely make it to highest level of tech-savvy. So, does that make me a digital native? In my opinion, I am not a digital native. I can categorise myself as a digital immigrant. This is because I am not growing up surrounded by digital technology, but I was introduced with it during my growing up days. As generation Z might be fast learners, I learn to explore the world of digital technology as much as I can to be as good as I can am right now. Moreover, this ‘digital immigrants’ term is very suitable to put on generation Z and millenials as they are not born surrounded by digital technology, hence they are living to be introduced with it. On the other hand, I think generation Alpha and beyond can be considered as digital natives as they are and will be born encircled by the wide use of digital technology and gadgets. In all, the terms of digital immigrants or digital natives depend on a person lifestyle, if the person introduced by the technology when he/she already grown up, then he/she is a digital immigrant, and if the person is born with the technology, we can call them as digital natives.

To summarise, being born with digital technology in your hands, is not a bad thing. Also, it is not too late to learn and get familiarise with digital technology as it will bring us good in the future which is becoming more competitive and adventurous with the extensive use of digital technology. In conclusion, it does not matter if you are either a digital immigrant or digital native or even both, as long as you carry out your responsibilities in the real world with real human beings and make benefits from the use of the digital technology to ease up your life, you are considered to be the best version of yourself in the future.

REFERENCES

Andrew, O., 2018. The History and Evolution of the Smartphone: 1992-2018. [Online]
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Andrews, E., 2019. Who invented the internet?. [Online]
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Barr, S., 2019. What generation do you belong to? Millenial, Generation X or Z. [Online]
Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/generation-definitions-what-am-i-millennial-generation-x-y-z-baby-boomers-golden-age-young-old-a8679741.html
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Harris, W., 2011. Who invented the computer?. [Online]
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Lexico, 2019. Native. [Online]
Available at: https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/native
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Merriam-Webster, 2019. Immigrant. [Online]
Available at: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/immigrant
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Sulleyman, A., 2017. Millenials and generation Z interact more through phones and apps than in real life, report finds. [Online]
Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/millennials-generation-z-smartphone-habits-apps-communications-real-life-a8008641.html
[Accessed 17 December 2019].

Tech Terms, 2019. Digital Definition. [Online]
Available at: https://techterms.com/definition/digital
[Accessed 17 December 2019].

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2019. Konrad Zuse. [Online]
Available at: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Konrad-Zuse
[Accessed 18 December 2019].

Wikipedia, 2019. Computer. [Online]
Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer
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