SOCIAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS

SOCIAL AND TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS
First, there are social and organizational changes. Information-processing has become increasingly visible and important in economic, social, and political life. One familiar piece of evidence is the statistical growth of occupations specializing in information activities. Numerous studies have demonstrated substantial growth in information-based occupations. These occupations now take the largest share of employment in the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other industrial societies. The biggest category is information processors—mainly office workers—followed by information producers, distributors, and infrastructure workers.
Second, there is technological change. The new information technology (IT) based on microelectronics, together with other innovations such as optical discs and fibre optics, underpins huge increases in the power, and decreases in the costs, of all sorts of information-processing. (The term “information-processing” covers the generation, storage, transmission, manipulation, and display of information, including numerical, textual, audio, and video data.) The information-processing aspects of all work can be reshaped through IT, so the revolution is not limited to information occupations: for example, industrial robots change the nature of factory work.
Computing and telecommunications (and also such areas as broadcasting and publishing) used to be quite distinct industries, involving distinct technologies. Now they have converged around certain key activities, such as use of the Internet. Using the same underlying technologies, modern computing and telecommunication devices handle data in digital form. Such data can be shared between, and processed by, many different devices and media, and used in a vast range of information-processing activities.
The pace of adoption of new IT has been very speedy: it is markedly more rapid than that of earlier revolutionary technologies, such as the steam engine or electric motor. Within 25 years of the invention of the microprocessor, it had become commonplace in practically every workplace and many homes: present not only in computers, but also in a huge variety of other devices, from telephones and television sets to washing machines and children’s toys.