Ingredients of the Digital Society

The things that have made the biggest contribution to making society “digital” are the personal computer, the mobile phone and the Internet. The personal computer started off the “digitization” of society and in its early days it had a huge impact on business. With the arrival of the Internet, the PC empowered people by allowing them to consume and exchange information via the Web and email.

The Internet and the PC ushered in an “Information Age” that has made the world a much more transparent place, but has also led to the problem of information overload. One of the bigger challenges people face today is how to make sense of all the information that is available – they have to figure out how to find, validate, rate and classify it. Search engines like Google allow us to find information while new services like digg and del.icio.us are trying to address the issue of rating and classification.
Mobile phones are a slightly different story – they really caught on after the networks went digital. Today mobile phones are penetrating the most remote corners of the world and have helped a large section of the world’s population to organize their lives more efficiently. There are a couple of billion mobile phones in the world today and this penetration has been achieved in around a dozen years. The GSM standard helped deliver cheap mobile telephony around the world – it was so widely adopted that the price of equipment to build mobile networks fell drastically.

While new applications like Skype are making communications even cheaper, the successors of the “Social Networking” phenomenon are likely to make the biggest impact on the digital society. By delivering an easy and fun way to bring people together, Web 2.0 technology has started a revolution. There will be many more applications around connecting people, but along the way we will learn how to link up more and more groups and find ways to help them organize their activities.

The power of organizing society around digital paradigms is already being demonstrated in the the American Presidential election campaign for 2008. In this blog, I will continue to look at ways in which technology will help transform the way societies organize and operate. Join in and help shape the discussion.