Social Informatics

The Social Impacts of ICT

Over the past few decades, particularly since the early 1990s, there has been a dramatic uptake of information technologies in society; therefore, it is incumbent on the academy to reflect on this process and its obvious and hidden impacts. Early computers were designed for massive processing of numbers in pursuit of the cold war, and it was not until the 1970s that the development of database technology opened the possibility for the creation and use of archives of digital information[Page 435] about people, although the U.S. Bureau of the Census had pioneered the use of information-processing technology several decades earlier. By the 1980s, most large corporations had invested heavily in computing technology, using it to track customers and clients as well as production and distribution, and government agencies were not far behind. With the popularization of the personal computer during the 1980s and of the Internet and World Wide Web during the 1990s, a large proportion of society became computer literate, using the technology for everything from shopping to home entertainment. Massive economies of scale deriving from a uniform digital technology, along with exponential increases in processing and storage power, meant that by the turn of the 21st century, computers with the power of the mainframes of the 1960s were accessible to the average consumer.

All of this has had massive impacts on society and is the focus of the growing field of social informatics. Among the core issues is the digital divide, that is, the sharp and growing difference between those to whom ICT is an inescapable part of life and those to whom it is largely unavailable. These differences exist at all geographic scales—from the international (access to ICT is tightly controlled in many countries and is simply impossible in others), to the regional, and even to the neighborhood level. Another core issue is privacy and related issues of surveillance. ICT has made it possible for extensive monitoring networks to be installed using video cameras capable of recognizing vehicle license plates and even faces. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is now installed in a growing proportion of the U.S. vehicle fleet and is used, for example, by car rental agencies to monitor the travel and speeds of renters. Databases can be readily linked, based on names or street addresses, to assemble frightening amounts of data on individuals. To date, there has been very little legislation in the United States aimed at regulating such databases, particularly in the private sector, whereas legislation in the European Union is somewhat more advanced.

A further set of issues derives from the ability of ICT to copy and disseminate information at electronic speed. Copyright and intellectual property rights are taking on new meaning, and ICT is providing unprecedented opportunities for plagiarism. Traditional publication mechanisms are being replaced by the much more flexible technologies of the World Wide Web, with implications for the business models of university presses, learned journals, and traditional private-sector publishers.

...