Electronic devices had first made computing easier. Hence the name computers. Increasingly, we are relying on electronic devices for managing information - to capture, store, analyse and retrieve. Not surprisingly, we have the term information technology.

The effect of information technology is ever-increasing in our lives. Computers fuelled information technology, and in turn information technology fuelled the adoption of computers. Over a period of time, both computers and information technology have become faster, cheaper and reliable. Today the smart phones are taking the place of computers, and we are probably witnessing a massive explosion in information technology. Smart phones makes computing easy, cheap and ubiquitous. It has accelerated the adoption of information technology manyfold, and also the consumption of digitised matter.

Our music, movies, video, books, news, finances are all digitised. Today we consider digital representation just as an extension to the physical matter. And the fire is spreading. As we exhaust the digitisation of larger things, the next logical step is to start digitising the smaller ones and the fragmented ones. Even the ones we fail to recognise as something that can be digitised.

Not just the names and addresses of the local businesses, it could be any registers we keep - in libraries, government records, police records; it could be recipes in the kitchen or menus in the restaurants.

In short, the driving principle of this phenomenon may be phrased as “anything that can be digitised will be digitised.”

Tomorrow we are going to need this digital information all the more - for our mobiles, personal devices and wearables to work effectively and efficiently. Or in another (strange) perspective, these computing devices need fine-grained digital information than we do, to tell us what we should do.