Page 112 - The Fourth Industrial Revolution

Shift 2: Our Digital Presence

The tipping point: 80% of people with a digital presence on the internet
By 2025: 84% of respondents expected this tipping point will have occurred
Having a presence in the digital world has evolved rapidly in the past 20 or more years. Just 10 years
ago, it meant having a mobile phone number, email address and perhaps a personal website or a
MySpace page.
Now, people’s digital presence is regarded as their digital interactions, and traces through a multitude
of online platforms and media. Many people have more than one digital presence, such as a Facebook
page, Twitter account, LinkedIn profile, Tumblr blog, Instagram account and often many more.
In our increasingly connected world, digital life is becoming inextricably linked with a person’s physical
life. In the future, building and managing a digital presence will become as common as when people
decide how to present themselves to the world everyday through fashion, words and acts. In that
connected world and through their digital presence, people will be able to seek and share information,
freely express ideas, find and be found, and develop and maintain relationships virtually anywhere in
the world.

Positive impacts
– Increased transparency
– Increased and faster interconnection between individuals and groups
– Increase in free speech
– Faster information dissemination/exchange
– More efficient use of government services

Negative impacts
– Privacy/potential surveillance
– More identity theft
– Online bullying/stalking
– Groupthink within interest groups and increased polarization
– Disseminating inaccurate information (the need for reputation management); echo chambers 78
– Lack of transparency where individuals are not privy to information algorithms (for
news/information)

Unknown, or cuts both ways
– Digital legacies/footprints
– More targeted advertising
– More targeted information and news
– Individual profiling
– Permanent identity (no anonymity)
– Ease of developing online social movement (political groups, interest groups, hobbies, terrorist
groups)

The shift in action

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