THE NEW CONNOTATION OF LITERACY-DIGITAL AWARENESS

The past two months have been that of severe dis-ruption and change. The COVID 19 spurt and the subsequent lockdowns of various degrees across the world have forced us to explore new working models and also sweat every idea we had of remote working. Plugging into office networks on remote lines, home networks, multiple devices has thrown up opportunities and challenges of its own. Our old definition of literacy was the ability to read and write in a language – the presumption being that this would give us access to education, communication, reading, general information and build our thinking capabilities. But, today, some of it have no meaning unless we are able to access an electronic equipment like a phone or a laptop or desktop and a handheld mobile phone!

- Rajesh Nair

The spotlight is clearly on the gargantuan topic of ‘Digital’. We often limit our thoughts on digital with something related to ‘technology’. But, technology has always been around. Artificial Intelligence has been the moot topic for several decades now and robots caught our fancy half a decade ago. But, what is different today is the surfeit of various areas of technology which has come together. The key elements of robotic process automation have efficiently attached the ‘routine tasks’ at the workplace and made them far more effective and time consuming that ever before. The focus is also on the various tasks and businesses which have in the past been constrained by capacity and speed of decision making and human coordination. The entire automation theme is likely bring quantum changes in the ability to consume data and implement various complex iterations with a scale and speed that was hard to imagine even as recent as couple of years ago.