Information Society: A review from the future

 

    As I could read from the 2004 Information Society Report to the Parliament of Finland by Pekka Himanen (Link here) there were a point of view really well based on creativity and development. Also I can say that it was objectively optimistic and with a very good future projection refered to all the area that surrounded our society in the 2004. But lets see if the model proposed has been effective or not and if the ideas mentioned about the welfare policies and society have been accomplished.

    There were a list of trending topcis about global challenges which some of them have been fulfilled such as increasing international tax competition, the new global division of labour, population ageing, increased pressures on the welfare state, the rise of bio-industries,  regional concentration, a deepening global divide and even the spread of a “culture of emergency”; this means that the review made on 2004 has been well done in a futuristic view. It is true that some of these trending challenges are still rising so we can say that maybe in 17 more years there will still be with us.

    What is really interesting is the way of how they described the global competition models between USA, EU, ASIA and the rest (less developed countries or association of countries), for example for USA neoliberalism which is still rising in a matter of freedom, is the most powerful economical countries, militarily really powerful it fits the description of nowadays but we can say that now the Asian model has been balanced in an economical and military way, maybe not in a developed society of freedom but still a huge potential industry attracting companies due to the lower taxes and productivity policies than in other countries. EU has it has been described in  the review it is a welfare state and dependent from creative tools in order to maintain the welfare, either way the “Finnish model” (EU) has experienced a good development in areas such as technology, social interaction and polotical management. So in this way I don't think that EU is still stagnated, maybe a bit due to the Covid-19 crisis that has affected the american and european model in various ways.

    Creativity and development comes togheter so there is also in the review an interesting way of analyzing the foreing migration into the EU countries but we can say that in the ones that have more organised structures of politics, efficiency in the inustrial areas and social welfare taking care on their employees has gained a lot of foreing population for example Germany is the leader of Europe and it is because of the well develpoment in the important areas that involves a society of welfare (industry, education, sanitary system, strong govern and concerned politics). 

In my opinion the review of 2004 has been really interesting in a way of a base to develope another futuristic review of which challenges we will face now and what is the key of everything is creativity. 

IRC (Internet Relay Chat)

 

    Nowadays we are used to communicating in real time via the Internet, using instant messaging services such as WhatsApp or audio and video streaming services such as Facebook chat or Skype. Just 25 years ago the origin of all these services was born, a protocol known as Internet Relay Chat, that is, IRC.

    IRC started as a project that came from Jarkko Oikarinen in August 1988 while working at the University of Oulu in Finland. It was 25 years ago when Oikarinen wrote the code for the first version of the IRC server.

    It was an extremely innovative protocol for the time, a service that allowed real-time communication over the Internet (chat) either in channels that allowed interaction between several users or through private conversations between two users with the added bonus of being able to exchange files and send them to other users.

But how this has affected our lives? Actually this programe was so used when the cybercafes started to appear. But when Meseenger was released then IRC decayed from it's popularity.

Anyway, Jarkko Oikarinen currently works at Google and, curiously, still linked to communications via the Internet since Sweden is part of the team working on Google Hangouts, so we can say that the IRC base is still alive in our lives such as Google Hangouts.

2 Interesting Technologies (Obsolete and not)

IRC (Internet Relay Chat)

IRC was created by Jarkko Oikarinen in August of 1988 it was a boom in Internet.

The first form of communication in real time that became popular on the Internet, the famous chat. The best way to meet people with your interests or in your area without getting up from your chair. There was no portal that did not have its chat, and IRC servers sprung up everywhere. 

Unfortunately among modern social networks and instant messaging programs they ended up killing him, but surely you still have good friends from a channel. 

Webcam!

The first webcam was released in 1991 by some lazy students from Cambridge university that wanted to check the coffee levels before going to buy them by then it was a huge progess. 

It is interesting how this was done and why and now how we are using them almost every week due to work stuff.

3 Flopped out IT ideas

 I would like to start with one that contains the flop verb form in it's title: Flappy Bird. 

This is an app  game which was developed around the 2013 by  Nguyễn Hà Đông. It started raising the number of people playing it and a year after, it became super trending that much that it was considered dangerously addictive. In fact the creator felt guilty because of this particular characteristic which made it popular so he deleted it from the App Stores and remove it form the market . 

The next failure I want to talk about is Vine (The entertainment network where videos and personalities get really big, really fast. Download Vine to watch videos, remixes and trends before they blow up.Vine online site)

It consisted on creating videos that last for so little, exactly for 7 seconds. It was created on 2012 and Twitter bought it in the same year. It became so popular and actually was a good idea that even today there are some apps which are similar to it such as Tik Tok. I even found it even usdefull when I was little actually it worked so good to share your life in videos with your friends and have fun. But what happened to it? Why such a good idea got cancelled? Well the first and most basic reason was the money. The cretors and owner didn't want Vine to be monetized a fact that Twitter was not going to support due to financial problems that Twitter was facing around 2016. So from the popularity to the shut down in 4 years. Well at least it was fun for those years.     

Finally the one an only for me is the Windows 8. 

Released on October of 2012, it was a new idea from Microsoft to introduce a new software, actually I need to say that it was needed because the company needed to do something due to the incoming market of tablets. So they tried to make an OS similar to a tablet one but for PC. But why it didn't worked? It sounds clever at least.

Let's just say that it was risky. The users found it strange liike it didn't seem as a PC system, like if you want a tablet system format then just buy it but if you buy a PC then you want it to be a proper PC which it didn't seem as it. So Microsoft needed to fix it and this is why they released Windows 10 in 2015 as a proper PC software which was and is still more solid as a software idea for computers.  

https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/20/21029499/decade-fails-flops-tech-science-culture-apple-google-data-kickstarter-2010-2019

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flappy_Bird

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vine_(service)#:~:text=On%20October%2027%2C%202016%2C%20Vine,discontinuing%20the%20Vine%20mobile%20app.&text=Vine%20executives%20and%20co%20founders,Twitter's%20discontinuation%20of%20the%20service.