Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies

Volume: 2 – Issue: 3 – July - 2012

The Digital Communications Revolution

Vineet Kaul
DAIICT ( Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information, Communication & Technology)
University, India

Abstract
We are living at the crest of a communications revolution. Digital communications and
computers are having a tremendous impact on the world today. This article studies different
aspects of communication systems by covering some basic ideas, approaches, and
methodologies and gauges the degree of the current state of digital communication studies
together with its research into mass communication. This article explains the rationale for the
digitization and analyses the new ways of producing communication, the characteristics of
digital communication products and the consumption processes that they activate. Finally, an
analysis is done of the methodology and technology used in the creation of the multimedia
version of the exhibition, and the complexities of the fields of knowledge that are
fundamental for constructing a Theory of Digital Communication (TDC).

Digitization is creating a second economy that’s vast, automatic, and invisible—thereby

bringing the biggest change since the Industrial Revolution. This article concludes with a
Theory of Digital Communication that should resolve, from defining the study aims and the
most pertinent methodologies with the closest fields of knowledge with which to establish
strong epistemological relationships. Can such a transformation—deep and slow and silent—
be happening today?

Keywords: digital communication, mass communication, new media, hypermedia,

interactions, theory.

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1. Introduction
In conventional parlance, the current era in history is generally characterized as one of
globalization, technological revolution, and democratization. In all three of these areas, media
and communication play a central, perhaps even a defining, role. Economic and cultural
globalization arguably would be impossible without a global commercial media system to
promote global markets and to encourage consumer values. The very essence of the
technological revolution is the radical development in digital communication and computing.
The digital communications revolution may have begun in 1832 with the Morse telegraph,
but it is still a significant movement. It should be realized that digital innovations and
increasing transmission efficiencies are simply picking up speed with age. The Gutenberg era
is over. A new digital communications technology has emerged. An electronic superhighway
is beginning to girdle the globe as voice; video and data converge, bringing in their wake a
new basket of digital, multimedia and interactive communication technologies. The world’s
media, telecommunications and information technology industries are undergoing a period of
unprecedented and profound change. Dramatic technological advances combined with market
liberalisation and globalization have together engendered the .digital revolution. A dramatic
consequence of this is convergence, a ubiquitous but loosely defined term commonly
understood to denote the blurring of boundaries between the media, telecoms and information
technology sectors. There is broad consensus between academics and practitioners that
technological advances are bringing these sectors closer together and have the potential to
transform them entirely. It is because netification, computerization, and digitalization all
increase choices.

In days of yore, if you wanted to rise to the top of the social stratosphere, all you needed was
good penmanship and a horse to ride to on house calls. But alas, times have changed, and the
world of socialization is so much more confusing. Horses have been replaced with tweeting
birds (which, when malfunctioning, are substituted for a single whale), and penmanship has
been replaced by finger-tapping (and a resignation to the tyranny of autocorrect). Now we
live in a time where the mainstream has fallen behind the zeitgeist and the world has become
so wired together , so flattened that you can’t avoid seeing just where you stand on the planet-
just where the caravan is and just how far ahead or behind you are. The main reason for
today’s flattened planet, of course, is the internet. Within last 30 years, the emergence of
Internet as a media delivery system has transformed the structure and the economics of the

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media business throughout the world. The tremendous acceleration towards convergence of
communication and internet is brining the advancement of digital communication to its
extreme capacity. Convergence does not necessarily sound the death knell of age-old-
technologies. In fact, it leaves enough room for many technologies to co-exist and one will
not replace the other outright. This is because no one technology can meet all the
requirements of the market-place. Hence, each technology will find its niche and redefine
new and old classes of service and user terminals. In this context one can safely assume that
there will be a rash of new user terminals that will let us communicate in ways we dream.

