The New Information Society

We constantly hear today about the new technology and how important

it is for our future. Most people had never heard of the phenomenon before

the end of the 1970s, and their experience was limited to a small nunlber

of gadgets based on microelectronics, such as pocket calculators, digital

watches and electronic games. They may have known of the existence of

word processors as being sophisticated and very expensive forms of

typewriter, but the average person had probably never seen such a device,

let alone had access to one. Of course, many were aware that computers

were increasingly being adopted by a variety of organizations because their

bills, wage or salary slips, air tickets, cheques and bank statements contained

an array of digital figures, but this hardly seemed to be of major significance

to their way of life.

After all, the members of modern societies are used to new inventions,

and there was no particular reason to suppose that this microelectronics

technology was any more significant than other technological inventions

that had emerged before. Ever since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution

there has been a deluge of technological development s which have resulted

in new products and industries, larger markets, increased productivity,

economic growth and a level of prosperity which earlier generations would

never have believed possible. Those who had predicted that the replacement

of human labour by machines would lead to widespread unemployment

and human misery had been proved wrong. Why then should this

technology be any different from what had gone before? Surely the

development of the new technology should create even more wealth, new

employment opportunities, and perhaps even the dawn of a new

information age of increased leisure where human beings would be

liberated from the constant need to work in order to survive?

Microelectronics has already been extensively applied in many sectors