Fuelled by technology: Fundamental changes in the way we do things this century

A year in the field of technology is a long time, considering the speed at which we are seeing advancements across the various spheres associated with technology.

So when we talk about the changes seen across a span of 15 years, we are not only looking at some path-breaking work, but also some fundamental changes in the way we do things. Here is a list of things that have been enabled thanks to advancements in technology over the last 15 years.

Mobile phones: One-trick ponies to road warriors

Early 2000s bring back memories of mobile phones which would resemble a school-time compass box. Nokia was the darling among mobile phone users, to an extent that it had become a verb. BlackBerry was a name to be reckoned with for business users. Java ruled the roost and Android, iOS and Windows Phone OS ecosystems did not even exist in the early 2000s. Touchscreen phones were a rarity and those with touchscreens always had a physical keypad in some capacity. Also phones were mostly used just to make calls and send SMSes. Oh and maybe play Snake!

Since Apple launched its iPhone, the form factor of the phone has moved on from a QWERTY keypad driven one to a touchscreen one. Phones have become slimmer, screen resolutions and battery capacities have increased, cameras on phones make entry level compact cameras seem to be lacking, dual SIM phones are the norm now. Indeed a lot has changed with phones and the way we communicate now with data being given prime importance over mere voice and SMS.

Music and Video: Physical media to streaming

Audio cassettes and Compact Discs (CDs) were the only way to consume music for the masses, with the audiophiles sticking to their Vinyl LPs. Three or Five CD stereo players or decks as they were popularly called required sufficient space in your living rooms with provision for the speaker and woofer sets. Napster, the website which transformed the way music would be consumed in the coming years had just about started in 1999. Apple released its iPod and the iTunes model of selling music (which let you buy a song instead of the entire album) started taking over the physical forms of media for music consumption. Coming to 2015, there are audio streaming services which ensure you have music on demand. For a monthly fee, you even get to download the music you want.

The same is true for our video consumption as well. VHS tapes and VCDs (and later DVDs) were all the rage back in the early 2000s. Now it is all digital and there are multiple online services as well as your Direct to Home services offering you the option of Movies on Demand.

Photography: Analogue to Digital

In the early 2000s photography involved getting the right kind of film for the occassion, installing it in your film camera, photographing, then awaiting the physical prints that were processed by the photography labs. There was no luxury of clicking selfies with the 36-roll limit that each film offered. Editing photographs on your own was out of the question, unless you owned a film processing lab. Digital photography which relies on an electronic sensor, started picking up pace in the early noughties. By 2004-2005 onwards, smartphones started sporting colour displays and some of the expensive ones also had a camera module on them.

Today, we cannot imagine a smartphone without a camera that would put to shame the most advanced compact digital cameras from the early 2000s. Like the famous quote goes, “The best camera is the one that is always with you.” Technology advancement in camera optics and sensors has made that a reality.

Booking on the go

Serpentine queues at the railway booking counters, being on call with travel agents to book your flight or train tickets was a common occurrence in the early 2000s. Making payments online was nowhere on the radar of internet users who were still coming to terms with the concept of broadband speeds. With the improvements in the online payment methods and ticket booking services to help you book not just train, bus and flight tickets, but also movie tickets online - it is only on the rarest occasions that we actually wait in a line to buy a ticket for the above services. The app ecosystem has made booking everything on the go a reality. Need to head to the airport and are tired waiting for a cab to take you there? Fire up Uber or Ola. Want to book a doctors appointment? Apps such as Practo help out with that. Want to fix that tripped switch at your home? Apps such as UrbanClap will help you out. Hell, even your grocery shopping is taken care of now by apps such as Big Basket, Grofers and so on.

Banking

Banking in the early 2000s meant going to a bank, filling out forms just to withdraw cash or deposit a cheque. If you were staying in a different location from your bank’s home branch, you had to wait for days before you could transfer or receive money. ATMs were few and did not have as many services as you get today. But with the centralisation of banks (connecting banks online) as long as you are transacting within a same bank, irrespective of your location, money transfer is immediate. Online security mechanisms have matured and there are many checks and balances in place, that ensure that you do not hesitate to do online banking transactions. Mobile banking applications are helping out further with banking on the go. In fact in this year itself we have seen more mobile wallets than ever before, which give you an incentive to pay via these apps.

