TWC Session 5 (Week 5)

Happy belated 90th Birthday to Mr Lee Kuan Yew, without his bold vision (can relate to last week's lesson on change leadership & management), we will not have our Singapore today and we should not take the present for granted.

Figure 1. Singapore Skyline
Reproduced from Wikipedia. (n.d.)

Brief Overview/Summary

Today, we look into the topic of ICT & World Change (Mass Media, the Internet, Wireless, Interactive Telecommunications)- Past, Present & Future. We look into how aspects in ICT such as Mass Media, Internet, Social Networking, Crowd Sourcing and Gaming are evolving from past to the present and ideas of how it will be in the future.

• Mass media is defined as using media technologies to send message across a large audience. In the past, we use smoke signals, word of mouth and drums etc, to currently through newspaper, radio, TV, internet etc. It evolved from one-way to a two-way (interactive) approach which allows feedback and comments.
• Internet revolutionized the world with the invention of WWW, messages are sent within seconds to people, information can be found within a click away (such as Wikipedia). It started from Web 1.0 to currently Web 2.0 and in the future, Web 3.0 which is not only interactive but intelligent and omnipresent (as mentioned in the video), where the web is used a tool to settle our way of life, like giving recommendations to users, building an itinerary etc. 
• With the revolutionary internet, social networking sites started with ICQ, MSN Messenger, MySpace, to now Facebook, Weibo. Social network has indeed revolutionized the way we communicate and work, eg. Police use social networking sites to tackle crimes and solve cases, social networking sites also provide hidden opportunities for business marketing to reach out quickly to friends of friends of friends and it goes on (based on the principle of word of mouth in the past)
• Crowd sourcing where users reach out to people for answers, eg. Yahoo Answers, forums etc.
• Gaming has evolved from single user experience to a MMORPG (multi-user) format where users can not only have fun, but also communicate through gaming. Interestingly, gaming technology is also used in surgery (use of joysticks), simulation of scenarios (military use, training a pilot, driving of car ,riding of bike etc) and gaming is also used to education to raise the interest of learning in young ones.
• Cloud computing evolves the way we use a computer, it depends on internet for we work in a virtual drive without the need of an operating system, big hard-drives, softwares etc. Laptops such as Google Chromebook are slowly rising and this might be the future of computers.

We also look into why ICT/Knowledge revolution productivity is so low, because we are in a very early stage and we faced challenges like job opportunities (no need for more people due to use of computers), therefore we need to start educating people on how to incorporate ICT. We also look into the risks with ICT such as security, espionage, invasion of privacy (stealing of private info and identity) and exposure to corrupting influences (that is why North Korea, China and also many other countries still limit the population access to internet). Then we ended the class with 5 presentations which are very thought-provoking and informative.

Interesting Observations and Ideas

How internet has revolutionized the world and how it has brought about ideas of social networking, another experience in gaming, and how much it is being evolved from passive to interactive to intelligent (which focuses more on the user-experience) in the future.

Key Take Away Points

• ICT is a driver of world change.
• A coin has two sides and it is so with technology, people will use it for good but also there will be people with bad intentions, therefore we must always be cautious and safeguard ourselves.

Issues for Further Discussion

• Will cloud computing (cloud storage) take over the role of hard-drives, solid state drives in the future or will it just be an evolution for a certain population of people due the risk of heavy dependent on internet? 
• Can we survive without internet? (as mentioned in the 1st presentation). I would say in Singapore, MINDEF can survive, because they run on an independent intranet (which is what Danny Hillis had suggested in his speech to solve this problem)

Personal Ratings for Session

I rate this session 10/10 as the presentations were very informative and the session gives a very clear picture on why ICT is a driver of world change.