The ICT and its paraphernalia have found their niche in the hearts of many people all over the world. About one-third of the world population is now online. It took television over 20 years to reach 50 million households—it took the internet just five to achieve the same level of penetration. Such feat is unprecedented, considering the fact that not even the originators of the technology anticipated such meteoric success. The internet has dynamically led to the democratization of knowledge. It has also changed the way things are done. Businesses are harnessing the potentials of the internet to get their products and services into the to-buy lists of consumers. People now work from the comfort of their homes. This is called telecommuting. Writers can now publish their works seamlessly online. Travellers now easily make hotel reservations. Communications with people all over the world has defied all barriers. With social media sites and applications such as Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, WhatsApp and many more, online experiences just got juicier. Lots of educational resources litter web pages and online fora. With WordPress, blogging is just made easier. In his book, “The Road Ahead”, Bill Gates says, ‘Some parents aren’t happy when they see their children in front of the computer, “Go read a book”, they say. But they are only thinking of computer games. In the future, books will be in the child’s computer.’ It’s happening now! The World Wide Web has been spreading like wildfire since the day Tim Barnes Lee crystalized the idea of it. As at 2004, they were 635 million websites online and the figures has increased ever since. Also, the digital divide is fast becoming narrow. In 2005, for instance, there were estimated 1 billion people with internet access despite the dot.com bubble burst of the early 2000. And now the one-third of the world population. These figures provide us with the bird’s eye view of how the internet has grown over the years, and how fast a rate people are moving to the place called ‘online’. Interestingly, the pool of information available online and offline seems inexhaustible. For instance, most Excel users make use of less than 10% of its total features. There is a saying that if you want to hide an information from net users, put it on page 2 of Google, they may never discover it. According to a report, 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search result. When we search something on Google, say, ‘business plan’ , it returns hundreds of results, spread across many pages, however, we usually get the information we need from the first few results that pop up, thanks to Search Engine Optimisation. For knowledge sake, Google is the most popular website in the world, seconded by Facebook. The information age is here to stay. ICT is everywhere around us. It’s applied to almost every task today. The tech-heads are developing new technologies every day. Complex problems are now met with simple solutions, and simple problems now receive antidote of complex solutions. In fact the future we speak of is here!
And this is just the beginning of advanced technology.
ReplyDeleteExactly. You're on point.
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