How The Internet Baby Grew – Digital Revolution in the 2010 Decade

A Decade Of The IT Revolution

In late 2014, when some counties in Georgia claiming to be “early adapters of technology” started the “BYOD – Bring your own device” program in their schools, it gave me a pit in my stomach. Children were welcome to bring their own iPads and tablets to learn in classroom environments. Are elementary school children equipped to handle super computers at their fingertips?

The corporate world is already reaping the side affects of the BYOD movement, where employees are allowed to bring their own devices, because it meant companies could save on the hardware and software maintenance of the devices. But, as a result, computer desks are seen littered with iPads where employees day trade and follow their cats on cat cameras in their homes. But, that’s the nature of the world we live, with the necessary evil – Technology.

Below is how Technology has been making waves over the past few years. Let us see our transition from a human interface to a digital world in the blink of a decade.

In 2010 

I read this in an article called: Attached to Technology and Paying a Price, in New York Times. And I realized my own life was changing.

When one of the most important e-mail messages of his life landed in his in-box a few years ago, Kord Campbell overlooked it. Not just for a day or two, but 12 days. He finally saw it while sifting through old messages: a big company wanted to buy his Internet start-up. “I stood up from my desk and said, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” Mr. Campbell said. “It’s kind of hard to miss an e-mail like that, but I did.”

The message had slipped by him amid an electronic flood: two computer screens alive with e-mail, instant messages, online chats, a Web browser and the computer code he was writing.

In extreme cases of neglect, with very little interaction between parents or other caregivers and peers, children can develop a variety of pathologies.
More broadly, cellphones and computers have transformed life. They let people escape their cubicles and work anywhere. They shrink distances and handle countless mundane tasks, freeing up time for more exciting pursuits.

Major spats have arisen because Mr. Campbell escapes into video games during tough emotional stretches. On family vacations, he has trouble putting down his devices. When he rides the subway to San Francisco, he knows he will be offline 221 seconds as the train goes through a tunnel.
Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets from his electronic gadgets. He forgets things like dinner plans, and he has trouble focusing in its absence, people feel bored.

In 2011

The User Bloooo, from Mole Empire, makes a popular Reddit meme even popular. The meme is called Third World Success.

Third World Success Meme

In 2012

In one study from Anxiety UK, 45 percent of people felt worried or uncomfortable as a result of not being able to access their social networks or email. And nomophobia – fear of being without a mobile phone – affects over 66 percent of the population, according to 2012 findings.

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The word Free Visibility: Disclaimers start to pop up around use of “free content” on the internet. “Usually, artists like that. If not, it’s just a matter of asking us to remove the content and we’re going to do it with no problems at all. “

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The number of honks heard on the streets went up, as drivers in the front were messaging or engrossed in their phones.

In 2013

“Now, that said, there are certainly times to switch our phones to vibrate, put them in our pockets or in another room, and just enjoy the people we’re with. Most of us kind of know this in our gut: a 2013 survey found that 76 percent of Americans think phones at the table are inappropriate. What’s more, some restaurants hate the trend of constantly pulling out technology during a meal and will go to surprising lengths to get us to put them away – asking customers to stow phones in a box during the meal or offering deep discounts for those who can unplug. One Georgia Chick-fil-A restaurant challenged its customers to keep their phones in a “Cell Phone Coop” on the table throughout the meal. If they can successfully leave it there, they’ll get a free ice cream.”

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Sound Hound is an app about which I heard on NPR that it tells us what song we’re listening to.

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“New research from the leading money saving website in the U.S. has discovered that the majority of American parents have used their tech gadgets as a means of “baby-sitting” their children before, with the average occurrence being twice a week.”

The study, conducted by couponcodes4u.com, polled 2,403 American parents of children ages 2 to 13, most of whom said they have devices such as smartphones, tablets, PCs and game consoles at home: 27% of respondents said they allowed kids to access tech devices on a daily basis; 22% on a weekly basis; and 19% said they do it “occasionally”; 18% said they rarely did; and 15% said never.

“Furthermore, when asked if they often used their tech gadgets to effectively ‘baby-sit’ their children (keep them occupied so the parents didn’t have to), the majority, 58%, said that they did, while 25% admitted that it ‘depended’ on the situation,” the study goes.

