User:Dude98276/sandbox

Digitalization is the process in which aspects of social life are restructured around digital communication

As such interactions move away from analog technologies (snail mail, telephone calls) to digital ones (email, chat, social media), both work and leisure domains become digitalized.

Not to be confused with:

Digitization which refers to the process of converting information into a digital (i.e. computer-readable) format Digital Transformation refers to a company adopting a digital technology.

History
The world's digital footprint has increased exponentially. Today, global IP traffic is almost 150,000 GB per second compared to 100 GB per day three decades ago.

Digital Revolution
The Digital Revolution refers to the advancement of technology from analog electronic and mechanical devices to the digital technology available today. The era started to during the 1980s and is ongoing.

Internet
The internet, first developed in the 1960s, widespread use of internet has significantly increased the speed at which data and information can be transformed and shared.

During the late 1990s, it was estimated that traffic on the public Internet grew by 100 percent per year, while the mean annual growth in the number of Internet users was thought to be between 20% and 50%.

Today, we can send data from one end of the world to the other in a matter of seconds, make online presentations, live in parallel “game worlds,” and use pictures, video, sound, and text to share our real lives, our genuine identity.

Examples in Society
Modern examples include: Electronic Mail, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing, and etc.

Business
Digital technologies can make transactions and interactions observable and controllable in real-time, which ultimately lowers transaction costs as well as costs of production

- Google Chief Economist Hal Varian

Digitalization improves an existing business process or processes but doesn’t change or transform them. That is to say, it takes a process from a human-driven event or series of events to software-driven.

Education
Services such as Zoom, a videoconferencing software, have changed the way eduction is received in the modern era. The COVID-19 Pandemic shut down many schools, which lead to a substantial amount of education institutions to utilize remote learning software in order to combat social distancing.

Concerns
There have been many concerns and issues regarding digitalization.

Shifts to digitalization, such as in telehealth, while presenting many positive aspects, expose a persistent digital divide that leaves socially and technologically marginalized populations – rural, immigrant, uninsured, low-income, digitally illiterate, and older populations – with even more limited access to essential services.

Some digital processes remain deeply entangled with physical processes and are difficult, if not impossible, to digitalize.

The expansion of internet services is consuming about one-tenth of global electricity production. The shift to cloud is scaling up energy consumption and carbon emissions, including from coal-fired power plants. One study determined the annual carbon emissions of creating crypto-currencies at between 22 and 29 million tons of CO2 – the equivalent of a small country like Jordan.