In India the convergence has arrived faster than expected. The convergence would help in
web casting, video on demand, and internet via cable. The much awaited delivery of Internet
through cable network has already started in Delhi and Mumbai. The 'convergence' of
technologies has given birth to the prospect of multimedia services which will offer
interactive computer based applications that will combine text, graphics, audio and animation
features into a media experience for users. India, like any other developing country, has
always been very responsive to the latest developments in the media and the Indian
government has implemented various development plans as well as promoting human
development, especially in today’s environment of social and economic change. India has
also been particularly attentive to the rapidly changing world of information and
communication technology but at the same time is mindful of the effects of the information
gap or the digital divide in the Indian society.

2. Definition of Digital Communication

Definition (According to the "Digital Citizenship"
website [http://coe.k-state.edu/digitalcitizenship/index.htm%5D%29%7C
Digital communication: electronic exchange of information. One of the significant changes
with the digital revolution is a person’s ability to communicate with other people. In the 19th
century, forms of communication were limited. In the 21st century, forms of communication
have exploded to offer a wide variety of choices (e.g., e-mail, cellular phones, instant
messaging) The expanding digital communication options has changed everything because
people are able to keep in constant communication with anyone else. Anyone is afforded the
opportunity to access information anywhere and anytime. Unfortunately, many

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administrators, teachers, students, and the general public have not been taught how to make
appropriate decisions when faced so many different digital communication options.

3. Digital Communication Revolution

Today, the digital communications revolution is also changing the social landscape, with the
power to free millions of people from the marginalization that comes from having no voice in
global affairs. Power now rests with the people – and people now expect to be heard as a
right. The world’s media, telecommunications and information technology industries are
undergoing a period of profound change. A cocktail of closely interrelated developments
including the exponential growth of the internet and World Wide Web, digitisation, dramatic
reductions in the cost of computing power, deregulation and market de-regulation has
triggered the so-called .digital revolution. For sometime, scholars, educators, policymakers
and parents have been debating the implications of media and digital technology for literacy,
attention span, social tolerance, and propensity for aggression, among other concerns. This
communications tsunami is rolling our way and many of us are not sure what to do. We see
the tide going out fast and far. But standing on the beach and waiting for it to roar back in is
not an option.

Now digital communications is a field, which has overpowered all the communication and
the media fields. Digital communication, as the word itself explains, takes the use of digital
methodologies to communicate digitally or technically. Today, we have more ways to
communicate something that would have been unthinkable for previous generations.
Everybody is communicating from various multimedia tools like podcast, newscast, YouTube
and other multimedia tools. This is how multimedia benefit from the use of communication
technology.

Digital communications techniques and devices have been around for ages. The 1980’s
popularization of the computer and the birth of the Internet was a quantum shift in
communication and an evolutionary step for human society. The Digital Revolution marked
the latest stage of the information age. People in distant parts of the world now connect
instantly and information flow has shrunk the world. One of the biggest changes recently is
the interconnected immediacy of social networking. Digital communication systems are
ubiquitous in the modern world and comprise some of the most important technologies of

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21st-century society. Information and media literacy involves the ability to critically analyze
and evaluate information; determine what information is needed; and locate, synthesize,
evaluate, and use information effectively (Gunter, 2007; NCREL & the Metiri Group, 2003).
Since so much of today’s media is in visual form, students need visual literacy skills to
understand information that integrates images, video, sequences, design, form, symbols,
color, 3D, and graphic representations. They need to know how to interpret visual messages
and look beyond the surface to determine deeper meaning in what they see.

