Access for Everyone?
Some of us don’t actually possess phones with internet access or pushed email.
For the vast majority of people on this planet, acquiring the latest gadget is still out of reach due to costs. Until my brief tenure in advertising a couple of years ago, as much as I may have wanted a PDA (as they were once known), I couldn’t afford one and was therefore separated from an entire movement that has now transformed how we, as a global community, communicate and live. After my layoff from said job as corporate hustler last year, I had to relinquish my beloved Crackberry and went back to utilizing my very basic and entirely acceptable Tracphone. It wasn’t such a tragedy, but with the evolution of smartphones, I couldn’t help but feel out of the loop.
Anyone that’s involved in any shape or form in the digital world recognizes the strides that smartphones, web apps, and internet innovation are taking. What is new today will be old news within a matter weeks. In places such as India or the many countries of Africa, people are using their phones for far more than just email or bullshit web games—they pay for groceries with a swipe of the phone, for example. We use these applications to share moments, conversations, photos, data, and more. Organization of higher education often takes place only via online portals—from applying to school to registering for classes to turning in exams. Many people are only available through the online world.
Once upon a time, knowledge equaled power. Now, it is the access to knowledge that equals power. So what happens to those that don’t have the financial means to acquire that access? Are we left behind and looked upon in the same manner that the homeless or Dalit are? Throwaways? I recently invested in a Crackberry again and while it’s not the latest model, it opened up that world again for me. How do we do this for the people for whom the costs remains beyond their means? If technology is the framework of the world, how do we make it accessible to everyone?
One portal to the entire world…
Consider the following scenario: sometime in the future, everything will be in digital format. Nothing will be printed at all -not your bills, not your contracts, nothing. Sometime in the near future, you won’t store anything on your own computer either. Your music collection, your pictures, your “newspaper”, your personal library -all of it will live in its own personal home in the Cloud.
Imagine carrying all of your personal information -absolutely EVERYTHING- in the palm of your hand or in your pocket and only needing a single passcode and ID to access it.
You take out your smartphone, open the main application, and enter your login information. One main login for everything. Your bank account is there, your mortgage contracts are there, every possible piece of information for your entire academic history is there (transcripts, records, report cards, term papers, etc), your travel history, your credit report, your personal library, your music collection, EVERYTHING. You take a class and the instructor uploads the class information. You automatically have it upon coming online. You don’t go to website and put in special login information to gain access to it. What if you only need a single ID and passcode to access all of this instead of fifty million different passwords that you somehow have to keep track of? Or what if there’s a built-in application that magically remembers every single password and instantly logs on to all the applications all at the same time, upon powering up?
Maybe Google and Apple have teamed up to make this happen. Maybe the government fits in here some place. Maybe not. With everything moving toward efficiency -mobile devices that serve as stereos, computers, phones, cameras, calendars, address books, televisions, and more- this notion can’t really be that far off. Do we trust whoever decides to put this into motion? Should we? Should we embrace the technology when it comes about or all vow to become Luddites?
Think about it -information is power and whoever has control over the information has power over the masses.
