Curtailing the quantity of information accessible in today’s world [ICT Clinic]

I have always maintained that the coming of the Information and Communications Technology age, which we are now in, also came with a lot of disruption in the ways that we do things before its advent.

The availability of a variety of devices, such as wearables, mobile phones, i p ads and laptops and their connection to the Internet, enables us to have access to countless information from the various platforms and search engines.

Aside from the real-time information that we can now obtain through access to search engines, we also have the opportunity to relate with friends, loved ones, colleagues, etc., on the various social media platforms, such as Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, email, etc, also, through access to the Internet on our various devices.

Worthy of mention too, are the various applications that have been developed on a variety of issues, such as productivity, games, and many more.

Today, we now have access to information that, hitherto, might take days, weeks, months or even years to access, just at the click of the buttons on our devices.

Letters written in times past, for instance, took days or weeks to get delivered; same with replies to those letters. Hence, we get things done faster these days than we used to. The speed of information and communication you would agree has drastically improved with technology.

There is no doubt that the ICT age has also revolutionised the ways in which our traditional media platforms operate. For example, almost all the national dailies no longer depend on printing and distribution of newspapers to vendors to sell alone, but you will also find many of them with their news posted on their online platforms. Today, we have online only dailies, which were nearly inconceivable many years ago. One of the beauties of operating online news outfits is that there are provisions for the readers to air their views in response to the content on those blogs, in real time. That is a luxury, hitherto, not possible, when the news was available only in print. You had to write a letter and post to the editor of a printed newspaper if you wanted to make a comment on a printed news item you have just read. You also had no guarantees that your letter will be posted.

Thanks to the progress made in technology, many people now also have the opportunity to make calls, to air their views on television and radio programmes in real time. This was a luxury preserved for only those few, who were privileged to be — Finish Reading on the Punch