The rapid development of digital technologies has radically transformed ways of keeping in
touch with home cultures and diasporic networks. In each stage of technological
development, particularly within communication technology, there is a grander impact upon
cultural relationships that spreads across multiple disciplines – social, economical and
political. Within this relationship between these cultural characteristics it is often hard to
establish the sequence of their occurrence, or if they indeed occur simultaneously. When
considering this, the Andy Warhol quote “the perineal [cultural] question: Does art
imitate life, or does life imitate art?” (Irwin and Gracia 2006) has much relevance
to the temporal relationship to the technology coming first, or if the cultural need
or desire is present to inform the development of this technology. The same
could certainly be said about the impact that this type of technological
development relationship has politically and ultimately culturally. This poses the
question, does the communication technology come first, or does a change in the
political state occur to instigate the transformation of these communication
technologies and their techniques? Moreover, the notion of migration has undergone
significant shifts, coming to signify imaginaries on the move which are not necessarily linked
to geographical displacement. ‘The rise of digital communications and widespread access to
telecommunications and cables networks has a profound impact on virtually every aspect of
contemporary life. Society currently heavily relies on such digital equipment like cell
phones, desk computers, laptops, digital cameras, televisions, DVD players, blue ray players,
gaming systems, and digital music players. All of these devices can be used in conjunction
with one another and communicate to one another seamlessly. From advanced wireless
multimedia systems to simple integrated home networking, communications and networking
technologies are at the center of a continuing revolution. In addition to changing our daily

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lives, the transformation in digital communications also raises important economic, public
policy and societal questions.

The first signs were the rise of online journalism, where bloggers and crowd-sourcers worked
to fill the slack of mainstream media, much of which has been controlled through moneyed
interests. Many media entrepreneurs are now imbibing the online edition culture side by side
with hard copy versions. They do this in anticipation of the waxing strength of digital
communication, especially to conquer the fear that its full emergence would kill the
traditional media. They also train back up- capacity building; there is issue of robustness and
freshness of content etc and doing it with panache. To them, digital journalism has become a
new cash cow. In addition, the popularity of social websites like twitter and You Tube has
contributed to the eventual decline of many traditional newspapers and TV news. The new
digital press is more and more running roughshod over the old printing press, it is gradually
replacing much of the existing system of journalism which often filtered and slanted
perception toward particular commercial interests.

The internet is direct democracy and there’s no hierarchy and everyone can express
themselves. Although inequality of access to this technology is a problem, the Internet has
opened the door to an incredibly fast changing and relatively unmediated world. The Internet
is borderless. It can take one to virtually any corner of any street. The world has become
literally a click away. People who go online can have direct communication with those in
other countries through social networking on platforms such as Facebook and Internet Relay
Chat. This relates a person immediately to events happening around the world and to masses
of like-minded people.

The first ones to pioneer WikiLeaks on the web were hackers and programmers. They have
blazed through a wild cyberspace, not bound in the same way by the laws and traditions of
society. Through the wild currents of net-neutrality, the fresh thoughts and ideas of people
that are exiled from the mainstream find refuge in offshore digital asylums. In this domain,
one can explore and carve out a different identity. In relative anonymity, one with technical
savvy can connect, travel and embody wishes and ideals via digitized avatars and move freely
beyond prescribed societal roles. Despite increasing Internet surveillance and censorship,
many still feel safer finding like-minded people online to share their grievances toward

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government than through traditional structures. WikiLeaks put its roots down on this new
neutral infrastructure as the first stateless whistle-blower publisher that exists only on the
internet. By revealing government and corporate abuse, this organization has inspired people
world over to unite in a struggle for justice.

Recently, unions have lost power and become mostly window dressing for corporate
structures and a prop for this semblance of democracy. After having so much of their power
stripped away, Unions are joining the protesters and bypassing the traditional political
system. It is a new form of sit-in. Through encampment, people are starting to learn to live
together, creating an alternative society. Leaderless movements encourage each person to
become their own leader and really work with others. Decentralization means power is
rendered by the people back into the hands of the individual.

The rise of digital media has fundamentally changed the complex relationships between
brands and consumers. Media business is taking a new shape globally. Digital
communication is the in-thing now, and media entrepreneurs with foresight are not sleeping.
Owners of these media organisations do this in anticipation of the waxing strength of digital
communication, especially to conquer the fear that its full emergence would kill the
traditional media. Advertising was never a goal unto itself. Our real role has always been
creating competitive advantage for the brand and product through any means available. This
has traditionally meant creating differentiation for products and brands through creativity and
innovation in how we positioned and told stories around those products and communicated
their benefits. At it’s most blunt, it’s meant using reach and frequency to blast familiarity into
peoples’ brains with catchy slogans and jingles. And so from this starting point it makes
sense that we tend to focus on what we can achieve in digital through the lens of
communication alone. And while the latest digital technology offers potential for
unprecedented levels of consumer engagement, it also requires our industry to adapt rapidly
in order to exploit the opportunity successfully.

