| The New Information SocietyWe constantly hear today about the new technology and how importantit is for our future. Most people had never heard of the phenomenon beforethe end of the 1970s, and their experience was limited to a small nunlberof gadgets based on microelectronics, such as pocket calculators, digitalwatches and electronic games. They may have known of the existence ofword processors as being sophisticated and very expensive forms oftypewriter, but the average person had probably never seen such a device,let alone had access to one. Of course, many were aware that computerswere increasingly being adopted by a variety of organizations because theirbills, wage or salary slips, air tickets, cheques and bank statements containedan array of digital figures, but this hardly seemed to be of major significanceto their way of life. After all, the members of modern societies are used to new inventions,and there was no particular reason to suppose that this microelectronics technology was any more significant than other technological inventionsthat had emerged before. Ever since the dawn of the Industrial Revolutionthere has been a deluge of technological development s which have resultedin new products and industries, larger markets, increased productivity,economic growth and a level of prosperity which earlier generations would never have believed possible. Those who had predicted that the replacement of human labour by machines would lead to widespread unemployment and human misery had been proved wrong. Why then should this technology be any different from what had gone before? Surely the development of the new technology should create even more wealth, new employment opportunities, and perhaps even the dawn of a new information age of increased leisure where human beings would be liberated from the constant need to work in order to survive? Microelectronics has already been extensively applied in many sectors |
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