It's pervasiveness started at the turn of the century. Up to the last decade of the twentieth century 1990 to the year 2000 the mobile phone was not very well known in our society. Telecommunication activities were mainly through the land phone at home which was in most cases padlocked and the key pocketed by the head of the house. Another channel was the telecenter now reduced to oblivion just like the land phone due to the advent of the mobile telephone that has gained unprecedented pervasiveness as it has become a very useful communication tool. It links us individually or in groups via WhatsApp for instance as messages can be transmitted to groups within seconds. Instead of rushing to the now defunct telecaster, one only stays at home and makes a local or international call comfortably. Text messages also facilitate communication and give us access to our contacts at any given time not to mention voice messages. Succinctly, the mobile phone has knitted us closer to one another and establishes it's indispensability. When we went to school in the late sixties, seventies and eighties, the mobile phone was a luxury. For our children and grandchildren, it is a necessity. It can even be used as a calculator in maths classes. It has proven to be an essential and indispensable tool.
The phone, because of its ubiquitous presence, has also facilitated the advent of different forms of saving or keeping money or transferring money at times proving to be a safe, fast and reliable as the traditional money transfer or banking institutions or systems: our notion of wallet as kids was a small leather wrapper where we could or rather where our parents could keep money and place them in their back pockets for men. Today, the wallet has transcended the boundaries of the back pocket and has gone electronic or digital. The Q wallet which is kept downloaded and installed inside one's phone, Afrimoney which us another form of wallet downloaded and installed in one-s phone and countless other forms of money-saving or transacting etc exist and can be downloaded and used for easing or facilitating money transactions all downloaded and installed and used according to one's tastes and satisfaction.
WAVE can be used within the comfort of one's home to send or receive money anywhere. It can be used at any time of the day or night to effect money transactions. It is so convenient and we heard people say they can go the market with their phones and pay for vegetables or settle with the fish monger or the butcher without the physical currency notes being produced for payment. What an innovation! This first quarter of the twenty first century has witnessed or ushered in a myriad innovations and I can only say that we, on the other hand, are benefitting from it on a large scale and if each quarter of a century of the remaining three quarters come with such technological and innovative strides then the telephone would have been the single most useful tool having the greatest influence in our lives than any other.
This quarter of a century, year 2000 to 2025 that has just elapsed can be seen to be analogous to the splitting of the atom, seventy-five years ago and the subsequent discoveries that ensued.
The phone, with its in built camera, is not just for journalistic purposes, taking pictures or snap shots and expediting them to other sources for other purposes and completely ignoring the humanistic aspect like going out to rescue a drowning soul or putting out the fire in a neighbour's house or separating two infants that are fighting with one affliction bodily harm to the other who is profusely bleeding and instead of making attempts at carrying out one's civic duty, one just takes his/her phone and snaps shots of the ongoing incident(s) and sends them for reporting elsewhere. The phone was not created for that.
The first quarter of the twentieth century, though an offshoot of previous innovations like, as already mentioned the splitting of the atom, has offered us opportunities to be comfortably couched on innovations that largely improve our life styles.
MY TAKE:
Sheikh Tijan MD Salla...
