Impacts brought by the apparent reliance on digital technologies due to COVID-19
After listening to the below podcast from the Guardian, as a human geographer, I am interested in the status quo of more globalization and the impact brought by technological reliance. In times with the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in the early 2020s, strict and frequent lockdowns have put limitations on human activities. With such a large-scale and uncontrollable spread of infectious disease, a revolution of technology is caused by more reliance on them, resulting in diverse and widespread global impacts to the people living in this ‘Global Village’.
When COVID-19 spreads, there are massive people changing their mode of contact to online. According to the discussion in the podcast, it has been observed that a majority of people prefers meetings in person in the past. Many of them refuse to use digital technologies for meeting anyone, no matter its advantage of convenience. But during the COVID pandemic, the lockdown policies made human contact face-face impossible. They have been forced to use online meeting software, the Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, for example, to bridge the gap between abnormal and normal life. They bring all types of human contact online, from commercial conferences to personal meetings, replicating human activities back to possible. When time continues, the advantages of digital meetings are demonstrated to people after they experienced frequent online meetings. They have to get used to and tend to rely on digital technologies even after lockdown, for reasons like comfort and convenience. Therefore, it is predicted that the mode of human contact may be changing to online and face-face mixed in the post-COVID 19 periods (The Guardian, 2020). The mixed-mode education is an example, teaching and learning are getting used to online mode, which many universities worldwide are adopting after the lockdown period in the 2020s.
In fact, the increasing reliance on digital technologies may have boosted the efficiency of different industries. The trend of more ‘work from home’ increases the accessibility and diversity of the workplace. Staff can receive orders, join conferences and work in any place, even in their living places, making communication and working procedures more efficient.
The impacts of the ‘work from home’ culture involve both ‘local’ and ‘global’. Locally, it reduces commuting and transport demand in cities, especially in megacities like London where residential suburbs are common. Local urban problems such as traffic congestion can be relieved in many countries. Globally, when it comes to multinational enterprises, management and idea exchange are more common to do remotely. Globalization is enhanced as multinational enterprises can be set up easily, and the information exchange can be speeded up by the increasing technological reliance. Air transport demand reduces as workers are not required to travel between headquarters and manufacturing plants in other countries. In the long run, carbon reduction is possible which can slow down climate change, but not by much (Tollefson, 2021).
More data collection of governments across the globe is also enabled by technology. More commonly, governments are now using mobile networks to release information to the general public and get new types of data. For example, under the data collection agreements made by governments and network providers during the COVID-19, they are able to collect network usage patterns in different locations for assessing the effectiveness of policies like social distancing (The Guardian, 2020). But this raises concerns about people’s privacy globally. In fact, many private companies are interested in these data, especially for advertising purposes. If these data are leaked out to the public or being hacked by hackers, the result will be catastrophic as it involves much personal information.
Although there are many advantages brought by technological reliance, the inequalities of technology access and innovation across the globe have limited some countries from receiving these benefits. Research conducted by internet geographer Mark Graham shows that internet penetration is the highest in the world’s economic cores, with more than 90% of their population having access to the internet. But the Global South is the opposite, internet penetration is the lowest in Africa, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, and in parts of Asia where the level of economic development is low (Straumann, 2018). In other words, not all countries have arrived at the stage of postmodernity. The economic inequality between the global North-south Divide will be intensified under the technological reliance in the Global North, as the Global South are still facing difficulties such as inadequate capital and technological resources in replicating the economic activities by the use of technology, while the Global North can remain their multiplier effect on economic growth.
In this short passage, I have briefly summarised the potential impacts brought by the increasing technological reliance. It creates a huge shift of human behavior which leads to both positive and negative concerns globally, from economic activities to even social, political, and environmental sectors in and across countries, which differs between locations with different levels of network coverage and digital access under the problem of the global digital divide.
References
The Guardian, 2020. ‘From Houseparty to Zoom: our digital lives in lockdown’. [podcast] Today in Focus. Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2020/apr/01/from-houseparty-to-zoom-our-digital-lives-in-lockdown>.
Tollefson, J., 2021. ‘COVID curbed carbon emissions in 2020 — but not by much’. [online] nature. Available at: <https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00090-3>.
Straumann, R., 2018. ‘Who can access the internet?’. [online] Geonet.oii.ox.ac.uk. Available at: <http://geonet.oii.ox.ac.uk/blog/who-can-access-the-internet/>.