Government going paperless

Doing anything remotely related with government applications was one task you prayed you never had to do. We all have memories of waiting endlessly in government offices only to be told that we need to get a physical attested copy of one document in triplicate and so on and so forth. Using ‘Agents’ to help us with applications processing (at a premium) even though we could easily fill out forms, just to bypass the headache of doing the rounds of government offices, was a norm rather than an exception. But off late we have been seeing almost all of the government services going online - and you can make applications from the comforts of your home. Want to apply for passport? No sweat, just fill out an online form, keep your documents ready and appear at the regional passport office on the date and time which you get. Want to pay your electricity bills? Do it online. Want to file your income tax? You can do that online as well. India is also one of the few large countries which has migrated from ballot paper to Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) during state and national elections. Our Aadhaar unique identification project is the largest of its kind anywhere in the world, to get all the residents of our country on record. Thanks to this, you no longer need to have multiple address proofs. With the ongoing Digital India initiative, the upcoming years should see more things going online, with faster turn-around time.

Ease of publishing/creating content

Early 2000s were the Web 1.0 era, where you had static web pages, videos that would take ages to load and the only opportunity to upload content online would be when you were sending attachments along with your mails. With the popularisation of the Web 2.0 era sometime in 2004, user generated content suddenly got a shot in the arm. ‘The World is Flat,’ explained Thomas Friedman in his book of the same name and with Web 2.0, internet users went from being just consumers to content producers. Eventually products and services such as YouTube, Flickr, social networks such as Orkut, Facebook, Twitter and so on carried on the trend and made the internet a two-way communication tool. Unlike in the early 2000s, an upcoming author can self publish his or her book; filmmakers and photographers can make use of platforms such as YouTube, Flickr, Instagram and so on to popularise their work; blogs have made many legacy media outlets redundant; collaborative work across geographies is not an issue anymore and much much more.

Digital Storage

I still remember the first computer I had purchased - it came with a grand 4GB of total storage! Colourful 3.5-inch floppy disks which would store a total of 1.44MB of data were carried around to transfer data at the time. Hard drive capacities increased incrementally over the years and USB 2.0 flash drives made floppy discs irrelevant. Now a microSD card, the size of your nail can store enough data than a truck full of 3.5-inch floppy discs.

Televisions

TV screens meant CRTs and unlike the slim TVs that we see today, back in the early 2000s having a fat TV with the latest gadgetry in terms of sound system within the TV package itself was par for the course. Cable TV was still analogue and Direct to Home players were yet to make an appearance, so it was quite normal for reception to be peppered with static. TV screen sizes were limited to around 29-inches or 32 inches. With advancements in the LED and OLED systems today, TV screen can be as thin as 9mm and sizes can go over 100-inches diagonally. Not to mention, high resolutions, curved TV displays, smart TV components and so on. TVs have certainly changed the way the living room is designed over the years.

Fitness tracking

The only way you could track how much you have run is if you had access to a high end gymnasium with the state-of-the-art treadmill. Fitness tracking was not even a buzzword in the early 2000s. Fast forward to today, when you have fitness trackers to track how much you have run, what’s your speed, how many calories you have burnt, how long you have slept - how much of that sleep is deep sleep, what is your active heart rate and so on and so forth. Fitness trackers have become as ubiquitous as watches on your wrists.

Activism

When one talks about democratic protests and activism, images of crowds holding banners in city squares, candle light marches, are some of the images that come to mind. But just a couple of years ago, we saw a sort of activism that would never have been possible in the early noughties. Arab Spring in the middle-eastern countries has got about a regime change. Online activism paired with the right amount of offline protests has been the pioneer in lot of successful protests we have seen over the last couple of years - be it the Egypt elections, Occupy Wall Street movement, Candle light vigils after 26/11 attacks and so on — all have the social media to thank for garnering and amplifying support. Things such as Right to Information act, online petitions via sites such as Change.org and the rise in citizen journalism are more factors that have lead to an informed citizenry which will not take any bullshit lying down.

Check out Firstpost’s collection on how the past 15 years transformed sports, entertainment, technology and more in F.Rewind