The Digitization of Everything – Response

The reading discusses an app called Waze. Waze is a GPS app but with a twist, it does not only tell you how to get to your destination and what the shortest route is, but it also tells you which route has traffic and how long it’ll take you to get to your destination with traffic taken into account. This is not a new idea- to me at least because I have seen it applied in my google maps app. This application of the “social” in the “digital” to make applications even more useful to humans. In the old days, people would have to listen to the radio to know how the traffic conditions are, but now we have such apps to make our lives easier. The inventors of Waze did not create something completely new, they just relied on sensor technology to measure the traffic in the streets. They worked on something that existed previously and helped better it by adding what the reading calls “layers” to the original format – the map.