Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and World Change
This week session is all about the vast advancements of different communication methods in today's context. Certain areas we looked in depth during class were the areas of interest, advantages and dangers of ICT and how do we capture the value of ICT revolutions in different industries. This is interesting to know how it can shape the future of our world.
In the past, we could only communicate through face-to-face or through the tradition medium of posting letter out to our recipient in which the communication will only reach by a few days later. Slowly, as we move on inventions from pagers to big cell phone and a shift to our handheld PDA or Iphone that have mobile internet connections and all-in-one functions in such a small device. SMS, MMS and internet becomes an everyday mode of communication. I was curious to know more about our telecommunication statistics therefore I went to research and below are my findings.
Mobile Phone Penetration Rate
The figures of the chart above show the increasing percentage of mobile phone penetration in Singapore. In the year 2009, it reaches 137.4% penetration rate (IDA Singapore) and 6.58 million mobile users (BuddeComm) which hits one of the highest mobile penetration rates in the world at around 76%. This implies that every Singaporeans own at least 2 hand phones per person. Imagine the numbers of text messages we sent and phone calls we made daily are expected to rise at an exponential rate. And look at the way how our major mobile operators package their services at a competitive pricing to the consumers. They include free incoming calls and unlimited SMS options in our phone contract which have made our communication so easily reached to our recipient at practically no cost. This has also improved the method in which how communication is being exchanged.
Besides, there are growing concerns on the social networking sites at an individual level or business context. People can get to share information, ideas, activities, and interests; voice out personal opinions or daily updates through these sites and on the other hand businessmen are using this platform as a form of reaching their business to their target audience. In fact I have also shared during my presentation that the rapid growth in the social networking sites has become popular across different age groups, and if the largest social networking site, Facebook, is to use to be an illustration of a country it is said to be the third largest country in the world. These sites can be a gift or the opposite way of playing into issues of identity, privacy, exposure and many factors of dangers. In my opinion, for the issue on privacy it’s a matter of how a person is willing to share his or her private information and control who can access that information. With internet being able to store records of everything (online photo, status update, post or any blog entry) and information gets stored forever, everyone should be careful on publishing these information about themselves and not to be a victim of one.
This week is my presentation sharing with the class, the revolutionary change of web 2.0 to web 3.0 in the near future. Web 2.0 is all about the user-generated content and read-write web. People are consuming as well as contributing information through social networking sites or other sites like Youtube, Flickr. The line dividing a consumer and content publisher is increasingly getting blurred in this era.
So what’s new about Web 3.0? In short, this can also be named as the semantic web (adding meaning of data), personalization (iGoogle), intelligent search (search engine understands the general knowledge of language and knows what the users likes and dislikes) and behavioral advertising among other things. It is also believed to be the most comprehensive vision of Internet’s future available as of 2010 - and this is now we rule the internet of tomorrow.
Rate: 9/10
I feel that the individual presentations should be appointed not more than 5 persons in each session as the class will usually restless towards the end of the class. However being the last presenter, it gets hard to pull their full attention to my speech. In addition, due to time constraints, the discussion I had with the class was insufficient and I believe more interesting discussions on web 3.0 could be raised. I hope we could work this out by allocating strict time allocation for each individual on the following lessons.
