Whether one likes it or not, everything is getting digitized. And it is often a good idea for human beings to keep abreast of changes. This is a series of posts designed with community health folks in mind to help them develop mental models around the technologies that make up the digital world.
In this post, we will look at certain foundational terms like "information", "data", "communication", and "computer". Then we will connect it to words like "internet", "server", and "cloud".
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Information / Content / Data
Anything that is meaningful is "information". Emails, videos, textbooks, numbers, anything that you can imagine and represent or store in some form.
"Content" is just another word for information used in specific contexts. Like if I'm sending you an email, the body of that email would be called "content". An article has content. A youtube video has content. An instagram post has content. A tweet thread has content.
"Data" is yet another way of looking at information. If you collect information about 50 people while doing a research project and put it in a spreadsheet, you might call it research data. If a hospital keeps a medical record of a patient who was admitted there, that would be called health data. If you write a brief bio of yourself and share it with someone, it might be called a biodata.
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Communication
Human beings have been communicating forever. We can talk to each other. Or we can draw something on the wall which someone else can come back and read later - perhaps after a day, perhaps after centuries. We can write letters. We can write emails. We can message people.
Communication is just transfer of information/data from one place to another, from one mind to another.
It need not always be one-to-one. It can be one-to-many. Mass communication.
We will come back to the term 'communication' in a while.
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Computer / Computing device
A computer is a machine or a device which can be used to view, store, transmit, receive, and manipulate/transform data or information.
Is a physical book a computer? It can be used to view, store, transmit and receive information. But it cannot manipulate or transform that information.
What about a calculator? Is it a computer? A calculator can be used to view, store and manipulate/transform information. But it can't really transmit or receive information, can it?
What about a smartphone? You can send and receive data/information via smartphone. You can store it and view it. You can also manipulate and transform it. A smartphone is a computer.
So is a laptop, or a desktop.
Computer as a Communication Technology
You might have noticed that in the above section, I am referring to the computer as a machine that can be used in receiving/transmitting information, or, communication. In the past people might have called a calculator a computer. But today, computers are almost universally able to communicate and therefore it is ideal to view computers as machines useful in communication technology.
What kind of communications do computers allow?
Email, WhatsApp, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, research publication, reading journals, reading news, writing blogs, reading blogs, putting things on a website, viewing a website, so on.
(Remember - your smartphone is also a computer!)
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Internet
The Internet is the simplest and most powerful creation of human beings in the past few decades.
It is super simple. Imagine I (A) connect my computer and your (B) computer with a cable that can transmit information. Now I can send messages from my computer to yours and vice versa. A---B
Imagine now that you connect your computer with that of another friend (C). Now, I can send a message to C through your computer. A--->B--->C
If D connects to C's computer, D can send a message to me. D--->C--->B--->A
Imagine most of the computers in the world connected to each other through each other. Like a huge "net". That's internet.
This connection need not be through a physical cable.
It can also be through the electromagnetic spectrum. 4G, 5G, WiFi.
You might have a question here. You have only one computer in your place, and it is not connected to any other computer. How are you able to browse the internet, then?
Well, actually, when you're connected to internet (be it through wifi, be it through mobile data), what you're actually connecting to is a computer. That computer would be in the office of your internet service provider (Airtel, BSNL, Jio, etc). And they connect their computer to the rest of the world through massive underground cables.
Basically, the whole world is connected through cables and electromagnetic spectrum. And that's how internet works.
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Server
A computer is not a magical device.
If your computer is switched off, you cannot read your emails from it.
If your computer is not connected to the internet, it cannot send or receive information from the internet. If your wifi is switched off, or your data pack is over, you cannot receive whatsapp messages or emails.
But if that's the case, what will happen to the WhatsApp messages others send to you when your phone is switched off? Where does it exist? Where is it stored?
Let's say B's phone is switched off. A sends a WhatsApp message to B. A then switches their phone off. Both phones are now switched off. Does the message exist anywhere?
B switches their phone on now. (A's phone is still switched off). Will B receive the WhatsApp message sent by A?
The answer is yes. And the answer is "servers".
A server is just a computer that is kept on and connected to internet all the time.
When A sends a WhatsApp message to B, A's message is not directly send from A's phone to B's phone. Instead, A's message is send from A's phone to a computer owned by the WhatsApp company. This computer is always kept on. This computer might physically be located in California, or London, or Mumbai. We do not know for sure. But WhatsApp knows. And "server" is just another word for this computer that is always on.
This server sends the message then to B whenever possible. If B is online, it will immediately send that message. If B is switched off and later comes back online, the server will send the message to B then.
That's what a server is. A computer that's always online.
It is not just WhatsApp. Almost everything in today's internet works through servers. If you're reading this through an email, you are probably getting that email off your email providers' server (Gmail/Yahoo/whoever). If you're seeing this on a blog, you connected to Blogger company's server to download this post to your computer.
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Cloud / Cloud server
Cloud is just a fancy name for servers run by big companies like Amazon/Google/Microsoft. When I run a computer at my home and keep it always online, it is called just a "server". But when a capitalist company runs a computer at their air-conditioned, high security, custom built buildings, it is called a "cloud server", or sometimes simply "cloud".
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We will look at some related words like "client", "database", "website", "protocol", etc in the next post.
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