A brief histroy of digitalisation
Digitalization is the most imporant trend that is transforming both, society and companies on a global scale.
This is due to the fact that, digitalization removed the locality of information. Removing their locality made it possible for flows of information to become non-linear. That means information is now simultaneously flowing around between many points (e.g., computers).
At this point, the question might arise as to what digitalization means. Digitalization is the transformation of analog values into digital values, which are then stored/used utilizing technical systems. The most well-known of such technological systems is the digital computer.
Digital computers in the traditional sense were large mainframe computers that were first constructed in the 1940s. The German Konrad Zuse deserves special mention here as he developed the first functional program-controlled (mainframe) computer, the Z3, already in 1941. Against this background, Zuse is considered the inventor of the modern digital computer.
In the 1970s, the personal computer (PC) and the technologies associated with it became a key pillar of our modern society. Due to the compactness of the PC, digitalization managed to penetrate all arenas of our lives.
At the same time, the production sector was permanently restructured by the deployment of microchips, which in turn lead to a wave of rationalization. For example, industrial robots massively replaced production workers at car manufacturing sites. However, especially in the case of physically demanding or monotonous tasks, digitalisation can therefore bring advantages as it facilitates these tasks. At the same time digitalisation lead to the establishment of new economic fields and new jobs such as software developer.
In the mid-1990s, the digitalisaton process reached its next milestone: The spread of the Internet, which serves the world as a highway for communication and information.
Today the benefits of digitalization are most visible when looking at the advances in medical technology, such as computer tomography and AI-diagnosis. At this point also the area of education deserves special mention. Free online courses that are made possible by the rapid spread of digital technology allow people all over the world to expand their knowledge.
On the other side, emerging trends such as the spatial and temporal resolution of workplaces, facilitated by digitalization, harbor new challenges. In this regard, a general “flexibilization” of working contracts and reachability are particularly noteworthy.
Serious problems also arise with the proliferation of surveillance programs, some of which have been prominently demonstrated by Edward Snowden. (e.g. PRISM)
Finally, digitalization and, in particular, the associated volume and speed of information are increasingly changing our society and lives.