In the past three decades, mobile communications humanely evolved from being intermittent, sluggish, and one-directional to being profuse, instantaneous, and participatory.
What I called a ‘Mental Digital Shift’ has transfigured how we study, work, mingle, and make decisions globally. Information is a prostitute of communication; its offspring is technology. Let me masturbate to satisfaction with a click on the internet before I jerk off sperms into this essay.
What I called a ‘Mental Digital Shift’ has transfigured how we study, work, mingle, and make decisions globally. Information is a prostitute of communication; its offspring is technology. Let me masturbate to satisfaction with a click on the internet before I jerk off sperms into this essay.
The only thing which is yet to be a human right is public sex. Why? If lying, deformation, blackmailing, and nudity are the children of technology, how should we call her wife? A whore or a promiscuous digital world, isn’t it? Having read more of American Paul Beatty recently, my writings became too blunt and extraterrestrial; why should we call a dog a pet when it is actually called a bitch or a dog? That’s an epiphany and a bit tenebrous, but in fact, a verisimilitude. A fickle must not be termed an imbroglio. In America, the word ‘bitch’ isn’t offensive, but why is it offensive in writing and in African societies? That’s the first step to perceiving how we consume information publicly.
As a result, fraying into the annals of communication, aliens have been walking on the planet from time immemorial. Just in a little bit of conundrum, the word iPhone is not ‘i’-phone; it is actually ‘Eye-Phone.’ In simple terms, when the land is unsafe to walk in, the sea becomes safer for traveling. Let’s travel back in time: pornography, leaked sex videos, and viral news all used to stop inside the bedroom over the past three decades. How did they forcefully enter the public domain?
With the introduction of the iPhone 17, the world of technology is beyond ordinary smart watches, iPhones, and Android phones. Twenty years from now or thereabout, kids will be using smart glasses phones to expectantly remember how out-fashioned their ancestors were. Smart glasses are the new face of global technology. In information technology, beyond 2030 is the era of a Mental Digital Shift (MDS); a period in information technology, science, and innovation where everything depends on a simple blink.
Over the past three decades (roughly from the mid-1990s to the 2020s), information has undertaken a dramatic alteration, largely driven by the evolution of portable communications. In the mid-1990s, when technology was an infant, information was safeguarded with dignity and caution. The infancy of African technology can be attributed to the Era of Kings and Kingdoms—times when the skin of the goat had been beaten traditionally to convey messages. Horns were blown loudly to gather people at the king’s palace or village square. West Africans used musical instruments to create a quick communication system during emergencies and disasters throughout the precolonial era. As someone who spent most of his life growing up in African countries, I can vividly remember when telecommunication was a sperm in the person of telephone booths that exhaustively swallowed coins to make calls.
In those days, especially with the arrival of telephone booths in Africa, people walked miles and kilometres to make phone calls to loved ones afar. Our ancestors queued the whole day in large numbers to access ordinary telephone booths. While they might be very rare in sight these days, I had once advised the National Museum of The Gambia to just keep one telephone booth at the museum for generations yet unborn.
From telephone booths, technology took the form of a fetus in the womb of telephone lines. People first had access to calls in Africa through home-based telephone lines. In The Gambia, places like Banjul and Brikama used to have numbers starting with 448 or simply 442, followed by four or five other digits to make phone calls to various homes and offices. With time, telephone lines were quickly replaced by the first portable mobile phones in the form of Nokia 3310, Nokia 11-100, Siemens Mobile, Motorola, etc. In the early 2000s, Android phones started experiencing an exacerbated competition with the introduction of iPhones. The latter became dominant in modern-time technology from Apple Watches to iPhones. But in ancient Africa, musical instruments were an integral part of society, conveying messages over long distances due to their ability to mimic the tonal patterns of spoken languages. Drumming patterns conveyed information swiftly across vast distances, much faster than human messengers on foot.
These civilizations influenced the founding of precolonial empires, such as the Ghana, Mali, Songhai, Asante, Hausa, and Wolof empires, that further led to the emergence of more advanced civilizations. The "talking drums,” among the Wolof Tama, Mandinka Junjung, or Tabala, as Prof. Ousman Mamakey Bojang at the University of The Gambia puts it, were perfect for long-distance communication since they could produce tonal sounds that were very effective for conveying complicated messages.
