Over the past thirty years the human race has managed to achieve more than it did in nearly two thousand. We came from using horses as a means of transport to flying space shuttles to the moon and from writing letters to communicate with people overseas to instant split-second messaging. In this time we shifted from using technology a tool to needing technology to live. Throughout this essay I will be discussing a few of the technological phenomenons that were introduced in the twenty first century and affected us so drastically that they changed our way of behavior as a species.
When radio and television came about, they took the world by storm and introduced the concept of mass media to the world. The majority of people probably did not expect these phenomenons to be replaced just a few decades down the line by a far more superior medium to reach the masses. This of course, being the internet. The idea of the internet came about with the creation of electronic computers in the 1950s. This began to develop as the United States Department of Defense issued contracts to people who successfully created an internal network through which communication can be passed quicker and easier. This resulted in the creation of various networks such as ARPNET, Telenet, and Merit Network which were all developed in the late 60s and early 70s. ARPNET then led to the idea of creating a network of networks, which today is known as the Internet.
Around this time, mobile phones were also created. On the 3rd of April 1973 the first mobile phone call was made by a Motorola employee from the streets of Manhattan. About 10 years later mobiles became widely available, and since then they have become a vital piece of technology in our everyday lives. The mobile phone developed into the smartphone further down the road. Developers took many elements from various technologies that were already created and conveniently combined them into one small device. Not many people are aware of this, but the very first smartphone was created back in 1992 by IBM and was originally called the Simon Personal Computer. The term smartphone was then widely used after Apple revealed the first mainstream and affordable one known as the iPhone back in 2007. Just to put it into perspective, smartphones nowadays work at one hundred thousand times the speed of an early personal computer developed in the 70s.
Smartphones weren’t the first phones to incorporate internet services. Phones as early as 1996 had access to the net, but never made it to the general market. Blackberry and Apple were among the first first companies to introduce a mobile phone that could easily access the internet and that also made constant use of it. With the invention of the iPhone, many large companies identified the potential of it’s app market, such as social media giants Facebook and Twitter. At the time social media was relatively new, and was growing at light-speed. Facebook, which was one fo the first successful social media platforms to be created, was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommate Eduardo Saverin who both attended Harvard University. Facebook was originally created to be used by solely the students of Harvard but gradually made its way to other colleges in the Boston area and Ivy League, eventually reaching most universities around the United States and Canada. This has since developed into the Facebook of today, where people trade their personal data in order to be apart of the platform. Smartphones were a clear path for social media platforms to expand at a faster rate than they already were, so all the large ones that are still round today seized the opportunity. In the case of Facebook, this has now resulted in over two billion people using the platform world-wide.
The widespread popularity of these three milestones in modern technology is very clearly dependent on each other. Their incorporation has lead to the magnitude of their success. They offer people many opportunities separately, but together they super-charge those opportunities to make them endless. To somebody that was born in this instantaneous generation, even 30 years ago would seem like a drag of a time. The one device in their pockets can do what 20 devices could in the past. Lost somewhere? Use Google maps. Want to know the time? Pull out your smartphone. Feel like communicating with your partner who’s half way across the world? Use Messenger, WhatsApp, Snapchat, or FaceTime. One can become an expert on a subject they never even heard about within a fortnight. You can do virtually anything on the go, or even from the comfort of your own bed nowadays. You can pay bills, buy tickets, book flights, sell merchandise and so much more through one single device. Websites such as KickStarter even allow people to share their ideas with millions before they invest a cent in it, and even allow people to fund your idea, potentially saving the entrepreneur thousands. With regards to businesses the internet and social media are also a god-send. Marketing to millions of people and having the re-assurance that they will see it, and are most definitely interested in whatever you are selling has become far cheaper than planting a billboard on the busiest road in the country. These platforms have also created millions of jobs with the likes of social media influencers and bloggers living very successful lives doing something that they love. Let’s take a recent example of a video that went viral. A young boy of about 10 to 12 years picked up the mic in a Walmart in the US and began to yodel. Somebody (could have been one of his parents or a friend, or even a random bystander) took their phone out of their pocket and began to film this child sing. Once saved, the video was uploaded to social media and began to go viral. This resulted in billions of people viewing the video, and the creation of a petition for this child to perform at one of the largest music festivals in the world. The petition got so much traction that it grabbed the attention of one of the organizers. The boy got the chance to perform in front of millions of people and is now a social media sensation thanks to the power of a modern day mobile phone.
