the impacts of ICT

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1.3 Life in the Information Age

ICT has changed the way we live our lives. It affects everyone from professionals to working class people. ICT has created a different lifestyle for students, professionals, social life personal/everyday life. ICT can become a way of earning money to just being a source of entertainment. I will discuss the impacts of ICT through:

  • Entertainment and Leisure
  • Communication
  • Education
  • Banking and Shopping
  • Employment Opportunities

Entertainment and Leisure

We will look at way in which the way we entertain ourselves has changed.

Music

ICT takes part enormously when it comes to entertainment and leisure. Music used to be played in large black discs which would spin 45 laps per minuite. CDs finally came in the 90’s. CD’s in the early 90’s could not be copied. CD-RW did not exist then so everybody would buy original copies of CD’s, which was good for music industries, because to get hold of music you would have to buy the CD. The CD-RW was invented in the late 90’s and everyone copied CD’s and began to sell them for cheaper prices than original CDs. Economy for music industries went on a downfall. By then the Internet was something worth a lot and not many people had it. You could then share music with people all over the world through the Internet and then put it on CD. So we can see how ICT was having an impact on music.

    MP3 Players allows downloading music from their computer and are smaller than the palm of your hand. The first MP3s were invented in 1999. They could take about 128mg, to 512mg. Now in 2006 an MP3 can hold up to 60GB worth of songs. The bigger the memory the more amount of music it can take. Almost everyone has the Internet from working class people to professionals in the UK. Millions of people worldwide connect themselves to web-sites such as Kazaa and Limewire to downlaod eachother’s music. This gives access to any type of music you like without having to pay for it in shops such as MMV. If you have an MP3 you can store all your music there. MP3s can cost as little as £15. The use of copying CD’s or downloading music from kazaa and limewire is illegal. But nothing seems to be done about it. Although it is also illegal in 3rd world countries, the government allows the process of copyright because nobody would buy original CD’s.

    At the moment in 2006 there are different types of digital audio players:

A common one is just a normal CD player (as shown above), which is adaptable to play CDs, which have MP3 files. (Probably taken from the Internet)

A Flash Based Player is a solid device (as shown above) which is basicly used to just store music in an internal or external way such as memory cards, generally with a low storage device of 128MB-4GB. They generaly have USB devices to add and remove music. A Flash Based Player is like a solid memory device which people use to store music or other files.

Hard Drive-based Players or Digital Jukeboxes (as shown above) are devices that read digital audio files from a . They have a massive memory capacity of 1.5GB to 100GB, depending on the hard drive technology. This means you can store up thousands of songs in just one MP3 player. This shows us how ICT changes the way we listen to music, we can now listen to music so easily without ever even changing CDs because it can all be on an I-pod. The   and  are examples of popular digital jukeboxes.

People can just put headphones on an MP3 and listen to music with so much comfort.

 

Information for MP3 players was taken from

I interviewed my cousin, Tony Gallardo, Hispanic, age 30, on his opinions of the change in which music is affected by ICT. I asked him a few questions. His answers were,

   “thanks to the CD-RW I can make my own CD’s the way I want it to be. Thanks to MP3 I can listen to music at work. You wont have problems like your CDs getting scrathed”. He also commented,

Join now!

   “with my laptop I have all my music organised by artist, genre etc… so I am much more organised”.

Films

ICT has made home look like a cinema. We have big plasma televisions. Almost everyone I know has a 32 inch widescreen tv. DVDs are invented now which are exactly like CDs but hold a much larger amount of memory and contains a movie. DVDs give a perfect footage, unless there has been illegal copyright. Televisions these days, even if it’s a cheap one, give good quality. With DVDs and a good television for example a SONY plasma ...

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