Page 105 - Trust in ICT 2017

2 Trust in ICT 2

ITU-T Technical Paper, Future social media and knowledge society (2015)

Introduction

Smartphone addiction
Most mothers claim "my children are dying brain" since they use smartphones the whole day. They feel that
smartphones are similar to "Digital Drugs". Even when children go to bed, they have their smartphones with
them. If the battery is almost worn out, most children panic easily. Many couples too often fight to use the
smartphone. Most people send and receive an unlimited number of short messages by using social
networking services, such as Twitter and Facebook. Smartphone addictions are due to a hyper-connected
society of Internet, and they are more serious than Internet addiction or video game addiction. The average
usage time per day of smartphone addiction is more than eight hours, while normal users use three hours.
The main purpose of using smartphones is chatting, news searching, listening to music, and games. In the
near future, mobile phone manufacturers may have to attach mandatory warning on smartphones such as
"Excessive use of smartphones is harmful to your health and family reconciliation".

Data explosion
In Cisco's report on visual networking index in 2013, the volume of global Internet traffic is expected to reach
1.6 zeta bytes. (Note that 1 zettabyte = 1021 bytes = 1 billion terabytes = 1000 exabytes [1].) It has been
announced that global Internet protocol (IP) traffic is expected to increase by about three-fold during the
next five years. Wireless mobile traffic will exceed wired traffic, and video traffic with high definition quality
will be the best. The major factor of traffic increase is the increase of Internet users and mobile devices,
which are the result of the increase of broadband network bandwidth and video watching. The traffic volume
of mobile devices will exceed the volume of personal computer (PC) traffic. Moreover, wireless fidelity (WiFi)
traffic will exceed wired traffic for the first time. The percentage share of video traffic with high definition
quality of all the traffic is expected to increase to 79% in 2018 compared to 66% in 2013. Traffic for Internet
of things/machine-to-machine (IoT/M2M) applications will increase sharply in the near future.

New habit of online society

While people frequently use the Internet, they develop new habits. Currently, Internet users are increasing
drastically. More than 50% of the people in the world are plugged-in at the Internet. The penetration ratio of
smartphones is also steeply rising to more than 50%. Such penetration is causing change in the daily lives of
people. Lately, many people may have the habit of checking their smartphones first thing in the morning;
they check their schedule of the day to decide what clothes they have to wear, depending on their meeting
and business schedule. On their way to work, they check their e-mails and mobile messages. For their daily
lives and businesses, most people always connect to the online environment by using smartphones.
If they have a question during a meeting or a conversation, they directly check the related websites by using
the smartphone so that they can obtain the facts from the Internet without a serious debate. To get the
opinion of faraway experts, people call them immediately during the meeting. Sometimes, the meeting
makes a vote from the all the participants including those who participated remotely. In some strange cases
during face-to-face meetings, people start the meeting by using the social networking services in order to
record the meeting results even though all the members are present in the same location.

In their day-to-day life, people check their personal schedule by using the Internet. They fix dates with their
girlfriends, and book movie tickets by using the smartphone. When a girlfriend does not find the exact
meeting place, her boyfriend directs her from her current location. Sometimes, he asks his friends to find out
a nice venue to meet. He may enjoy a major event nearby like a street parade or fireworks. He can receive a
discount coupon for a nearby restaurant while he is looking for a nice place.
By using the smartphone, he meets with his family and friends every day even though he could not meet
them physically. Most mothers worry about their daughters when they come back home late in the evening;
they can contact their daughters by using the smartphone to ensure that they return safely.

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