Technologies propel the society forward to ride on the digital wave. What is pivotal for organisations to progress in a digital world is that they must be constantly manage to grasp the trend of technological developments and stand at upfront of digital wave in order to stay relevant to the market.
Digitalisation transforms and benefits the society in an unprecedented way. It connects those unconnected (Kemp, 2020). Take education as an example, digitalisation facilitates distant learning and allows online education to bloom and benefit the society at large by disrupting geographic restrictions. It can alter the student population drastically by benefiting those in remote districts which are normally barred from attending classes personally. It also allows educational service to proceed undisrupted even under extreme social conditions. Like under Covid-19, online teaching is essential to make course delivery feasible.
What comes along with the progressing of the digital era is the increasing influence of social media, particularly among the younger generation. Social media platforms like Facebook, Pinterest and Sina Weibo has been enjoying exponential growth in recent years. Marketers can now use Facebook to reach one-third of all the world’s adults aged 18 and above, and more than half of all the world’s adults aged 18 to 34. The total number of active users of Pinterest has grown by 29 percent over the past year. The platform has attracted more than 70 million new monthly active users (MAUs) over the past 12 months and the MAU figure reaches 322 million at the start of 2020. MAU for Sina Weibo should also pass the half-billion mark very soon (Kemp, 2020).
Along with the prevalence of social media that comes with digitalisation, organstions needs to deal with technological challenges. Among which, privacy is a major concern that organisations have to dealt with carefully. The latest research finds that people are more concerned about privacy issue than ever before. GlobalWebIndex reports that 64 percent of internet users are worried about how companies use their data, up from 63 percent at the start of 2019 (Kemp, 2020). In future, organisations must look into online security issues prudently and invest in online security infrastructure to protect users’ privacy during transmission. For instance, users should be free from the worry that their privacy will be intruded by hackers or via other data leakage channels when attending online education or interacting with the organisation via social media.
References
EDUCAUSE. (2020). 2020 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report™ | Teaching and Learning Edition. EDUCAUSE. https://library.educause.edu/resources/2020/3/2020-educause-horizon-report-teaching-and-learning-edition
Kemp, S. (2020). Digital 2020: 3.8 Billion People Use Social Media. Digital 2020 Global Digital Overview. https://wearesocial.com/au/blog/2020/01/digital-2020-3-8-billion-people-use-social-media