Thursday, July 16, 2009

The Future of the Information Age

When it comes to digital capital, I believe that the cell phone is forever responding to what the end user wants. We started with very large, heavy devices that solely were used to make and receive calls. Today, the industry has been driven by societal desires to do nearly everything and anything we could ever imagine.

Take for example the iPhone. I currently own an iPhone and I absolutely love it. I can check my email, bank accounts, weather, news, etc. at any time I desire. I also have the worlds supply of applications at my finger tips that will allow me to play numerous free games, there is an application for a compass, a flashlight, backgrounds, the list goes on forever. This is just a demonstration of how this particular industry has grown to face the wants and needs of the consumer.

It is very much like the evolution of the MP3 for digital music. They started out very basic and today many of us depend on them day in and day out. New artists are being discovered at a daily pace rather than taken two and a half years to be finally discovered, as Elvis was. It is simply incredible to see how certain industries can thrive off of the new wants and needs of the consumers and to really respond in such a fashion at such a great speed.

I find that my industry's position in the Tranquility piece was very clear. The cell phone certainly belongs with the first image painted. The one where technology moves at such high speeds that we must keep up with or we'll get lost, even if we don't know what our next move is going to be to keep up with one another. Cell phones are an instantaneous way of sending and receiving data.

The text message seems to be one of the largest booms at the moment and can keep up connected to our friends, families, co-workers, you name it, at any given time. We are of the information age and cell phones have been one of the driving forces that has enabled us to be where we are. No longer do we wait for hand-written letters to arrive via postal worker in our mailboxes. Now we simply check our inbox's whenever we are expecting something.

As impersonal as it is, this is what we have developed ourselves into. No longer do we patiently wait, we have come to expect things to be at our finger tips and because of this we have set ourselves into a technological trap than we would choose not to live without.

No comments:

Post a Comment