With the surge in popularity of digital communication comes a requirement for everyone to
use their literacy skills across a rapidly expanding range of contexts. Children growing up in
the digital age are very motivated by the possibilities of ICT .A myriad of innovative new
media organizations have sprung up to take advantage of the opportunities that stem from

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low-cost distribution networks. Over the last few years, the field of professional
communication has experienced a significant change: digital communication has become one
of the fastest growing and innovative sectors, with companies, NGOs and organisations
adopting digital tools on an increasingly large scale. The mushroom-like growth of new
media technologies is radically challenging traditional media outlets. In the face of such
seismic shifts and ruptures, the theoretical and pedagogical foundations of film and TV
studies are being shaken to their core. New Media demands a necessary rethinking of the
field. Modern world is dependent on digital communications and a new culture has emerged,
changing the way people exchange information. In the media industry, the former frontiers
between content producer, content bundler, content aggregator, distribution platforms and
home-based applications no longer exist. Everybody is now eating everybody's lunch, and
digitalisation has made many business models obsolete. Players wanting to stay in business
must adapt to the new environment and deliver added value to the final customer by offering
increasingly attractive products in a cost-effective way. They have to forge strong customer
ties and use data and algorithms efficiently to compete against the pure Internet players.

Today, thanks to new technologies and the digital communications revolution, educational
experiences and information are available to anyone with an Internet connection and a
computer or mobile device. These new technologies are transforming how we create, obtain,
use and share knowledge. As well, they are taking the power of knowledge to new heights.
By making knowledge widely accessible, new communications vehicles have created an
unprecedented global platform for innovation and ideas. Via the Web, innumerable bridges
are being built, linking “day-to-day” life to “university” life. People from all over the world
are connecting and contributing to our shared intellectual heritage like never before. With the
tools now at our disposal, we all have the opportunity to define and shape the kind of global
society we want to live in.It has been expected for some years now that the communication
technology of the Internet, and the accompanying development of digital repositories and free
electronic journals, should cause a digital revolution in scholarly communication digital
revolution in scholarly communication which would ease the scholarly communication crisis.
Since 1998 there has been widespread advocacy of a new electronic paradigm of scholarly
communication via free electronic journals, meaning those which are accessible via the
Internet, with no gates, tolls or registration. But the much awaited revolution has not yet
come.

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4. Theory of Digital Communication (TDC)

Communication and information theory are the theories of modern digital communication
systems, where "digital" means that we are transmitting information as symbols (or numbers)
from a finite alphabet (or limited set of numbers). Although physical signals are continuous
waveforms in time, the principles of communication theory, allows us to consider the
continuous waveforms we are transmitting and receiving over a noisy and interfering
communication channel (a telephone cable or the radio waves propagation of a mobile phone
antenna) as a digital system, randomly perturbing the information that we are transmitting.

Newspapers and magazines dominated the media in the second decade of the 20th century.
Tabloid or "jazz journalism", defined by its sensationalistic approach and emphasis on
scandal to sell newspapers, along with radio furthered the spread of media in America. The
diffusion of broadcasting in the second decade of the 20th century was followed by the
development of a theoretical corpus about 'new media' such as radio and, thirty years later,
television. At that time a large number of readers and anthologies examined the new
technological situation from a wide range of epistemological and theoretical angles. As a
whole, new media studies are characterized by an exceptional openness towards theory and
method and up until now it seemed impossible to discern any obvious canon guiding research
decisions in the field. This ‘experimental approach towards theory and epistemology’ (Sterne,
1999: 264) allows for valuable interdisciplinary cross-fertilizations that hold the promise of a
better understanding of evolving technological and social situations. Drawing on critical
theory, three meta-theoretical criteria concerning power, reason and closure are suggested
and applied in a review of common theoretical perspectives at use in the field. However, it
does not seem that the prevalence of this experimental approach in new media studies can be
ascribed to any larger meta-theoretical decision or discussion. While there certainly is some
overlap with the epistemological discussions of cultural studies and other academic traditions,
much of the field’s experimental character seems to be attributable to enthusiasm in the face
of the experimental possibilities of the new technologies themselves

