Page 106 - Trust in ICT 2017

2 Trust in ICT

Social effects of online connectivity

At least once a day, people visit their social networking service like Twitter and Facebook, etc. When people
are excluded to join as a friend or be a member of the social networking services, they are very disappointed
and they think that are being bullied. People may worry about such online as well as offline exclusion from
these communities. When people post the latest news and gossip on their social networking sites, they
observe and wonder how to appeal or how to react to their friends. People may want to learn about new
cultures of online social communities regardless of where they are or what they are working at. They may
exercise new skills on how to live in an open culture of an online society. This online culture may be similar
to a community culture like the Confucian civilization of Far East Asia.
Impact of technology development toward future society

The recent new technologies such as cloud computing, the web, and social networking services over the
Internet are just the beginning of a wide variety of technological developments for the future. The future
society is ready to invite new technologies like big data analytics, deep learning, augmented reality/virtual
reality (AR/VR) as well as Internet of things (IoT), etc. In the near future, network transmission speeds will be
exceeding more than 1 terabits per second and network processing power will be more than several hundred
petaflops. The storage capability of individual smartphones or personal computers will be more than 1
terabytes.
IBM Watson supercomputer wins over a human at the television quiz show of Jeopardy in 2011. The thinking
capability of a computer is superior to that of humans while puzzling over a particularly hard question [2].
This means that humans may focus on how to think rather than on how to remember. Humans welcome to
utilize the storage and processing capability of the cloud computing system. The computer with artificial
intelligence may help with how to think and remember. To overcome the language barrier, real-time
language translation may be available. For example, if people are discussing some outstanding issues, the
searching machine displays in advance the relevant information on the screen from the websites.

Wind of changes
In human history, there is no memory more than several billions of people are simultaneously talking and
sharing contents/documents together through the Internet. The real-time voting and instant collection of
opinions give an insight that technological development leads to a new cultural revolution. It offers new
challenges to individual human life such as dating, chatting, shopping, listening to music, and enjoying
movies, etc. There will be new business styles during the purchase, and the business transactions, etc. This
leads to social, cultural, and political changes of the human life. Digital technology may be asking to change
national laws and regulations. It also requests to change individual rights and responsibilities at the human
and business levels.
Many people may feel ashamed in such technological developments. New ecosystems of life and business
may be unstable without a guarantee of the stability and reliability of technology. If people try to drive a car
without the required skill or confidence, this causes car accidents. New technologies may introduce the build-
up of an unacceptable value chain (e.g. monopoly) of industries and eventually may destroy the traditional
business models. The development of new technologies may be sometimes undesirable if certain levels of
controllability and credibility are not guaranteed.
The online connectivity of the Internet is stronger than our expectations since it may introduce a new society
and create a new culture. However, online connectivity may awake a very unstable resonance in society where
collective actions, demonstrations, and public heated debates can occasionally take place. Moreover, many
people receive many spam e-mails and are attacked by short message service phishing (i.e. smishing), etc.

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