The Impact of ICT on Society

Ben Pull Candidate number: 5099 Centre number: 19237

I will talk about how ICT has effected people from all walks of life, how it has effected jobs and living conditions.

The impact of ICT on society is great. As more and more people begin to work from home, or jobs become de-skilled, computer based, the social implications are going to be very serious.

The most important issue is increased leisure time, and as more work is done in less time, the result should mean more leisure time. In some rare cases this does happen. Take for example small businesses, or larger teleworker companies where people are allowed to work from home. Leisure time does not always increase, the managers and the companies require the workers the same amount of time spent on the job, so people should become more productive and a lot more work will be done. A bonus of this would be that as leisure time increases, the leisure industry will grow, and more people would use the leisure time, which would improve the workers morale.

Another effect of ICT on the society is the introduction of home shopping over the Internet, this aspect could possibly result in people never leaving their homes, doing everything from home, possibly resulting in house bound individuals who could not leave their houses even if they wanted to.

Continuing on this vein, talking about working at home, the amount of required offices may be reduced. This would both result in fewer buildings in the city centre and reduce traffic pollution from people who are no longer required to commute to work.

There are definite upsides to home shopping however, ...

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There are definite upsides to home shopping however, people who cannot currently leave their houses, the physically disabled people or people who are too busy to do anything to do shopping, who currently rely on other people to do their shopping, near-free internet shopping could allow people to be more independent and less reliant on other people.

Returning to teleworkers and working from home, people may feel that they are never away from work and as the number of teleworkers increase, their work and home life will occur in the same place, resulting in a blurring of the boundaries between work and home, perhaps resulting in little or no work being done due to it. Alongside this, teleworkers would be at home, with more distractions, and probably more responsibilities as they are at home they may be expected to look after children, do housework and possibly cook for their partner.

However an advantageous implication of ICT would be the homes we live in, heating, lighting, and appliances can now all be controlled by computer, so you never have to leave your workstation. The only possible downside to this would be the problems with creating an age of super geeks; these teleworkers with high spec homes would have no reason to leave their homes, which could give those people serious mental physical and social problems.

Talking about disadvantaged people, people that are in some way are barred from attending a work place in conjunction with an obvious physical impairment, could not previously work, with thanks to home working, these people can now compete with any able-bodied worker in computer based tasks.

A very negative problem with home working would be the huge possibility of reduced privacy, as at home, you are less likely to have the high level security a standard business would have. And as more and more information is collected and stored on us, using cameras and secretly located spy ware on our PC’s privacy becomes a big issue, company or trade secrets could be released on to the internet, it is very important to keep things private. However with the use of increasingly more sophisticated equipment to search the data on us, privacy is most definitely harder to achieve.

Another important issue is the currently less computer related jobs, for instance manual jobs. These jobs have been greatly reduced by computers and technology. Assembly work on production lines has been replaced by computer-controlled machinery such as robots and computer controlled forklift trucks.

A good point would be, the creation of new more interesting (in my opinion) jobs. Examples of these would be systems analysts, programmers and software engineers, as well as help desk operators and computer trainers. However the bad side to this would be that certain jobs have disappeared, for instance card based database workers had to re-train or get the boot.

This has increased unemployment. The new jobs created by ICT do not outnumber those lost to ICT. This has led to the creation of an underclass of people, who cannot afford to have a PC because they have no job to gain any money.

This final point could either be a good or a bad point; the need to continually update your skills. Because of the fast pace of change in ICT, people need to continually learn new skills, or find themselves unemployed.

In conclusion, I am of the view that ICT has improved lives and destroyed others, I feel that as ICT development is inevitable I will support it and work to keep myself up with technology so I do not become obsolete.