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1. Introduction
The term ‘The
Information Society’ has been in vogue for a number of years. It is not
certain who first coined the expression (although undoubtedly there will
be many who claim to have done so). Whatever the authorship, the
expression might be considered as a natural extension or variant of the
expression ‘information age’. The expression information age was and is
used to differentiate the period beginning in the 1950s or 1960s (the
exact birth date being a matter of opinion) from the earlier
agricultural, industrial and (briefly) service ages. By the mid 1990s,
however, the term Information Society had gained widespread currency
although for the previous decade at least, it could claim to be a field
in its own right in the academic community . Indeed, according to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica:
Analysis of one
of the three traditional divisions of the economy, the service sector,
shows a sharp increase in information-intensive activities since the
beginning of the 20th century. By 1975 these activities accounted for
half of the labour force of the United States giving rise to the
so-called information society.
Although much has
been written on the Information Society and there is considerable
enthusiasm for it at national and supranational level (the EU has a
Directorate General for the Information Society ), and while many
authors have raised a wide range of issues in this area, to date
relatively little academic effort has been made to evaluate the impact
of information and communications technology (ICT) on society as a
whole. There is certainly no shortage of books on the information
society as a quick search of any web based book site will reveal. Books
on the information society cover everything from its impact on the Black
community to legal, sceptical, historical and sociological perspectives.
But there is no (or at least readily locatable) publication which offers
a balanced evaluation of the impact of ICT on society. One possible
reason for this paucity of serious academic comment is the sheer scale
of the task. This paper does not attempt to fill this gap or even define
the scale of the task. Instead it suggests a framework of conceptual
issues that will need to be addressed in any such evaluation. It is,
therefore, only a first step on a road which is yet to be travelled.
2. In search of a
definition
Any discussion of
an Information Society should start with some level of agreement on what
is meant by the word ‘society’. ‘Society’ remains one of those words
which, as St. Augustine once said of ‘time’, everybody understands until
they are asked to explain it. A good working definition is given by the
Concise Oxford Dictionary, which defines ‘society’ as:
the sum of human
conditions and activity regarded as a whole functioning
interdependently.
What then, in
this context, is the ‘Information Society’? Here, we find many answers.
For example, Ireland’s Information Society Commission website uses the
following definition:
Information
Society is the term that is used to capture the increasing contemporary
influence of information and communication technologies (ICTs).
This is quite a
different construction from the preceding definition. Looking further
into the Irish government’s view of the Information Society we find the
Minister for the Information Society making statements such as:
Exploiting these
opportunities, using technology to enhance people’s lives, is in my
view, what the Information Society is about.
This interprets the information
society not as a concept, but almost as a political objective. As such
the information society is taken to be a good thing which, like
motherhood and apple pie, deserves everybody’s support. However the key
expression here is ‘enhancing people’s lives’, a phrase fraught with
problems for the would-be evaluator. Tempting though it is to simply
regard this concept as purely subjective and therefore intractable, it
is necessary to confront the problems it presents if progress in
evaluating the Information Society is to be achieved.
Another view of this can be found
on the European Union’s Information Society DG’s website which contains
the following statement:
The last few years have witnessed a
transformation in the industrial landscape of the developed world.
Telecommunications liberalisation, the explosive growth of the Internet
and a growing tide of mergers between computer, media and
telecommunications companies all point to one thing - the birth of the
information society.
Here is yet another view of
society, albeit one which does not tell the reader what an Information
Society actually is. All this says is that technology leads us into an
information society - whatever the latter may be. It is also worth
noting that, as far as the EU is concerned, the Information Society is a
product of the telecommunication liberalisation and growth of Internet
usage during the 1990s. But, as we have seen, in the view of many
others, the Information Society was born well before 1995 and the phrase
was in use long before 1980.
A more formal approach can be found
in the academic literature. The Information Society Journal ‘Topics for
Discussion’ (2003) section makes the following observations:
Since wealth, power and freedom of
action derive from control over, access to, and effective use of,
information and expertise, the shifting organization of information
technologies and social life -- large scale and small scale -- is a
major concern. These combined trends have stimulated discussions on the
relationships between technological change and social change. The term
Information Society has been a key marker for many of these studies and
discussions.
