The new digitization. More digital hours and exponential minutes
We are in a new time, a time of uncertainty, and intense disruption. A kind of VUCA squared or cubed. An n-dimensional VUCA …
A time adapted to an evolution of the type of geometric progression, following the Laws of Moore or Metcalfe, to configure the exponential advance of the digital world.
An evolution that is not only technological. And that permeates the culture and impacts the economy. Just have to see how the ranking of the companies with the most capital has changed.
We are in the era of the Tech Giants.
And suddenly, in an instant, due to something that a priori is not very digital and is as small as a virus, it has accelerated even more.
Many barriers have fallen from one day to the next, and now almost everyone telecommutes.
Time and space have changed to another dimension, both personally and in companies. And, the image of a meeting hour that comes to mind becomes very digital…
The Cloud, which advanced and made these Tech Giants grow, has now established itself as a necessary savior of companies in the pandemic.
For this reason, the recent evolution of companies like Amazon or Zoom has been spectacular and also exponential, since otherwise, no one would have imagined headlines like
“Zoom is already worth more than the seven largest airlines”
Unfortunately, as there is a positive exponential effect for some digital companies, there is also a negative exponential effect for the classic analog travel companies.
There is a kind of “hole” that, in some way, connects with the rise of digital.
Probably, this “push” that the COVID has given to Digital will be “softened” when the pandemic is overcome by having a vaccine and treatment. And, it will be necessary to urgently recover the “lost time” and make the economy resurface.
Hopefully, the recovery can also be “exponential.”
But the rollout of new networks like 5G, ushering in the “millisecond age,” and the explosion of IoT, and AI, and data, will most likely allow the geometric digital progression to continue and accelerate even further. The minutes will give a lot of themselves, “stretching” the seconds and taking advantage of every millisecond.
As Einstein said, time is relative. And, we can perceive that relativity in the digital world about the information handled per unit of time.
With 5G, the speed of the mobile network will multiply by 100, generating an exponential growth of information circulating through the networks, as shown in this figure of the expected evolution in global mobile traffic, expressed in Exabyte / Month (an Exabyte is 1,024 Petabytes, or on the order of 1 Million Terabytes).
And a large part of that information will be on video and generated on Social Media Platforms, in addition to the one generated by the development of the IoT and other new technologies, such as virtual and augmented reality.
According to Metcalfe’s Law, the value of networks is the square of the connected and active users, and hence its exponential nature.
The evolution of network users does not stop growing. And in some cases, such as Instagram, WhatsApp, or Tik Tok with a very steep slope.
After this “pilot” with a pronounced immersion in digital due to Covid19, it seems evident that we have to prepare for even deeper immersion in digital.
With more digital hours and some “exponential” minutes (with 60,000 milliseconds).
In fact, in 2020, there have already been quite a few changes and increases in the “internet minute”.
And, we can be sure that the infographics of the coming years will surprise us with changes and new applications that we have not thought about, or perhaps very vaguely.
