Being Fluent with Information Technology

Box 1.1 - Possible Social Effects of Information Technology

Information technology has brought or is bringing more abstract or intangible changes than those enumerated in the text.

• Freedom. Information technology is an enabler for the opportunity for individuals to express themselves freely, unfettered by intermediaries. For a modest investment in a computer and the nominal cost of a connections to an Internet service provider, anyone can post anything on a personal home page or say anything in a chat room, and the potential audience for such postings is quite large. Such convenient, inexpensive, and sustained opportunities for free speech are unprecedented, as are the dark sides of easy expression (e.g., the ease of disseminating misinformation or disinformation, hate speech, child pornography, and so on).
• World connectivity. Information technology is cheap, fast, "point to point," and asynchronous, giving e-mail a convenience and immediacy that postal and telephonic communications have never had, and a personalization that broadcast media cannot provide. With the World Wide Web, access to local information is possible at unprecedented speeds—one can read the Sydney Morning Herald in Sydney, Nova Scotia, at the same moment that Australians are reading it. The ease with which information technology allows citizens of the world to keep in touch with people and events elsewhere unifies the world profoundly. And this effect will increase as information technology becomes adopted more completely around the world.
• Loss of remoteness. A corollary to the world-connecting property of information technology is that information resources are now much more accessible to individuals worldwide. Although the entire holdings of the New York Library will not soon be completely online, the informa