Deepening of Information Age: Record Pace of Smart Phone Adaption

Technology adaption has been speeding up, with smart phones saturating the US markets in record time

From Technologyreview.com (hat tip Professor Mark Perry)

Today's technology scene seems overheated to some. Apple is the most valuable company on earth. Software apps are reaching tens of millions of users within weeks. Major technology names like Research in Motion and Nokia are being undone by rapid changes to their markets. Underlying these developments: the unprecedented speed at which mobile computers are spreading.

Presented below is the U.S. market penetration achieved by nine technologies since 1876, the year Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone. Penetration rates have been organized to show three phases of a technology's spread: traction, maturity, and saturation.

Those technologies with "last mile" problems—bringing electricity cables or telephone wire to individual homes—appear to spread more slowly. It took almost a century for landline phones to reach saturation, or the point at which new demand falls off. Mobile phones, by contrast, achieved saturation in just 20 years. Smart phones are on track to halve that rate yet again, and tablets could move still faster, setting consecutive records for speed to market saturation in the United States.

It is difficult to conclude categorically from the available data that smart phones are spreading faster than any previous technology. Statistics are not always available globally, and not every technology is easily tracked. Also, because smart phones have not yet reached market saturation, as electricity and television have, the results are still coming in.

This for me represents additional manifestations of the deepening of the information age.

This also means that the diffusion of technology usage will increasingly change the way live or do things or how we conduct commerce.

The influence of technology will not be limited to economy, but will also affect politics and political institutions.

The intensifying friction between on the one side, globalization and technology innovation, and on the other, centralized political institutions should be a noteworthy example.

Nonetheless the transition will not be smooth as entrenched parties, who benefited from the industrial political economy, will resist and fight change.