This is clearer, but still does not
constitute a usable definition. One is reminded of Humpty Dumpty’s
exasperated observation in Alice Through the Looking Glass (Carroll
1992) when he exclaims that: “Words mean what I say they mean, nothing
more, nothing less”.
We offer two possible working
definitions of the Information Society. The first goes back to the
concept of the information age. The term ‘Information Society’ suggests
a society in which an important (or even the dominant) economic activity
is the production and consumption of information. This is consistent
with earlier definitions of industrial or agricultural societies. The
industrial society emerged when advances in agricultural production
technology meant that the labour requirements of food production dropped
to a point where most of the working population did not need to be
engaged in this activity. In a similar manner, the Information Society
has emerged at a period when the amount of manufacturing labour needed
to produce the required level of consumer and production goods has
fallen to such an extent that the labour released can be employed in
service and information industries. From this perspective, an
information society might be defined thus:
An information society is one where
most of the staples of existence: food, shelter and material wants
(including education and medicine) are in sufficient supply to satisfy a
large proportion of the citizens of that society and where the focus is
shifting (or has shifted) to the innovative production and consumption
of information as a way of enhancing the quality of life for individuals
in that society.
This definition begs numerous
questions and raises several issues, including that of ‘quality of
life’. It also raises the question about the meaning of consumption in
this context. One can consume a bottle or wine, a service and (given
time) an aircraft or even a building, but much information is not a
consumer good in this sense. While some information can be so regarded
(a film for example) and some information is volatile or time fragile
(e.g. a weather forecast or a stock tip) much information is permanent
and indefinitely reusable.
An alternative definition might
therefore be:
An Information Society is a society
in which the use of information technology plays an important role in
how the people live. In the Information Society the peoples lives
interface with information technology in the way they work, the way they
relax and in other aspects of their lives in a variety of ways.
This avoids using the term ‘quality
of life’ as well as the concept of consumption, but presents different
challenges. Using this definition, what is there to evaluate? One answer
to this is might be that the evaluation is across the board and does not
attempt to focus per se on “quality of life”. In advanced societies,
information technology is used for virtually all record keeping from
births and deaths to all medical treatments, from food purchases to
electricity supply management. Furthermore information technology is
deeply embedded in motorcars, aeroplanes, television sets and many other
household devices. Some aspect of a typical citizen of the first world’s
life will be facilitated by the use of some aspect of information
technology virtually on a continuous basis. But this merely brings us
back via a circuitous route to asking in what way, to borrow the Irish
Minister’s phrase, these developments have enhanced people’s lives which
brings the question back to quality of life. In other words, and
uncomfortable though the idea may be, the problem of ‘quality of life’
is at the core of this issue and needs to be addressed.
3. A simple answer?
A possible solution to the problem
of evaluating the impact of ICT on society is to argue that, were it not
beneficial, it would not be used as extensively as it is. Although a
useful reflection this is not a convincing argument. One answer to the
question of ‘Why is information technology being used to the extent that
it is?’ is the same one that is frequently given to the question ‘Why do
mountaineers climb mountains?’ and that is ‘because it is/they are
there’. There is no doubt that use of the latest information technology
is perceived as a dimension of progress. The latest personal computer or
the latest mobile telephone is regarded by most as being better than
older models. But does this constitute progress? It is not always
obvious that it does. Human curiosity pushes technology boundaries. And
the result of this is a scramble to convert these new technologies into
products which perform faster and deliver more functionality. This is
totally irrespective of whether they facilitate a more satisfactory
experience for the user of the product and those around them or whether
their long-term societal effects are good or bad. ICT companies are not
in existence primarily as social benefactor or good deed doers. They are
entrepreneurial organisations driven by the profit motive. The
information technology industry has a need to sell and has an interest
in creating demand, if necessary for what is unnecessary. A recent
critique of the food industry (Brownell & Horgan 2003) has argued that
the plague of obesity now threatening western society comes from the
desperate need of the food industry to sell us more than we require for
healthy nutrition. Many of those who are now suffering the effects of
many years of eating fast food, would once, no doubt, have seen fast
food as a form of ‘progress’. The question is could the same be said of
ICT, i.e. that in relentlessly pushing technology into people’s lives
the industry is creating a form of information obesity? From this
reflection alone it should be clear that the availability of
contemporary ICT will not of necessity enhance people’s lives.