Evolution is natural to the technology business. Taking Digital Media to the Next Generation
is no longer based on the broadcasting logic and has changed the limits and habitants of this
territory: Digital visual information processing and communication pervade nearly every
aspect of our daily experience, and have even invaded our pockets in the form of camera-

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equipped cell phones, PDAs and epistemological spaces. Considering the quick progress of
technological and financial consolidation in the new media sphere, these technologies’
experimental possibilities may not persist very much longer. In a climate that is generally
more hostile towards such characteristics, the need for an ‘experimental approach’ in
academia also would appear less self-evident. The risk that new media studies’ valuable
openness and social relevance will be compromised in such a scenario, therefore, has to be
countered by the development of a more explicit meta-theoretical corpus. However, along
with the maturing of the field, histories of the field (Silver, 2000) as well as topical,
theoretical and methodological meta-analyses have been developed (Kim and Weaver, 2002;
Silver, 2004; Stempel and Stewart, 2000), pointing towards a need for more conceptual
comparisons and evaluative analyses of the underlying theoretical approaches employed in
the field. The question is: What will be the operating system of next generation digital media
and who will support it, and can an active “ecosystem” be maintained that enables technology
companies to develop smart applications for it?

5. Digital or Hypermedia Communication

The advent of hypermedia space constitutes a qualitative leap in the ways that people seek,
access, produce, and react to information. Two applications were described for hypermedia
(Berk, & Devlin, 1991). First, they may serve as a thinking tool, to organize and facilitate
access to personal and known information; second it can be a medium by which the user
access information organized by others. The necessity to develop adaptative interface is
relevant mostly in the second type, because then the user is confronted to a vast set of
documents of which the structure and content is unknown. In this context, the function of the
hypermedia is to communicate, making the information accessible and useful to the user. To
understand the difference between presenting an information and making it accessible, it is
interesting to think of the interface as a dialog, where the information is exchanged in both
directions, where meta-communication and non-verbal cues serve as non-intrusive feedback
to guide the exchange, finally where the information is gradually adapted to the level of
competence and interest of the interlocutor.

Paradoxically, adding intelligence and control in the interface is contrary to the philosophy of
hypermedia which is supposed to give the user full control to explore the content at a given
moment. More so, an adaptative interface may be perceived by the user as unpredictable and

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incoherent, increasing his impression of disorientation. Therefore, it is important to design

the adaptation to make it both predictable and flexible to the user.

Most importantly, hypermedia space broadens access to the means of communication, since
it is obviously easier for average people to “produce” messages today in the era of mobile
devices and blogs than it was in the days of state-owned broadcasting, telephone landlines,
and the daily newspaper delivered to the door or purchased at the store. The new media
environment is therefore more participatory and network interactive communication systems
based on hypermedia produce a type of cultural product that is not read linearly; rather, it is
organized in a structure that is oriented towards connecting and integrating different pieces of
knowledge. They are different from approaches in which authorship and management are
centralized, as they develop processes of communication in which people participate, in
which the communicative materials can be "experienced." These systems bring culture closer
to what we might call the "open-ended" approach. As interactive hypermedia systems take an
increasingly prevalent role in the workplace, at home and on the web, their usability becomes
vitally important to meeting the expectations of users and fulfilling the promise integrating
technology into daily life. Quality and Communicability for Interactive Hypermedia
Concepts and Practices for Design explores ways to overcome obstacles to successful
communication from theories of communicability to the various levels of design and
integration.