In 2014

The average American spent 444 minutes per day – nearly 7. 5 hours – in front of a screen, be it a smart phone, tablet, television, or personal computer. That’s higher than the numbers in most European countries, where people spend “only” 5 to 7 hours per day with screens, yet it’s not nearly enough to put the United States in the top five nations: China, Brazil, Vietnam, the Philippines, and, in first place, Indonesia, where people spend 9 hours per day staring at a screen. The American Time Use Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that, the average American adult spent four times longer watching television than “socializing and communicating,” and 20 times longer on TV than on “religious and spiritual activities.” The survey did not ask about hours surfing the web, but we can imagine a similar disparity.

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Friends in an eMBA class tease each other that they might need such a wearable technology piece. “Introducing the Irish watch”. Pic Source: Imgur

Irish Watch LOL

In 2015

Over 200 billion emails were sent each day. That translates to 28 emails per person. Prior to the advent of our modern technical age, when was the last time someone mailed 28 letters out each and every day? Or even ten letters for that matter. Heck, even one. This is where we’ve found ourselves now, and it’s a vastly different cultural landscape. Of course, it doesn’t end there. Emails are just one component of our 21st century tech-fueled writing-based lives. There are an estimated 190 million active blogs online. Eight trillion texts are sent each year. To boot, literally all social media platforms require users to engage in some form of writing. Heck, even the knuckle-dragging ignoramuses trolling YouTube comments sectionsare, in the most charitable definition of the term, ‘writers.’
~ Technology Has Turned Us Into a Nation of Writers, Huffington Post

In 2016

This is how we balanced work and home:
Integrators: Work and home blend.
Separators: Clear line between work and personal life. Very low tech at home.
The Fusion lover: Almost completely mix work with personal life.
The Cycler: Switches between integrating and separating work and home.

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The Internet’s latest infatuation is the #AfterSex selfie

Browse through the feed on Instagram (NSFW), and you’ll see people using the hashtag on a variety of photos: raunchy cartoons, eyeroll-worthy memes, a very relaxed looking open hand (get it?) and a surprising number of photos of actor Dave Franco (why it’s not James, the weirder brother, is anyone’s guess). But once you wade through the joke images, you get to the good stuff.

A similar hashtag #AfterSexHair shows a series of people showing off with beachy waves meant to emulate the carefree, look someone might have after a roll in the hay.

CNET even posits that this could be part of a confessional trend started by apps like Secret and Whisper, both of which encourage users to share their true thoughts – often about sex, love and bodily functions – anonymously.

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“Everyone is vulnerable to cyberattack. Seventy-five billion devices – from kitchen appliances to manufacturing systems – will link to the Internet by 2020. The notion of “American Internet exceptionalism” is a profound – and logical – belief. The US created the Internet, leads online innovation and profits from those innovations. Google, Facebook and Twitter are US companies, and US websites dominate web traffic from India to South Africa to Brazil. An email from Peru to Brazil passes through the US.

The European Commission launched an antimonopoly investigation into Google, and French skeptics use the acronym GAFA for the all-powerful foursome of Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. The Snowden revelations – which included US spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel – led to a push for “made-in-Germany” email systems that would allow Germans to communicate online without relying on American networks and firms.

China is one of the most aggressive cyberattackers. Its control of its domestic Internet stands in stark contrast to the US free-for-all. China requires citizens, who have no online anonymity, to use their national identification numbers when creating social media accounts.”

In 2017

It was predicted that e-books would overtake the paper book, that they would become the totality of publishing. In 2010, the founder of MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, was precise about the hour that paper would perish. “It’s happening in 5 years.” Well, doomsday has come and gone. Paper books have held their ground, and e-book sales have failed to accumulate at their predicted pace. Actually, they have plummeted. In 2015, e-book revenue dropped by 11 percent, while brick-and-mortar bookstore revenue increased by nearly 2 percent. My turn away from the Kindle wasn’t an idiosyncrasy, but part of a widespread tendency. My hunch is that a good portion of the reading public wants an escape from the intense flow of the Internet; they want silent reading, private contemplation – and there’s a nagging sense that paper, and only paper, can induce such a state. The popular gravitation back to the page – not the metaphorical page, but the fibrous thing you can rub between your fingers – is a gravitation back to fundamental lessons from the history of reading.
~ World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech. Used with permission of Penguin Press. Copyright 2017 by Franklin Foer.