4. In search of metrics: Quality of
life?
It has already been noted that the
concept of quality of life is difficult. Quality of life can, like
beauty, be in the eye of the beholder. One man’s favourite occupation is
another’s idea of hell. Most people like children, but there are people
who find even the most endearing children tiresome. Some people like to
live in crowded urban environments; others prefer to live in rural
settings. This variety of reaction is also true of ICT – there will be
developments which some perceive to be advantageous but which others
will consider to be a step backwards. The desirability of a given
technology development will depend on to whom one is talking at the
time. Trying to use the notion of the enhancement of people’s lives or
of the quality of life in general is therefore highly problematical from
an academic point of view because of, as mentioned above, the
quintessentially subjective nature of these concepts. In such
circumstances, it can be argued, objective evaluation is a chimera,
because any evaluation has to be based on a viewpoint and, as a
post-modernist would doubtless point out, there is no privileged
perspective.
Our answer to this line of
reasoning is based on grounds of pragmatism and aggregate behaviour and
effect. This is the basis of the case developed in this paper. To the
question, what do we mean by ‘quality of life’, a simple answer is that,
at the level of the individual, quality of life is directly proportional
to the degree of satisfaction and enjoyment people have in the way they
live. At the most basic level, there are certain aspects of the notion
of the quality of life on which many people are at least to some extent
in agreement and about which there is also some consensus on priorities.
A well-known example of this is Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Maslow
1970). Maslow asserts that physical needs must be met first. A person
who is starving is unlikely to be unduly concerned about his need for
social acceptance. From the physical necessities, Maslow suggests that
humans move through a succession of progressively deeper psychological
needs. As food, clothing, shelter and basic survival requirements are
satisfied, human needs progress to such things as safety, relationships,
status/esteem, fulfilling work and ‘self realisation’. This is fine in
theory. Although it become progressively more difficult to measure
improvements as one moves up the triangle and in particular from the
physical to the psychological, Prowse (2003) argues that capitalist
economic systems depend on this phenomenon and the fact most people do
not reflect too deeply on it.
One definition of something, which
improves ‘quality of life’, might, therefore, be something that moves
one nearer to the apex of Maslow’s triangle. Somebody who has food to
eat has a better quality of life than somebody who is starving. Somebody
who is able to realise him or herself has a higher quality of life than
somebody who is still struggling to make ends meet (Handy 1994).
It also needs to be noted that
people’s judgement and values change; what is considered valuable by one
generation or society may not be so by the next. There is also the
problem whereby something which is good for one individual may when made
available to a larger group, become a disadvantage to all. Perceptions
of what makes for a good life are not always objective or rational -
people are often driven by irrational fears or misjudgements of long
term consequences. If, for example, Joe is the only person with a car,
Joe gets to work, faster. If everybody has a car, everybody, including
Joe, gets to work slower. In type of circumstance, the negative impacts
of new technology may not become evident for some time. The singer Joni
Mitchel summed up this latter phenomenon evocatively when she wrote:
“Don’t it always seem the same that
you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. They’ve paved paradise,
put up a parking lot”
Based on this brief review, the
following conclusions are tentatively proposed:
§ Within a given society
and culture (assuming reasonable homogeneity), there will be
developments which most people will consider to improve their quality of
life of, or are beneficial to, the community or of individuals or groups
within that community in such a way as to give a net benefit to the
society as a whole;
§ There will always be
subjectivity, but when dealing with aggregate effects on a basis of
pragmatism, this does not significantly weaken the above claim;
§ Some developments which
are initially perceived as improvements in the quality of life are
actually, or may turn out to be, disimprovements. It may sometimes be
difficult to see this at the time of implementation;
One approach to evaluating the
information society is, therefore, to measure improvements in the
aggregate citizen perception of satisfaction with life over time and
within a society. Comparisons between societies and between individuals
within a society are further complications which will not be addressed
here.
