THE DIRECTION OF THE INFORMATION REVOLUTION

THE DIRECTION OF THE INFORMATION REVOLUTION
The outcome of the information revolution is seen by some commentators as likely to be as profound as the shift from agricultural to industrial society. Others see the transformation as essentially a change from one form of industrial society to another, as has happened in earlier technological revolutions.
One major issue is how rapidly social institutions adapt to take advantage of the new ways of doing things that new IT makes possible. While some jobs and some areas of people’s lives do seem to have changed rapidly, many others appear to have been affected relatively little. Historians point out that it can take a very long time for what in retrospect seems the obvious way to use a technology to become standard practice. For example, electric motors were first used as if they were steam engines, with one centralized motor powering numerous devices, rather than numerous small motors, each powering its own appliance.
New IT has often been introduced into well-established patterns of working and living without radically altering them. For example, the traditional office, with secretaries working at keyboards and notes being written on paper and manually exchanged, has remained remarkably stable, even if personal computers have replaced typewriters.Often the technology that gains acceptance is that which most easily fits within traditional ways of doing things. For example, the fax machine, which could take hand-written or typed notes, and was often delegated to a secretary to use, was hugely successful in the 1980s. At the beginning of that decade, it had been predicted that fax would rapidly die out, and e-mail would take its place; but this proved to involve too much organizational change.