Raise your hand if you owned or knew somebody who owned a Blackberry three years ago.
Now, think about the number of people you know now who own a Blackberry. Compare that to the number of iPhones surrounding you right now.
The Blackberry used to be the premier smart phone, especially for businessmen, but now its market share in America has plummeted.
While many variables were in the equation that led Blackberry to this point, one stands out to me: Blackberry seemingly refused to innovate.
While Apple was releasing brand-new devices with some new must-have specification, Blackberry was overloading the market with nearly identical phones with little-to-no innovation.
In the end, Apple wins the market.
Welcome to the 21st century — a time when technology is obsolete before its first birthday and the attention span of Americans doesn’t even last a full commercial.
Now more than ever, the government is at a disadvantage. Little funding is available for research and development in the public sector, and the government does not have the profit incentive that businesses thrive on.
As a result, the government must be truly innovative, using all resources available to it. This means using technology to connect citizens to the government in ways never before possible.
For example, many of the large, tourist-heavy cities have designed apps that serve as personal tour guides, including audio recordings for history and details of specific landmarks. Some of these apps even incorporate personal diaries so visitors can share their experiences with others.
The cities can also use these diaries to quickly identify and address problems that tourists might notice, such as an accumulation of trash around a statue.
The city of Portland, Oregon, has developed an app that allows citizens to report problems directly to the appropriate city agency along with pictures and GPS data. The agency can even respond to users through the app.
Such apps allow citizens to feel connected and responsible for their city and its maintenance.
Previously, many people would naively believe that the government would take care of something, no matter how small, without any help from citizens.
These apps shatter that train of thought.
One thing that Mississippi’s government seem to be late to the party on, though, is the digital filing of public records. Finding government reports or data online is nearly impossible for many of the state agencies, and even more so on the city level.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) was originally based on now-outdated technology, and it should be restructured with the technological advances in mind.
Requiring all public records from the past few years onward to be available online would not only make it easier on the public to provide checks on the government, but also it would alleviate the burden on staff and clerks who spend a good deal of time fulfilling public records requests.
Technology, after all, is a good thing. Now more than ever, we need government to truly move into the 21st century.
Trenton Winford is a junior public policy leadership major from Madison.
