Digitisation changes social landscape

The increasing digitisation of life has brought about drastic transformation in socio-cultural and economic landscape of Pakistan during the last two decades with exponential growth in use of electronic gadgets and tools of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs).

Therefore, if anything happens worth watching or reading in any part of the globe, it does not go unnoticed on social media. The Facebook and Whatsapp groups of friends, family members and colleagues have connected people virtually.

The IT has provided alternate means to almost everything from education to citizen-government interaction, economy to market-customer relations, socialisation to marketing, healthcare to banking sector, praying to mourning, greetings to happy birthday wishes, sports to entertainment, media to business, Google maps to webinars, YouTube Channels to online newspaper, e-commerce to online games, e-payment to online transaction, online shopping to digital tourism.

The digital journey gained momentum in Pakistan when people were restricted to their residences during the first and second waves of Covid-19 to overcome the spread of coronavirus.

A Rawalpindi-based software house, App Desk, CEO Muhammad Tanveer Khan said that technological transformation was inevitable in almost all walks of life.

He said, "The coronavirus pandemic has pushed us to learn more about the utility of modern-day technologies to cope with 21st century challenges."

Muhammad Uzair Khan, a social scientist and educationist has said that the traditional lifestyle would slowly be replaced by a digital lifestyle with online 'likes', 'views', 'shares', 'followers' and 'friends' in digits.

Replying to a question, Tanveer Khan said that the international companies were very serious about the online content on social media and YouTube for kids. He said: "In order to avoid negative repercussions, don't let your kids make unsupervised access to the internet."

Published in The Express Tribune, January 4^th, 2021.