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Technology That A 35 Year Old Man Uses:
Phil P. writes:
“Kevin, I’d love to see a list of the Apps that you use at work. Calendar, storage, project management, etc.” ~Phil P.
Thanks for the email, Phil. Here is my list:
Storage, documents, email, spreadsheets: G Suite
Mobile email: Gmail
Calendar (MacOS & iOS): BusyCal
Contact management: Full Contact
Team communication: Slack
Project management: Basecamp
App prototyping: InVision
Design: Sketch
Screenshot sharing: CloudApp
Team password management: 1password
Functionality flowcharts: OmniGraffle
App analytics: Firebase
App downloads & reviews: appFigures
Todo & Notes: Reminders & Notes app (iOS default)
Email and document proofreading: Grammarly
Mobile document scanning (save as PDF to Google Drive): Scannable
Document signatures: Hellosign
Conference calls: UberConference
Audio editing: Logic Pro X
Video conferencing: Hangouts
Encrypted chat & calls: Signal
Newsletters: Mailchimp

In 2018

Something very harmful and maybe irreversible is happening to human attention in our digital age. Not just distraction or addiction; social media companies are inducing people to give up their autonomy. The power to shape people’s attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies. It takes a real effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called “the freedom of mind.” There is a possibility that once lost, people who grow up in the digital age will have difficulty in regaining it. This may have far-reaching political consequences. People without the freedom of mind can be easily manipulated. This danger does not loom only in the future; it already played an important role in the 2016 US presidential elections.
~ George Soros at at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Jan, 2018

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In 2018, we saw this. By 2020, hashtag #GenerationZ will account for 40% of all U.S. consumers. Are you ready to market to these important customers?

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The top 10 Games that Teens Were Playing:
Candy Crush Saga
FarCry 5
Fortnite
God of War
PlayerUnknown – Battle Grounds
Roblox.

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I noticed these kind of apps started coming up: Technology helping Technology addictions??

Tech Helping Tech Addiction

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The Facebook Fiasco:
It all started when President Trump’s 2016 election campaign hired the political data firm Cambridge Analytica, which used apparently frivolous “personality quizzes” and a goofy app to create personality profiles of some 50 million Facebook users and influence their voting behavior. Data collected included personal details, friend relationships and even “likes.”

That sounds innocent enough. Users opted in, right? Wrong. Only about 270,000 users consented to sharing personal data. The majority were harvested through the consenting minority, as part of their “social graphs.”

In other words, those 270,000 gave permission for Cambridge Analytica to harvest personal details on 50 million. These personality profiles were then used to select highly targeted political ads. The technique used was developed by scientists at Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Center.

In 2019

A Minute On The Internet

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Millennial Girl Quits Job And Posts About It On Linked In:
Currently aspiring to be a ‘Yogini’ and ‘Free-thinker’. Ex- Senior Manager Training – Voice & Accent at IBM India

Yesterday, I mustered courage to leave my 9 to 5 job to fulfill my dream of becoming a solopreneur.
Gathered so much learning. How to take rejections, success, appreciation, criticism and how to be a part of a bigger team and lead. Embracing other’s opinion without judging and achieving work goals without hurting any team member’s sentiment.

While the people and a big brand name kept me in golden cuffs for 13 long years. But a part of me was always dreaming of what would it be like to leave and not doing this 9 to 5 grind. Each year I got a raise, timely promotions and I had this perfect idea of success defined by the norms of my company and people around me.
People won’t understand what you are doing but at the end of the day you gotta try all those endless opportunities waiting outside the corporate world. Success is what you want, how much you want and when you want. It’s an idea not a figure.

For now I will take a break, travel, do yoga, spend time with my family and do all those things that I didn’t do since I was 16 as an excuse of being in a full time job.
So, no more zulmi Mondays, Wednesday flops and weekend impish glee. Here’s hoping that future beholds learning, passion, happiness and wealth defined by me and not by anyone else around me. #solopreneur #lastday

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Workplace Trends in 2019: 

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Truth About Technology – A Digital Literacy Project

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