5. A suitable case for multiple
perspectives
The complexity of evaluation here
suggests the need for a multi-perspective approach. A number of authors
have suggested multiple perspective approaches to evaluation of
information systems. These include Symons’ multiple perspectives (1994),
Cronk’s concept of holistic construal (Cronk 1999), Farbey et al’s meta
methodology (1993), Coleman and Jamieson’s ‘all benefits’ method (1994),
Remenyi et al (2000) and others. Outside information systems, one of the
most influential models for general business evaluation and appraisal of
recent years has been the balanced scorecard (Kaplan & Norton 1992;
1993; 2001). Of these options, holistic construal might eventually offer
the most powerful analytical tool for this problem, but given the
enormous complexity of the issues involved and the relatively embryonic
state of this concept in ICT, the simpler and better established
approach of a balanced scorecard may be the most appropriate model for
this task.
There are three initial challenges
which need to be addressed when evaluation the impact of ICT on a
society as a whole:
§ First there is the
problem of cost. The substantial literature on IT evaluation generally
deals with situations where there is a clear object to be evaluated.
This may be a system, an application, a business unit or the entire ICT
infrastructure of an organisation over a long period. In each of these
cases there is an identifiable entity with boundaries which, if not
always crystal clear, are well enough defined for most practical
purposes. Thus, while identifying all of the financial costs of ICT
itself poses problems (Bannister & McCabe 1999), the source of the
funding is normally clear and the benefits to this entity, individual or
group can be weighed against this cost. This is not true of a society.
The financial investment in the information society is borne by a long
list of stakeholders. This may include public utilities, the taxpayer
(i.e. government), businesses, individuals and social groups. It is
probably incalculable.
Thus for practicable purposes it
may be appropriate to put aside the evaluation of the financial cost of
the information society and look at the other costs and benefits of ICT
to society as a whole. A number of authors have examined this theme from
various angles over the years including Martin (1970), Sanders (1981),
Rosenberg (1985), Kelly (1995), Gates et al (1996), Cooper (1999) and
Graham and Marvin (2002). The views of these authors vary from the
evangelical to the vaguely apocalyptic.
§ Secondly there is the
problem of net benefits and the related question of time. I has already
been noted that that the impact of ICT in the long-term may be quite
different from the impact in the short-term. A clear example of this may
be seen in the use of information technology in the development of more
efficient organisational processes over the past few decades or so. The
record of ICT in business has largely been to do with making
organisations more efficient, i.e. leaner and meaner, or more effective
or strategically superior and this has time and again resulted in
economic and social disruption and casualties. One impact of ICT has
been to remove the need for unskilled labour and/or to de-skill existing
jobs. In the financial services sector alone, hundreds of thousands of
jobs have been eliminated by technology. It can even be argued that the
application of e-Government is primarily to do with making the delivery
of Government services more efficient than it is about enhancing
ordinary people’s lives. The history of organisational thinking in the
past 20 to 30 years at least has been dominated by a search for improved
efficiency. In the last decade this has taken the form of downsizing and
the activity. In this context, it is worth remembering the comment of
Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley when he said (1995):
The slash-and-burn restructuring is
not a permanent solution. Tactics of open-ended downsizing and real wage
compression are ultimately recipes for industrial extinction…If all you
do is cut, then you will eventually be left with nothing, with no market
share…If you compete by building, you have a future: if you compete by
cutting, you don’t…At the end of the day, you can create wealth only if
you’ve got a corporate sector that has its act together and takes a long
term strategic point of view…The debate itself is a healthy one. It goes
to the core of what it takes to compete and boost standards of living.
Do we get there by growing? Or – which is what we’ve been doing – by
hollowing out companies.
