Aishath Shadhiya

Digital divide

Digital divide is a term that refers to the gap between demographics and regions that have access to modern information and communications technology, and those that don’t or have restricted access. This technology can include the telephone, television, personal computers and the Internet.

Well before the late 20th century, digital dividereferred chiefly to the division between those with and without telephone access; after the late 1990s the term began to be used mainly to describe the split between those with and without Internet access, particularly broadband.

The digital divide typically exists between those in cities and those in rural areas; between the educated and the uneducated; between socioeconomic groups; and, globally, between the more and less industrially developed nations. Even among populations with some access to technology, the digital divide can be evident in the form of lower-performance computers, lower-speed wireless connections, lower-priced connections such as dial-up, and limited access to subscription-based content.

The reality of a separate-access marketplace is problematic because of the rise of services such as video on demand, video conferencing and virtual classrooms, which require access to high-speed, high-quality connections that those on the less-served side of the digital divide cannot access and/or afford. And while adoption of smartphones is growing, even among lower-income and minority groups, the rising costs of data plans and the difficulty of performing tasks and transactions on smartphones continue to inhibit the closing of the gap.

According to recent studies and reports, the digital divide is still very much a reality today. A June 2013 U.S. White House broadband report, for example, showed that only 71% of American homes have adopted broadband, a figure lower than in other countries with comparable gross domestic product.

Proponents for closing the digital divide include those who argue it would improve literacy, democracy, social mobility, economic equality and economic growth.

Digital Novices

Digital novices tend to have minimal digital contact with end users but understand the mandate to change.

Characteristics include legacy systems unable to support valuable online engagements, teams with limited skills and experience working on digital initiatives and frequently an unwillingness to find outside expertise to help build a business case and convince companies to move faster.

Ultimately, digital novices are still deciding where digital transformation fits into their organizations.

Organizations at this stage are commonly trying to provide consistent experiences across channels and devices, offer something personalized (rather than generic) to customers, and use data to cross-sell relevant services to existing customers.

Companies should work with partners who bring well-established processes to facilitate innovative thinking to jump-start digital innovation programs. Gaining traction and support across an organization involves engaging all company departments and garnering crucial insights from customers.

Performing a competitive experience assessment can help focus digital initiatives by plotting your companies’ digital customer experiences against its competitors. This creates a clear picture of how to increase appeal and relevance to current and prospective customers. From there, digital novices can decide how to rationalize application portfolios to best support future digital strategies across multiple channels.

Information society

Information Society is a term for a society in which the creation, distribution, and manipulation of information has become the most significant economic and cultural activity. An Information Society may be contrasted with societies in which the economic underpinning is primarily Industrial or Agrarian. The machine tools of the Information Society are computers and telecommunications, rather than lathes or ploughs.

Digital natives

A digital native is an individual who was born after the widespread adoption of digital technology. The term digital native doesn't refer to a particular generation. Instead, it is a catch-all category for children who have grown up using technology like the Internet, computers and mobile devices. This exposure to technology in the early years is believed to give digital natives a greater familiarity with and understanding of technology than people who were born before it was widespread.

Digital immigrants

A digital immigrant is an individual who was born before the widespread adoption of digital technology. The term digital immigrant may also apply to individuals who were born after the spread of digital technology and who were not exposed to it at an early age. Digital immigrants are the opposite of digital natives, who have been interacting with technology from childhood.

Digital immigrants are believed to be less quick to pick up new technologies than digital natives. This results in the equivalent of a speaking accent when it comes to the way in which they learn and adopt technology. A commonly used example is that a digital immigrant may prefer to print out a document to edit it by hand rather than doing onscreen editing.

Digital Age

For many, the digital age is simply the industrial era ‘amped up’ on tech steroids. Perhaps marked by the IT industry’s coming of age as new technology became as much part of the social fabric as it was in the world of business. But that doesn’t really cover it.

There are certain interesting traits that for me define the digital age:

Many of us now have virtual lives as well as physical ones.
Some of us use our virtual life to promote an idealized physical life.
Technology is augmenting us in unimaginable ways. We have the world’s knowledge at our fingertips, thanks to smartphone technology, but we choose to use it primarily for shopping and picking arguments with strangers. Either way, Alexander Graham Bell would be dumbfounded.
Thanks to digital distraction, we appear to be losing the ability to think deeply. We take in content like a whale takes in plankton. In other words, very little of what we ‘consume’ has ‘nutritional’ value.
Increasingly dumb objects, such as trolleys and toothbrushes, are becoming data-rich smart devices.

Many of us are happy to trade privacy for convenience. And some of us are unaware of the value of our own data.
Our own data, thanks to ‘quantified self’ technologies, is permanently streaming from us like a comet’s tail.
There is a growing acceptance that citizen surveillance is a price to be paid for being part of a developed society.
World leaders constraining foreign policy statements to 140 characters.
It has never been so easy to share.