Today millions of people around the world consume digital information, entertainment, and media. This information at our fingertips has transformed human life. Most of us now believe that the use of digital devices, especially mobile ones like smartphones, has been a quiet revolution. The uncanny ability to communicate over long distances is now integrated into much of what we all do. It’s improved our productivity, enhanced our interactions, and transformed how we do everything, from social networking to performing at our jobs.
The state of civilization in the early 1990s would be unrecognizable to many younger people. At that time, the Internet was capitalized and just emerging as a curious phenomenon. In fact, it wasn’t even referred to as the internet by most people, but by a more poetic name—the World Wide Web. In other words, an electronic web that invisibly girded the planet, shrinking the communication distance between people.
Our new revolution in the 21st century is the smartphone, which is essentially a pocket-sized computer that uses the internet to help us organize our personal and business affairs. Yet, despite the enormous reach and computing power of smartphones, they are still delicate electronic devices. Consequently, no responsible Apple iPhone owner would ever dream of refraining from shopping for Apple iPhone 8 cases, covers and other tech accessories.
While the smartphone is not our only form of digital adoption, we often behave as if it deserves the bulk of our undivided attention–an easy assumption to make considering we use it for almost everything we do in a day to organize our time and experiences.
This favoritism is understandable. Smartphones have changed the way we do business and the way we progress through our daily lives. For instance, employers can always get in touch with indispensable employees during a crisis and when we don’t know how to organize something coherently, we can trust an app to streamline the process for us.
Employees are Easier to Reach
In the past, businesses were reluctant to let their top troubleshooters go on vacation, only begrudging them time off because it was a decent thing to do and a legal obligation to comply with labor laws. Today, employers know that their most valuable employees are always within electronic reach should there be an emergency which only this proficient employee knows how to fix.
This ability to contact someone during a business emergency is particularly valued in IT. Other employees or even outside consultants may not know how to fix a particular glitch in the code or how to connect a certain client’s servers. What’s more, with mobile technology, a technical issue can even be fixed remotely. (By comparison, the digital pager was a primitive tool.)
There’s an App for That
Human beings are smart, with brains wired to seamlessly coordinate the subtle signals of about 100 billion neurons, each, incidentally, with about 10,000 glial cells to support data transfer. Yet, despite this brilliance, or perhaps because of it, we often have a hard time dealing with the sequential reasoning processes that mobile applications can handle with ease.
Business productivity apps perform all sorts of wizardry. They help a business assign projects to the right people. They help schedule employees at the best times. And, from emails to instant messages and from budget planners to GPS trackers, they work smoothly, efficiently, and tirelessly, never complaining or asking for a raise or a day off.
Mobile magic
A time-traveler from the Age of Enlightenment would be astounded at how people and businesses manage to run things based on a handheld device that translates ones and zeroes into recognizable words, images and symbols. Yet, this is the world we now live in. Anyone asking a question only has to browse a search engine for the answer. Anyone in a new city who is looking for a business service only has to review an online business directory to find the right place.
And anyone who feels an urgent need to talk to someone else while walking on the street has only to press a few buttons to establish instant contact. Yet despite these staggering advances, futurists suspect that this is just the beginning. Digital trends like artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and machine learning are still in their nascent stages, slowly gaining momentum in their electronic-oriented quest to rewrite our collective future.