In the West being more efficient
has become a holy cow against which it is a mortal sin to speak out. As
long as this is the case, ICT and the Information Society has some sort
of privileged respectability. But there clearly has to be a limit to the
acceptability of efficiency. What would we do if we were able to find
Aladdin’s genie and, as a result, we no longer needed any labour to
produce the goods and services and keep the records we need? Would we
continue to survive if our only purpose in life was leisure?
This is explored in more detail
below.
§ Thirdly, there is the
problem of defining the boundaries of ICT itself in this context. There
are certain components of ICT, from mainframes to the Internet, on whose
inclusion all would agree. But should we include DVD players? What about
television, radar, superhet radios, the Morse telegraph? Those who talk
of the information society as a 1990s phenomenon sometimes appear to
equate this development with the explosion in commercial and personal
use of the Internet c. 1995. There is a good case to be made that the
modern, electricity based information society began in the 19th century.
§ For the purposes of this
remainder of this paper, ICT will be defined as technology which uses
computers and/or networks technology. Broadcast technologies, such as
television and radio and non PC based home entertainment technologies
will be excluded from the discussion except where those technologies are
a direct spin off or result of developments in ICT (such as DVDs and
game boxes) or are differently enabled by ICT.
6. What’s on the scorecard?
As already stated, the approach
used in this paper is loosely based on the concept of the balanced
scorecard . As a first step in this process, this section sets out a
list of benefits and disbenefits resulting from the impact of ICT on
society. The objective here is to try to distil out those effects, which
can be attributed either entirely to ICT or substantively to ICT. We
start with benefits.
6.1 Benefits
The benefits of the Information
Society can be classified into a number of broad headings. These
headings are not mutually exclusive, but are a useful way of grouping
issues. The following are not in any particular order of importance:
§ Economic. Although it
has proved impossible to prove with the mathematical rigour that some
academic researchers demand (see Loveman (1994), Brynjolfsson 1993,
Brynjolfsson and Hitt 1994; 1999 for valiant attempts at this) there is
a broad agreement that ICT has improved productivity and consequently
economic wealth over the past forty years (though a few still deny
this). In areas as diverse as health and aviation, the contribution of
ICT to improvements in safety and quality are enormous.
§ Educational. This is not
simply a result of the availability of distance learning, but is due to
the ability of people, from schoolchildren to post doctoral researchers
to use the web for research and to buy interactive CDs or DVDs. The
economics and reach of learning have been and are being transformed.
§ Convenience and time.
Developments in information technology have greatly reduced the tedium
of day-to-day tasks for many citizens. Their impact here may be less
than that of the automobile or even the washing machine, but are not
negligible. From pre-programmable DVD recorders to paying taxes on-line,
technology has eliminated innumerable time-consuming ways of doing
uninteresting things.
§ Entertainment. This
covers a range of areas from more interesting jobs for many, to access
to a wide array of entertainment. Any reader of the novels of, say, Jane
Austin or William Thackeray, will soon realise that a problem of even
the wealthier classes in the 17th and 18th centuries was boredom. - no
radio, TV, etc.
§ Communication. ICT has
opened up new channels of communication. In a society which is
increasing mobile and fragmented, technology offers a way of
strengthening the social fabric and cohesion. Communication also enables
specialist interest groups to connect and exchange information and to
the establishment of so-called virtual communities.
§ Access to information.
The web in particular has opened up new vistas enabling the ready
acquisition of information (and, of course, the dissemination of
information). This has wide implications from choice of TV channel to
the distribution of power within society - even at the most basic
levels. For example, it is not unknown for lay people walking into their
local surgery with an unusual complaint, to know more about their
condition and its treatment than their doctor.
§ Political and
democratic. ICT has created new freedoms by enabling, for example,
freedom of information access and ability to communicate and mobilise
political resources. Developments in e-democracy, while still embryonic
hold out the promise of a more engaged community with the social
benefits that should flow from this. The demand on government to be able
to immediately respond to questions and criticism is also seen as a
development of the Information Society.