As a result, trade routes were also developed between West and North Africa, such as the Taghaza-Timbuktu, or Western route, the Ghadames-Air, or Central route, and the Fezzan-Kawar, or Eastern route. They created distinctive traditional communication methods that were essential in spreading information to communities all over West Africa, in disaster warnings, mitigation strategies, and other significant societal news.
To swiftly relay information across the community, town criers were deployed in mobilizing resources to enhance the participation of able-bodied men and women to communicate effectively. Africans should start rebranding the drums, gongs, trumpets, animal horns, elephant tusks, flutes, brass or metal horns, and so forth, which were among the musical instruments used for communication. No single researcher will deny that information was mostly accessed through newspapers, first-time computers, radio, and TVs from the 1990s to the early 2000s to date. But technology by then was an infant because mobile phones were purposely for voice calls and text messages. Access to the internet by then was very intermittent and in the form of limited (dial-up connections). Fast-forward to the 2020s–2025, mobile phones with 4G and 5G networks provide instant access to global information effortlessly with just a click. Our time is both more advanced and defamatory—advanced in the sense that we are better off than our ancestors in terms of technological development, but defamatory in the sense that with just a click, we lie, defame, cheat, and steal online or supposedly abuse the internet unethically. What I like to call ‘click and destroy’ or ‘scroll and see.’ While anyone can search, stream live, or publish content anytime, anywhere, personal information and privacy become an encumbrance to ethics.
I hate to call a cell phone a mobile phone; I like to call it a ‘global device’ or simply a ‘world tool’ because an average person must now know they are carrying the entire world in their pocket. Then, information mainly came from traditional entities, publishers, etc. A flow of information was one-way for all. But now, social media brings people together no matter how far. Viral posts and citizen journalism now compete with mainstream news outlets, which is very impressive. I am happy to see countries like The Gambia adopt the Personal Data Protection and Privacy Bill, 2025. This will go a long way in safeguarding private and public information cautiously to prevent misinformation and disinformation online foolishly. I might be too young to comprehend the full evolution of technology, but I know very well how blogs, podcasts, and vlogs have democratized media.
From local to global communication, technology has evolved rapidly. In ancient days, communication was grossly local or somewhat national. But in modern days, international calls and communication are faster due to their availability everywhere. This might not be said aloud, but WhatsApp is the largest means of communication in Africa, enabling real-time global communication for free, followed by Telegram, I presume. I may be dangerously correct or rightly wrong from my personal data, but mobile communication breaks cultural barriers and geographical boundaries. Africans now learn online, trade, and network across borders in seconds. Let’s start conversations around a borderless Africa in telecommunications, shall we?
In the past, people had to search for information deliberately because access was very limited. Credibility and accuracy were relatively easier to also maintain.
But in our present day, people possess interpersonal skills to develop digital literacy wisdom beyond the internet. Fake news, impersonation, and digital propaganda challenge truth and trust; misinformation misinforms all of us everywhere, every day. The internet is loaded with abundant information that is handsomely accurate and beautifully unreliable.
How accurate was information in times when a town-crier sounded his horn to relate an urgent community disaster compared to now when information is interactive with comments, shares, remixes, likes, and dislikes? Your own friends will pray for your success, and when you become successful, they will scroll and pass your posts on social media without liking them. Interesting, isn’t it? I must also teach about the karma of consciousness in uncommon sense that came as a consequence of social media. Some people or platforms use algorithms to personalize content, masquerading what individuals see and believe. Gone were the days when mobile phones were separated from other devices. But present is the time when AI assistants, wearables, smartphones, and cloud services create a world of delusion beyond reality.
Finally, the world, especially the technological spectrum, should expect and be very prepared for smart glasses as replacements for Androids and iPhones. While Tesla phones have come to lead in that direction, wearable phone glasses will dominate half of the global market by 2060. Apple Vision Pro, Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, and Google Glass are all making plans to compete in the market. AR Smart Glasses (Augmented Reality Smart Glasses) will bring information into your view. Smart glasses will make calls, send messages, and access the internet like a phone.
Beyond 2030, doctorate degrees and intellectual scholarship will be progressively replaced by AI, such that PhD holders will be redundant to innovation or use their degrees to continue causing social divides across the world. The world isn’t in turmoil because of education; it is in shambles because of so many educated people without knowledge beyond education. Aliens are not only around and living with us, but they wrote this essay to remind us that: yes, indeed, ‘We Came, We Saw, We Conquered.’
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