Businesses need to shift to a customer-centric approach and evolve from the old pipe model
technology
Posted inGeneral
It is your choice whether to embrace endings or beginnings
Our current era of crisis can also give us a promise of new growth
Posted inBusiness
Customer service and the trust conundrum
As customers become better informed and digitally savvy, businesses have to ditch old boardroom strategies in favour of a more customer-centric approach to build and retain trust
Posted inMedia
Social media is a valuable tool for improving health awareness in Africa
The combination of flexible targetability, low cost and direct communication make for an effective way to improve education and address individual needs
Posted inTech
Humanity in the future
Our ‘natural’ origin and technocratic destiny can be explored in Dan Brown’s Origin
Posted inTech
Eliminating bias is the new frontier of AI innovation
Artificial intelligence is racist and sexist, and just like in the real world, change in the virtual world requires sustained effort
Posted inEquality, Health, Media
A new chatbot can answer your awkward questions about sex and HIV
By Mamakiri Mulaudzi, Ebenneza Kofi Okyere-D, Peace Kiguwa, Janan J. Dietrich You know how it can be super awkward to chat to someone about sex related things? Well the team at the PHRU (Perinatal HIV Research Unit) at Wits University has fixed that. Imagine that you are 22-years-old and living in Soweto. Your parents probably don’t […]
Posted inBusiness, Equality, General, Health, Lifestyle, Media, Tech
When work becomes inhuman, and when competition ruins relationships
Some time ago I wrote a piece on Shoshana Zuboff‘s recently published The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and already other signs are beginning to appear that this invidious phenomenon is spreading in the workplace too, as surveillance of workers to ensure optimal productivity. In a recent edition of TIME magazine (‘When humans become robots‘; July […]
Posted inEquality, General, Health, Media, Tech
5G: Exacerbating interconnectedness?
From the point of view of complexity theory, or chaos theory, if you like, everything is interconnected. ‘Chaos’ is here regarded as just a very complex variety of ‘order’, unlike in earlier times — the ancient Greeks, for instance, opposed chaos’ and ‘cosmos’ (order), as most of us do in our daily lives. In Deleuzoguattarian […]
Posted inBusiness, General, Health, Media, News/Politics, Tech
So you think that Orwell’s ‘1984’ could only happen under a political dictatorship? Think again!
Many people — especially those who still read novels — will know George Orwell’s 1984, with its depiction of the brainwashing society of Big Brother, of Newspeak (the language designed to inhibit critical thinking), the Thought Police, and constant surveillance of every citizen, monitoring their behaviour (lest they should exhibit signs of discontent, or worse, […]
Posted inEquality, General, Health, Lifestyle, Media, Tech
Popular art and the homogenisation of viewing subjects globally
The global hype around the HBO television series, Game of Thrones (GoT), which ended with what was apparently generally perceived by fans as an anticlimax of sorts, made me reflect once again on the pertinence of the intellectual work of that indomitable French thinker, Bernard Stiegler, for grasping the way that contemporary electronic technology is […]
Posted inGeneral, Health, Media, Tech
Should one question technology’s drive for dominance?
In a sense, the titular question, above, is redundant. Technology is, after all, already dominant — a claim that hardly needs to be substantiated with evidence; it is there for everyone to perceive on a daily basis. Not that the objects of ‘perception’ are self-evident in any straightforward way. In social reality a good deal […]