Information Technologies

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Information and communication technologies have significantly altered the ways in which we work and live. They have changed practice at both the individual and institutional level. Many of us have come to rely on certain technologies, such as email, mobile phone technologies, e-commerce etc.  Having vast quantities of information at our fingertips has become a way of life. We are able, at the click of a mouse to keep up to date with current events, discover that hard to find article for an assignment or communicate in real-time via text, audio, video or all of the above, with colleagues, friends and strangers from around the globe. In short, information technologies and the Internet specifically, have become powerful agents for change and the exciting part is – the development and continued evolution of this amazing technology has occurred in our lifetime. We are actually part of the making of history, every day, with our online interactions and we have the opportunity to engage actively and intelligently in this evolutionary process.

 

Any evolution requires a past, and to be active intelligent users of the Internet, one thus requires an understanding of the history of this technology.  The term ‘information technology’ in the past, has referred to the computer on a desk in a workplace. Computers were used in these environments as a tool – a typewriter, calculator or storage device. The relative expense of computers prevented many people from using them in their homes, when a typewriter would perform the same task at a fraction of the cost.  The advent of email triggered a gradual change in the perception of computers merely as a ‘glorified typewriter’.  Computers now began to have some of the qualities of a communication medium as email was more widely embraced. With the subsequent development and expansion of the Internet, computers came to be seen as ‘media’. Information and news is broadcast on the Internet, similar to television, and consequently has the potential to reach a much wider audience than was the case with email.  It is this broadcast quality that has put information technology into a similar category as the mediums of radio and television. People now talk about the Internet and computers in terms of a ‘communication and information technology’ (Kitchen, 1998).

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The Internet had its beginnings with the development of the packet switching concept by Paul Baran from Rand in 1962. Tim Berners Lee’s development of the “Hypertext Markup Language” in 1990 was a significant development and I remember that! I was working in the computer industry all through the 1990s and witnessed my office connecting to the Internet for the first time. You don’t feel the same sense of familiarity with the history of Australia for instance. Captain Cook is no longer alive and you certainly can’t email him and get a response!

The dream behind the Web ...

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