cct205_in_class_exercise_5

__**What “digital innovation” do you feel best ** **deserves the title of “revolutionary” and why? **__

I’m going to go with the most logically sound answer to this question and say the internet as we know it is the digital innovation that best deserves the title of “revolutionary”. While it’s existed since the 1960’s, it was a completely original tool used for communication by the US Department of Defense. Over time it became commercialized and publicly available.

The reason I believe the internet BEST deserves this title is not only because of its ability to connect us across the world, but because of all the subsequent innovations that flourished thanks to its existence; bringing us into the information age. I like to see it as the innovation that keeps innovating itself, “the machine” that will bring us into the future. Off the top of my head I can already mention things like social networking, online banking, electronic money transfers, online purchasing, information super-databases such as Wikipedia and search engines like Google, the integration of all of those things, and even the introduction and evolution of mobile technology such as laptops, cell/smart phones and tablets/e-readers, all of which have drastically altered our lifestyles into ones of convenience.

The internet is still evolving into what we call “Web 2.0”. While we’re mostly there with the introduction of cloud computing and massive social networking/integration of social networking that strictly revolves around user-centered design, there are still many areas that are lagging behind. The next step in the evolution of the internet is in the Semantic Web that we discussed earlier in the semester, where the structuring of content will allow machines to understand what we have provided and enable them to perform tasks without human direction.

This evolution of the internet again invokes the necessity to upgrade the surrounding technologies to keep up with the changes, and thus promotes the infinite cycle of technological improvement. What else could possibly “best deserve” the title of revolutionary?