§ Reduction in risk. ICT
has reduced life risks both directly and indirectly in numerous ways
from medical technology to better weather forecasting. The ability of
computer modelling to simulate and predict events such as earthquakes is
still at a primitive stage, but these and many other problems may be
solved in time.
§ Ecological. This is a
mixed effect, but, in theory at least use of communications technology
reduces use of paper and to some degree the need to travel. To be
balanced, there are negative impacts as well from the toxic nature of
components like circuit boards which are hard to dispose of in an
environmentally friendly manner.
§ Information ecology.
Developments such as narrowcasting, customer relationship management,
targeted and permission marketing enable organisations to confine the
information sent to customers and clients to what it wanted and
relevant. True, this is still in the embryonic stages and is currently
overwhelmed by spam, but in the longer term it will improve everybody’s
life.
Falling cost and rising affluence
have made information available to almost all. Unlike other consumer
goods such as up-market cars or exclusive wines, information comes at
low, in many cases more or less zero, cost. The only barrier is
education, as local libraries will provide the access to the web for
free and Internet cafes, often open 24/7, mean no capital investment is
required to join the party.
6.2 Disbenefits
It has already been suggested that
the impact of the information society had not (or may not be) entirely
positive. Once again, it is useful to classify these and again not
necessarily in order of importance.
§ Information overload.
This is well documented (Shenk (1997); Wurman et al (2001)). There is a
school of thought that says that people are often happier or at least
more content when their options are limited. While some people revel in
freedom and anarchy, many people prefer to have many decisions taken for
them.
§ Unwanted information.
This is at its more obvious in the form of spam, but it is also manifest
in the vast volume of advertising that clutters up web sites and
television channels. At an altogether more serious level is the unwanted
pornography and other trash that comes in, unwanted, through the
electronic door.
§ Information inaccuracy.
On its home page Google points out that it is currently searching well
in excess of three billion web pages. There is no quality or content
control on the vast bulk of this. As the saying goes, on the Internet,
nobody knows that you are a dog.
§ New forms of crime. The
Internet in particular has enhanced the ability of certain types of
criminal to operate. Fraud, identity theft and blackmail are examples of
crimes that have been extended by technology. A particularly horrific
type of crime is the use of the Internet for child pornography.
§ Collateral economic
damage. This is related to the preceding point and occurs where illegal
use of technology undermines a whole industry or social structure. A
good example of the former is the music industry which has suffered
enormously not just from traditional piracy, but from wholesale
exchanges of material by individuals. This needs to be clearly
distinguished from normal casualties of new technology where industries
are displaced by legitimate substitution.
§ Vulnerability. Societies
are increasingly dependent on complex system to work. If such systems
fail, there can be major problems, a phenomenon foreseen by Forster
(Burton et al 1974) and vividly illustrated by the problems in 2003 with
the electricity grid in the northeast US and by the Sobig.F virus and
the havoc it played with e-mail systems around the world. Concerns are
increasing being expressed that viruses will contaminate machines
without even requiring a mail to be read or an attachment opened.
§ Disruption and
displacement. Peters (1991) celebrated this in his book, Thriving on
Chaos. Grove coined the phrase ‘Only the Paranoid Survive’ (Grove 1997).
But most people do not welcome chaos. Choice can be stressful and too
much choice can lead to other problems, not least of which might be who
gets to determine which television channel to watch!
§ Destruction of ‘social
capital’. A phenomenon some observers have commented is ‘cocooning’.
This is the increasing tendency of people to communicate electronically
rather than personally. Electronic communication (notwithstanding the
use of smiley symbols used in e-mails and text messaging) is an
impoverished form of communication when compared to face-to-face
contact. The most vivid description of this phenomenon can be found in
Putnam (2000). Putnam does not blame information technology for this
problem although he includes it as a key culprit. Ellis’ (1995) bleak
portrait of an affluent and bored culture is another side of this
phenomenon.
§ Increased economic
competition for advanced societies. One’s view of this depends on one’s
political perspective, but it can be argued that, as a good, information
is much more difficult to control than physical goods and it knows no
frontiers. This means that developing countries can offer services
remotely which undercut more advanced economies. A good example is
outsourcing of computer centres to third world countries.