Analog signals are extremely susceptible to interface and corruption from noise, aging and
corruption during copying much more than the digital media. The term “digital” seems
limited when defining the new types of 'interactive', 'multimedia' or 'networked'
communication because we can say that now, at the beginning of the 21st century, all
communication is digital to a certain degree. How will digital technologies change our culture
in the years to come? In what ways will they shape how we read and learn what we read and
learn, even if we read and learn?. Interactive media is the integration of digital media
including combinations of electronic text, graphics, moving images, and sound, into a
structured digital computerised environment that allows people to interact with the data for
appropriate purposes. The digital environment can include the Internet, telecoms and
interactive digital television. As it is not restricted by time and space, the development of
multimedia technology has facilitated direct contacts with customers and made processing

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and applications of content easy, thereby accelerating the social diffusion of multimedia
content.

Today media literacy has matured to a greater understanding of its potential, not just as a new
kind of "literacy" but more, as the engine for transforming the very nature of learning in a
global multimedia environment. After the invention of the printing press, it is the advent of
multimedia that has changed the way we learn and comprehend. Now is the time to make
media literacy education a national priority in advancing 21st century skills for a 21st century
world. Integration of multiple media such as visual imagery, text, audio, video, graphics and
animation together multiply the impact of the message. Multimedia differs fundamentally
from the conventional media like slides and films. While, conventional media are linear (one
event follows another in a sequence), multimedia is non-linear - it has the capacity for
branching in different directions and establishing linkages between different sections or
components of the programme. The non-linear attribute provides the end-user the luxury of
viewing the multimedia presentation at their convenience and pace.

New computer media, including multi-modal media, hypermedia, voice-into-text concurrent

interaction, and virtual reality, appear to have characteristics that may make them even more
distinctive. Multi-modal computer media should increase the bandwidth and, to a somewhat
lesser extent, the dynamism associated with correspondence and publishing media, thus
extending the possibilities associated with these media in the direction of both film and art
media and television. Hypermedia should have a similar effect in increasing the dynamism
and, to a lesser extent, the bandwidth, of these same media, thus pulling these clusters in the
direction of television and telephone media. Voice-into-text concurrent interaction should
increase the dynamism and, to a lesser extent, the bandwidth and audience sizes associated
with telephone and correspondence media, thus stretching these clusters in the direction of
face to face interactive media. Finally, the high bandwidth and dynamism associated with
virtual reality promise to stretch the limits of face to face interaction and create a new cluster
of interactive mass media in the empty space above face to face interaction. Thus, in the
wake of the advent of hypermedia, orthographers called for a reassessment of definitions
suggesting that the digital era is in some respects reminiscent of the pre-literate era, for the
storage, preservation and dissemination of knowledge “depends no longer on the actual
process of writing. Current hypermedia systems can best be defined as an amalgamation of

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hypertext and multimedia. While the hypertext data model enables this goal that is not true
for the data models of other media forms. In the same way, the concept of 'hypermedia' also
redefines the relationship between semiotics and mass communication theories. Finally, a yet
to be developed TDC should be able to exchange concepts and hypotheses with a still in
construction the labyrinth as a model of complexity: The semiotics of hypermedia.

Writing the Future

It is assumed that the future trends in digital communication will continue to be important
and digital literacy will continue to develop distinct .registers. Nothing could be more
obvious than the ways in which writing is changing. We only have to look around us at the
ubiquity of text messaging, the increasing dependence on e-mail as a form of communication
and the reach of web-based information and entertainment. The future of writing is closely
interwoven with the future of digital technology. In fact, when we look at current trends, four
tendencies seem to be emerging. These could be characterised as convergence, portability,
pervasiveness and transparency. Convergence refers to the capacity to integrate technological
functions in a single device. Hence, the mobile phone doubles up as camera, MP3 player and
so on – or the home media system deals with music, TV, telephonics and e-mail. The general
direction of convergence is to allow for access to multiple media from a single source.
Convergence pairs up with portability, because as devices become more compact and
wireless connection becomes more affordable and more ubiquitous, the possibilities of being
able to use all media, more or less at any time or place, increase. Pervasiveness suggests that
digital technologies will feature in more and more areas of everyday life, becoming even
more closely interwoven with the way we get things done. As this pervasiveness increases, it
is also likely that technological innovation will focus on making devices and their interfaces
more transparent – in ways that touch screens and desktop icons begin to suggest.

