We are living in an era of abundant technology, when everything we do has a tech element in it. Next to divine forces, it’s technology that is all-pervasive. I wonder if it is a new-age manifestation of the divine or the latest mayajaal, a web of illusions to keep us trapped in this universe.
Like living beings, technology keeps evolving, re-inventing itself and coming back in new avatars that it is not easy to keep pace with. You keep up at one end and can lag at another. Technology adoption cycles are interesting, as they can allow a laggard to leapfrog, leaving the earlier leaders wondering what went wrong.
For example, unified payments interface or UPI for small payments may have the record for fastest and largest adoption in the history of technology. It converged on the mobile phone our debit and credit cards, ATM, cheque books, demand drafts and hard cash.
E-commerce in India, which was struggling due to low penetration of credit cards and an even lower trust in e-transactions, are now flourishing with UPI. Developed countries with well-established networks of credit card use were way ahead of India at one point. But UPI made us jump ahead of them in a matter of just a few years. It will take those countries to move to UPI or the next wave of payment technology a lot more as it demands a change in systems and user habits.
Adoption of technology is heavily dependent on numbers. It’s not always the best product that leads, but the most adopted one. Take the case of WhatsApp. Most of us are on the app because everyone else in the family, friends and business circles is on it.
Even if we get frustrated with the insane forwards, we know it is the best place to share family news, get neighbourhood updates or interact with clients and colleagues. Remember a couple of years back major doubts about WhatsApp’s security were making the headlines? Many of us downloaded alternatives like Telegram and Signal. But where are we now? Back to dear WhatsApp. The reason is simple—everyone is else is also there.
Technologies can trap us in a time warp. If something worked for us at some point in time, we start treating it as a best practice and assume it would continue to deliver forever. In the 2014 general elections, the winning party made very smart use of social media. Probably for the first time, digital media played a significant role in the national elections. The opposition was left wondering about it. But a decade later, it was the opposition that made use of artificial intelligence and influencer marketing, while the ruling party stayed with Twitter trends and WhatsApp forwards. It’s an example of technology trap, which has a knack of favouring underdogs like the character of Barbarik in Mahabharat.
The early adopters of Facebook are the only ones left on that platform now, simply out of habit. Personally, I am myself trying to get out of the blogging trap that I have been stuck in for 20+ years, while it’s evident that not many people are reading anymore.
If you notice, there is a cyclicity involved with the technology adoption or its smart use. If you lose out on a technology cycle, you can always ride the next one that will help you leapfrog—as long as you are open to being an early adopter. Yes, early adoption comes with its risks, but they are far lower than the risk of not adopting at all. Having said that, it is the scamsters and criminals who are the fastest users of technology. They not only experiment with the latest technology but often become its first pro users so that they can trap the naïve who comes on board with a bit of nervousness. That is how they can hack ways to obtain OTPs for your transactions, trap you into transferring money to them, or to give them access to your passwords.
Have you seen them using deepfake audios or videos for money extortion? Before we can find the use cases for artificial intelligence to make the world a better place, they have found a way to use it to make quick money. By the time the authorities train their people and systems to catch the culprits, they would have innovated for the next leap. I wonder if this energy was directed at positive uses of technology, would we be experiencing swarga.
Technology also loses its attractiveness and usefulness when it tries to deliver too much. Banking portals used to be simple, allowing users to conduct basic transactions. Then, some marketing genius suggested inserting all kinds of clickbait promotions for their own as well as partners’ products, making its use dicey for not-too-tech-savvy people. The result is that they stay away or depend on their children to do online banking for them. A simple barcode reading often fails at the various checkpoints, necessitating both manual processes. Most technocrats need to learn the elegance of simplicity, where technology meets design.
So the traditional technology adoption lifecycle includes innovation, early adoption, mass adoption and leapfrogging laggards. This circular movement has its own rhythm that those embracing it can dance along to.
First Published in The New Indian Express on 16 March, 2025.