Nothing is perfect, and these devices are no different. As much opportunity as these modern technologies have, they equally possess the potential for threat. Many ethical issues are taken into consideration (especially as of late) where people are becoming more educated on the threats that are imposed. A big issue that has recently surfaced once again is that of privacy. When signing up to any social media website out there (for example Facebook) and agreeing to their terms of service, one is agreeing that all information uploaded to that particular platform is now usable by the company for distribution. At first glance this didn’t seem too worrisome to many people. In fact, when Facebook first launched Mark Zuckerberg appeared on CNBC’s “Bullseye” to discuss the new platform that he had created. All that was identified in that interview was the potential for growth and what a ground-breaking creation this was. One of the interviewers also called this “the next big thing”. We can see that a few years down the line various ethical issues began to pop up, leading Zuckerberg to conduct various interviews on live television, in one of which he was sweating so much due to nervousness he had to remove his hoodie. This issue of privacy of information even affected the last US presidential election in which a political consulting firm known as Cambridge Analytica bought information from an app developer using Facebook as a data mining source in order to influence the election and sway people’s votes in Trump’s favour. A total of eighty seven million people were affected by this, that’s just shy of one third of the US population. Social media aside, we can see examples of our right to privacy being breached via smart phones and other modern day technologies with the Edward Snowden leaks and iPhone’s mobile tracking services.
It is also important to take the fact that whatever is posted or uploaded to the internet, no matter the website, can always be recovered at any point in time. As an example I will take Mark Zuckerberg once again. Prior to releasing Facebook Zuckerberg launched a website called Facemash. This was Harvard’s version of ‘Hot or Not’. He would juxtapose 2 images of different Harvard students near each other and give people the chance to vote as to who was hot and who was not. Facebook’s predecessor was created back in 2003, but statuses that Zuckerberg had posted on the platform surfaced 4 years later when Facebook had already established itself on the American successful start-up map. Zuckerberg was caught out boasting to be intoxicated at three in the afternoon and a few hours later proceeded to compare some college girls to farm animals. This just goes to show that anything about anybody can be recovered from the internet once uploaded. Various celebrities experienced a similar situation where a man of 36 hacked Apple’s iCloud and managed to obtain very personal images of celebrities and upload them to the internet. Ryan Collins, the hacker, got sentenced to 18 months in prison for such a breach.
A lot of people view the internet, smartphones, and social media as related gifts, while others view them as individual hazards. I think that the majority of people that have been exposed to these technologies fall under the Technophile category. At the end of the day, these devices do make our lives easier and more comfortable whether one likes or dislikes it. It is always more convenient and cost-efficient to compact many devices into one that is relatively simple to use and can fit in your pocket, rather than having them all separately. I would say that a large amount of Technophobes would be of an older generation. People do not like change - that is a fact - and many people that were not born with these devices as we have been are reluctant to learn how to use them properly, raising many internal and external issues. Personally, I cannot live without my smartphone, the internet, or social media for that matter. That very fact leads me to believe that we have become reliant on these devices, and rather than being luxury goods, they have turned into needs. If we keep heading in the direction that we are headed, then I fear that in 40 years time the technology we have created will consume our minds point where human values and characteristics as we know them today will disappear.
Throughout this essay I have touched up on a mere grain of sand on a long stretch of beach of what technology and the internet nowadays have brought about. That being said, I think it is quite clear that the internet, smartphones and social media are intertwined with one another, and that one ground-breaking invention has led to another over a very short span of time.
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