The spheres of telecommunications and broadcasting are rapidly evolving and converging
into a single world of communication. Navigating convergence, portability, pervasiveness
and transparency represent future trends and suggest that the devices we use to communicate
with may well take on new forms and incorporate new functions. Yet, although the ability to
combine and access media is likely to become much easier (and much faster) there is little to
indicate major changes that will threaten the centrality of written communication. In fact it
seems likely that digital literacy will become more significant and that the current tendency

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for it to develop distinct registers (such as those used in discussion board posts, instant
messaging, texting and so on) will continue. Building a flexible and intelligent educational
response to digital literacy then becomes important both from the point of view of valuing
children’s everyday digital experience and in terms of preparing them for the future.

This relatively brief exploration of digital communication raises some fundamental questions
about how we conceptualise literacy and literacy pedagogy. It challenges existing models and
definitions of what constitutes text and what it means to be a reader, confounding recent
attempts to simplify or reduce literacy to a set of basic skills and routines. Because of the
disruptive nature of digital literacy, debates such as these are likely to continue. But in the
meantime, researchers and educators would be well advised to begin to address these new
literacies.

We need a broader agreement about what we mean by digital literacy and place written and
symbolic representation. This will enable us to be more specific about the emergence of new
forms of synchronous and asynchronous communication, the changing nature of literacy and
the skills, understandings and attitudes that we will need to encourage in our schools. We
need innovative work in digital literacy in educational settings particularly to investigate the
implications of new forms of social networking, knowledge sharing and knowledge building.
And finally, because of the pervasive nature of digital technology, the commercial interest
that is invested in it and the largely unregulated content of Internet based sources, we also
need to begin to sketch out what a critical digital literacy might look like. There is, in short,
plenty to be done if we are to prepare children and young people to play an active and critical
part in the digital future.

6. Conclusion
Digital communication used to be limited only to people knowledgeable about it. It has now
become a part of daily life. More user-friendly programs have been developed. The price has
also become more reasonable such that users now have more chances to use them. As a
result, users’ skills have tremendously improved as well. In the 1990s, only trained experts
used graphic

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design programs but now, many ordinary users are knowledgeable about it because of
availability of information from technical books and the Internet. They can also receive
feedback from other users through the sharing of information on the Internet.

Professional education on graphic design programs is no longer a requirement to execute

graphic design. However, many are dependent only on private lessons while the average age
of the users continues to go down, meaning that young people are already into graphic
design. Further studies need to be undertaken for users who want to be more competent in
using the more complicated programs.

While it is still not entirely apparent how the thinking of digital natives is changing, new
technologies, when presented to teacher candidates in the context of their intended use, which
is to enhance the teaching and learning processes, seem to motivate, engage, and offer more
opportunities for self-directed learning and reflection. Such technologies provide avenues for
creativity and foster inclusion of 21st-century skills in teacher education curricula. When the
technology is already familiar and we employ these tools to challenge students to use critical
skills, we reap the benefits of teaching today’s students in their familiar spaces.

However, the development growth model is shaped like a snail shell, and digital technologies
have not been the silver bullet that promoted the leapfrogging of creativity in stagnating
countries. Information and communication technologies (ICT) should be considered as a
means of technological learning rather than the end of creativity development. The challenge
of strengthening stagnating Asian countries to become competitive and innovative nations
will continue until the next decade. Unless necessary steps are taken to improve technological
learning and local innovations in stagnating countries, their technological dependency will
increase and thus deepen the marginalization in the coming eras.

In addition, training programs must be made available to non-users to help them gain
knowledge on graphic design. This will prevent them from being alienated in the digital
world. This can be regarded as a good government policy especially for a society that now
has more senior citizens. Eventually, the average age of new learners will go down. I strongly
propose that there be a

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standard educational policy for popular computer programs. This will help more people
participate in digital communication easily.

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