[W Forum] The Analog Information Age

The advent of smartphones, led by the iPhone, has transformed the industrial landscape over the past decade. Data communication, in other words the internet, has become the foundation of all industries, bringing fundamental changes to existing industries and social environments. Not only the way we obtain information but also the way we live our lives has undergone significant change.

In today's era flooded with smartphones, the concern is less about obtaining information and more about how to use the unfiltered, indiscriminate information in a useful and beneficial way. We started using smartphones for convenience, but paradoxically, we are experiencing wasting time in a sea of indiscriminate information and heaps of information garbage caused by smartphones.

Steven Jobs, who created the iPhone, was actually a person who liked analog culture. After work, Jobs listened to music on LPs rather than digital formats at home, and he strictly prohibited his children from using IT devices like smartphones. This was to prevent addiction to IT devices and to educate character through analog methods.

If digital is convenient, analog is inconvenient. Analog requires more effort and physical activity. You cannot find the traces of time passed, like the fingerprints on bookmarks, in e-books. Unlike digital devices that operate with the push of a button, LPs require placing the needle and adjusting the sound, and as time passes, the sound gains a nostalgic quality. Analog offers more emotional richness to human sentiments. If digital is the world of the mind and ease, analog is the world of emotion and the body.

In the internet world brought by smartphones, we need to seriously ask ourselves whether we are using our life time meaningfully. Are we spending more time habitually reacting to stimuli than thinking with our brains? Are we losing the beauty and charm of real life by wandering the internet world out of curiosity? Are we losing the time for inner reflection in the fun of showing off ourselves in the virtual world?

Then, what do the current generation addicted to smartphones and the internet need? If the role of IT devices including smartphones has been to provide more information and convenience, what we need now might be smart devices with filtering functions that provide more beneficial things for human beings. It is not easy to define what is beneficial and harmful, but at least it would cultivate healthy habits for ourselves.

Until now, the era of information communication has been an era of quantity based on search. In the future, it can be said to be an era of quality data communication based on big data and analog sensibility. If the first generation of data communication industry liberated humans from the difficulty of operation and produced massive amounts of information, the second generation can be seen as a human-centered data communication industry based on big data and analog sensibility. The vision of the second generation industry is to recognize the convenience and harmfulness of IT devices and self-evolve, just as Steve Jobs opened the smartphone era, to be reborn as a human-centered data communication era.

How much consensus do we have on the humanities and technology regarding the second generation data communication industry? The future world requires science and technology to be the servant of humans for true well-being of human life, not humans struggling to adapt to the advancement of science and technology. The leadership of the new data communication industry will lie in insight from the perspective of integrating analog and digital, setting direction as the essence of humanity, discovering one’s own unique code that cannot be replicated, and nurturing it.

Seunghee Jeong, CEO of G-Mobi Korea

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.