§ Reductions in (or at
least threats to) civil liberties. This covers a number of headings from
CCTV to electronic snooping (both state and private). As our society
becomes more dependent on ICT, it becomes progressively easier to track
what people do. The current proposal to put chips into all motor
vehicles would enable the police to detect when a vehicle was parked
illegally or broke the speed limit. Some may regard this as quite right,
many if not most would find the idea that the police can always know
where we are an unacceptable prospect.
§ Globalisation of
culture. The entire world becomes a giant exercise in branding. People
buy into global ‘lifestyles’ which are relentlessly hawked through the
cyberspace of web, television, radio and mobile phone. The world is not
so much becoming a McLuhan's global village, as a global shopping mall.
§ Lower quality
employment. Certain developments, notably call centres, have been
criticised as the sweat shops of the 21st century. By removing the
personal and social aspects of employment and by reducing employees to
extension of their machines, instead of vice versa, the quality of life
of many young people is reduced. Despite all the machinery, people are
still working longer hours (CGIU 1999).
§ Health risks. This is
divisible into the known and the unknown. The known includes repetitive
injury strain, eye strain and other effects of poor ergonomics. The
unknown includes the impact of continuous low levels of electromagnetic
radiation (particularly from mobile phones) on the body. The risks in
the latter case may be small, but the potential consequences are
enormous.
If asked, most people in the
developed world would be of the view that ICT has been a good thing. It
would be a brave parent who would try to separate their fifteen-year-old
from her mobile phone. The purpose of this article is not even to
suggest that there is a potentially negative net impact. However there
are negative impacts and the lack of balanced analysis is a serious gap
in the literature. For many years, the world has steamed ahead with the
development and deployment of new ICTs without any serious academic
questioning of the long term impact of this. As this preliminary
analysis has shown, the news is not all good. There are questions that
need to be asked.
7. Conclusion
This paper has not provided
definitive method with which to evaluate the information society. Its
primary purpose was to explore the extent of the problems involved in
this endeavour. Modern society is materially wealthier and better
informed that ever before, yet some subversive authors have argued that
we are actually worse off in terms of the sum of human happiness (Douthwaite
2000). From an ICT perspective, there is no doubt that that an
Information Society is richer than previous societies in many ways. It
offers new worlds of knowledge, increases choice, provides greater
freedom of expression, simplified processes, saves time and money and in
general empowers the citizen and the consumer. On the other hand, it
deluges the citizen with information of doubtful quality, creates
anxieties associated with having too many options, allows intrusive
freedom of expression to those from whom people may not wish not to hear
and threatens the privacy and civil liberties of the citizen.
Furthermore, it can be argued that just because there is a demand for
more, satisfying that demand will lead to better things. It is not,
therefore, obvious, that more is always better.
As often in these areas, this
problem is most vividly captured by the artist rather than the scientist
or academic. Several writers of fiction have already been cited and we
will conclude with another. In his short story, Come, Follow Me, the
Irish author Jack Harte (1986) tells of a street in a town where people
played cards with each other every evening. It was a social event that
all enjoyed and in which all participated. One day a mysterious stranger
comes to the street and innocently suggests that games would be more
interesting if they were played for money. At first this does make
things more interesting, but soon greed takes over and vicious
rivalries, enmities and accusations ensue. When, at the end of the
story, the mysterious stranger departs, he leaves behind the wreckage of
a contented society - where there was once harmony and contentment,
there remains nothing but misery and bitterness. Harte’s parable depicts
a fundamental problem with progress. We need continually be persuaded
not only to want more, but be convinced that having it enhances our
quality of life. But the motives of the persuaders are not always pure
and the consequences may not always be a better life or a healthier
society.
If we are to be sure that what we
are being offered will improve our lives we need a reliable means of
assessing what we are being offered. We need the tools to evaluate the
Information Society. This paper has offered some initial ideas. Much
more remains to be done.
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