COPYRIGHT OLACEFS.COM
By Rishaan Chowdhury:
Technology has changed the modern world. Today you can visit places all over the world with a few clicks, talk to your friends who are 1000’s of miles away, etc. But the world once existed and survived living through a time of handwritten letters, wooden printing blocks, and calligraphy.
Calligraphy is the art of writing. Today’s writing tools such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs use calligraphic letters to power their systems. This allows you to have such a variety of fonts to use while writing. Technology makes calligraphy accessible to anyone who has an electronic device. But computers can’t do everything. And today calligraphy is a forgotten art which has evolved rapidly into Fonts.
Calligraphy isn’t the only thing that has changed, nowadays people spend huge amounts of time browsing social media. Instead of spending time with family, 45% of the world spends time on social media every day. That is equal to roughly 3.15 Billion people. And to earn money Social media uses you. While you don’t pay a penny to sign up, the social media provider (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter…) use your information to earn money by selling it to advertisers who have the chance of you purchasing their product.
Social media-like things such as YouTube also have a similar process of showing recommendations to figure out what kind of interests you have. And from that they show ads to generate revenue for themselves. But recommendations aren’t just earning money. They are slightly altering your interest so they can pick new ads for you and can constantly have new media available.
But they can’t do this on their own, so the solution is notifications. Notifications are basically the things that ring, show messages on your iPad when they are off, and the things to suddenly drop from the top of your screen. Apps use notifications to bribe you into checking out the app. For example, a notification from Facebook might say “Your friend Bob just joined, want to say hi?!”, you would probably then click the notification and click the hi button, then you would start browsing the feed.
But the world isn’t completely taken over by tech yet. 55% of the world is still yet to use social media, that means that depending on what decisions we make in the future, we can decide if we want the world to turn into a completely tech based world or if we want to start taking back the reins. These are things that today as kids we can start changing by turning off notifications and not using our devices as whenever we don’t need to.