The financial system across the world is at a cusp of another major transformation due to innovations of information technology called fintech and the spread of Internet. In his book Fintech Future, Sanjay Phadke has very elaborately and logically explained the changes that are brought about by the fintech revolution in different parts of the world.
Recent headlines on global internet companies have been far from positive. Internet technology companies have been accused of a long list of excesses with immesuarble harm to their users and society at large. These accusations include outright fraud, issues of privacy, censorship, platforming hate speech, snooping on activists by governments, the weakening of democratic institutions, the spread of manufactured fake news, and throttling of market competition.
Written over three decades, Africa 2.0: Inside a Continent’s Communications Revolution by Russell Southwood could well be an ethnographic book. Southwood takes us through the journey of Africa since 1986 when all of sub-Saharan Africa had fewer phone lines than Manhattan in New York. If someone in Africa wanted a fixed-line telephone connection in 1986, it used to take a minimum of two years.
A new report by the Groupe Speciale Mobile Association (GSMA), an association representing the mobile industry and its operators, on the state of mobile internet indicates an increasingly connected, if still woefully unequal, world.The report reveals that as of the end of 2021, 55% of the world’s population, or 4.3 billion people, were using mobile internet.
In the book The Modem World, Driscoll tells a coming-of-age story of the internet—he uses a crisp yet vivid narrative voice that has the potential to hook a techie and non-techie alike. The book fills an important gap in the cultural memory and theoretical literature of the internet by paying close attention to the Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems (BBS).
As a child of the 80s the concept of how we consider and view privacy, I am increasingly realizing, is outdated and ‘so very last century’. As of this year I have lived more than half my life in this century and yet as technology consumes and propels most aspects of our lives I still think the right to privacy, intimate or otherwise, cannot and should not change.