The creation of the mobile internet is humanity’s most profound invention in recent times. It is our greatest charge at fast-tracking the transition of the homo sapien man into a higher being with the freshly-acquired ability of computer-aided hyperintelligence. Or have we not seen how mobiles have revolutionized our entire life system?
The virtual world has gradually lost its parallelism with reality; they have both collided at the intersection of actuality—our online life is now so intermixed with the offline that it is safe to say they are now the same.
We have suddenly morphed from a society that, 15–25 years ago, depended on wired and fixed computers to execute complex computational errands to the portable computer users of today. We have evolved from paper-text readers, radio listeners, and TV watchers into users of the compact versions of these media devices. And as for human knowledge, man is now an omniscient being wielding a screen.
Who Saw It Come In?
The concept of the handy philosopher’s screen (today’s smartphones) that was suggested by the difficulty of information technology’s unportable nature has birthed a screen culture that has become a part of humanity’s day-to-day operations as the smartphone continues its spread through civilization.
Source: livemint.com
I’m sure both Vint Cerf and Bob Khan, along with their numberless collaborators, didn’t know they were setting up the next phase of human evolution with their seminal contributions to the internet’s formation. The visionary developers of Apple’s iPhones, Nokia’s Symbian phones, Blackberries, and pioneer smartphones like the Ericsson R380 must have seen this generation of screen gazers as they ushered in the age of handheld computers. Or … did they also miss it?
Source: Biography on Britannica
If they did, one man surely didn’t. Steve Jobs, as Apple’s CEO, created the multi-billion dollar household brand that Apple is presently. It’s also rumored that he knew something about the apple incident in the Garden of Eden. He made this prediction in an audio interview with Nick Wingfield published in 2008 by The Information and The Wall Street Journal.
“I think there are a lot of people and I’m one of them who believe that mobile’s going to get quite serious because there are things you can do…Obviously, mobile’s with you all the time, but there’s services you can provide with mobile that obviously are not relevant on a desktop, such as location-based services integrated into your application. They can be mighty useful and we’re just at the tip of that. That’s going to be huge, I think,” he said.
His prophecy has proven true with new-age smartphones coming with built-in GPS; sensors like speedometers, gyroscopes, barometers, etc; and high-performance cameras. I don’t think we realize how far our mobile computers have developed in the duration of a blink.
Source: Vakoms.com
Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store are now our go-to marketplaces for apps and games that continue to beat our imagination in purpose and design. Yet, more seems to be coming with virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) threatening the future dominance of smartphones.
Surpassing The Past
Many may argue that the amount of time we spend on screens is excessive and unhealthy, and others even go further to say we deny ourselves the true experience of life when we participate too often in the unnatural world within the screen.
These Luddites have forgotten that technology has always been around to mark the progress of human intelligence at various times in our travel through the cosmos. It has always been around to mitigate the human condition to improve and improve the quality of life. Technology doesn’t take us out of nature, it only redefines it, and every generation will live in different settings dictated by the technical know-how available to them at their time.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Credit: Kungl. biblioteket
Credit: Robster1983
The intelligent man, throughout history, has been cheering the future to make better expedients that will moderate his sufferings and advance the wheel of development. The abacus helped the Chinese with calculations; Romans made the shift from scrolls to codices as a more reliable way of recording history; and the Egyptians built the first skyscrapers … don’t ask me how. These are the archetypes that contemporary creatives are building upon to devise our time’s machines. Since inventions are never new, only better versions of older ideas: every technology in the present world has its predecessor somewhere in the past.
Truly, nuclear weapons and cyber-crimes are unwanted consequences of modern technological advancements, but we must understand that the vices that result from technologies have more to do with an inherent tendency of man to pollute our privileges than the design of the equipment.
Source: ThoughtCo.
This tendency is evidenced in the fate of Alfred Nobel’s dynamites. Initially designed for the demolition of rocks and other industrial blasting operations in the late 1800s, dynamite, a safer replacement material for black powder, quickly became bombs in the hands of war-men and a weapon of mass destruction. Even a simple tool like the knife can be creative or destructive—the choice is always the holder’s.
The screen, especially in its portable form, has become a novel extension of our formerly limited mental capacity, allowing us to test the extent of the human intellect by aiding fast learning through a myriad of digital resources including e-learning facilities like Google and Wikipedia. Mobiles have given us a chance to expedite the expansion of our boundaries of wisdom.
This expedition is necessary for the continued improvement of information technology (IT). The field of computing with subfields like coding, programming, engineering, and others are areas where practitioners continue to find methods of bettering IT, and these specialized disciplines, I believe, are the present frontiers of our evolutionary progression.
Ancient man’s questions on the processing, sending, reception, and management of information continue to be answered. We can now imagine a world where every atom of data we create will survive till the end of time, and our footprints on Earth will be just as important as our impressions on the internet.
Now, the onus is on us to use this opportunity only to promote our planet’s progress, but, from popular practice, we know ourselves too much to expect a completely positive outcome of any human creation. So, don’t worry, the world has not changed, it has only found a different way of working; this shouldn’t disturb your dinner—but you may have to order it through your phone.
The New Reality
Social media platforms are gradually replacing traditional human connection circuits, and like real life, it comes with the familiar distinction between the proletariat and the elite.
Offices are now bedroom corners where CEOs do all the company’s work in their boxer shorts—or their spaghetti tops—while scrolling through their job apps on the web.
Cyberwars are now in vogue, and every individual or organization with this new power holds it over their subordinates like a lit Molotov.
The dark web, the internet’s ghetto, has substituted the physical black market to become the criminal underworld of the new era.
Digital media has replaced all old forms of media access with streaming services taking the front seat of digitized media distribution.
We now keep valuables on the internet, so cyber-security is now of greater importance.
The market is now digital, and cryptocurrency is its money. We may not have moved to Mars yet, but we live on the internet now.
The modern man’s life is now spent between portals of virtual reality, and offline and online are now connected through an existential passage.
We’re now truly limitless and on our way to the next phase of species elevation. It’s probably AI at its most unimaginable, and I’m sure someone in some corner of our universe is answering this question already. I won’t be shocked if the new age comes faster than we suspect it will.
AkowekoWura 