The rise of the digital age affects every component of our lives. It is only expected that our governments would eventually have to follow suite and join in on the party. Graduates of today are more “technologically aware” than our parents generation. In order for the government to keep up and change with the times, they have had to change the way they communicate with their people, they’ve also had to convert a lot of their services to online format in order to still be relevant to their citizens, some more than others.
On the social aspect of things, countries like North Korea, have strict governance over internet content within their borders. They monitor almost everything its’ citizens view on the internet, content is filtered and they pretty much have a “big brother” system in place. Anything that is deemed harmful to the country’s reputation or president will not be accessible to view. Because the internet is so flooded with all types of views and opinions, it must be a very very difficult process to monitor and filter all this content and as a citizen of that country, your views are therefore very biased.
In the United States, we have seen a lot of content that were previously deemed as “sensitive information” digitalized. From making appointments at the local DMV for your ID to filing your taxes, to applying for a passport or immigration status, a lot of these processes can now be done from the comfort of your living room sitting in front of a screen. The waiting lines at government agencies and endless paperwork to fill out has drastically decreased because of this conversion. The problem I have is the time it takes for information to be processed once you enter it into the system. From the time you enter your private information in a “safe” portal to the time you receive feedback, the waiting period is extremely long usually 8-12 weeks for response. The very limited or lack thereof face-face connection has become very limited and vague. When you call these agencies for an update on your application, you usually get a generic response of “your application is still being processed”. This of course makes sense due to the vast amount of data that has to be processed, the manpower to do all this almost nonexistent as the government are not the biggest hirers in the economy. Yet they still encourage you to apply online as it is “faster” and “more convenient”...for whom? All the while the time passes by, your information is passed off from department to department, computer screen to computer screen, system to system, there has to be some loss of privacy and sensitivity to your personal information and by the time it reaches the actual hands of a person, all you are is a case number.
I am optimistic that in the future, it is evitable that more and more processes will be converted online, and frankly that is fine with me, as I am part of the computer generation. My only issue is how they intend to improve on the lag time of information processing and response to citizens because when most of us are contacting the government for something, it is not an issue we can wait 8-12 weeks for.
Till then….toodles!
It is funny that they tell you to go online because its faster, but sometimes the waiting period is excruciatingly slow,so it would seem to be a better option to just go in person. The fact that the government is implementing the use of the internet though is a good start. Like businesses that start late in the online world, if the government started late, it might hinder the way they run the country. I feel though that the issues you brought up will be fixed within the next ten years.
ReplyDelete