The impact of computer technology0

The Internet represents the backbone of a rapidly changing online world that has undoubtedly changed the way in which we undertake many of our day to day activities in modern western society. Despite enormous technological hurdles, the uptake and growing ubiquity of the Internet has been considerably fast; it has been a mere fifteen years since the Internet first commonly appeared in homes and society has moved very quickly from a traditional voice-only telephony system to a radically interconnected media rich array of applications and protocols, the most common implementation of which is the World Wide Web. Information can now be feed through a socket in the wall, or wirelessly, to virtually any populated region on Earth. Unprecedented information and services are now available on the Web to augment, or sometimes replace, traditional services. Indeed, there are now low cost services that offer services exclusively online; there are branchless banks (http://www.ingdirect.com.au), computer driven insurance agencies (http://www.bingle.com.au) and dubiously cheap airline carriers (http://www.tigerairways.com) that offer low cost services without the need, and often the opportunity, to interact with another human being face to face. For many people the Web represents un-paralleled efficiency and independence to perform everyday tasks such as paying bills (http://www.bpay.com.au), doing taxes (http://www.ato.gov.au – e-tax), shopping (http://www.amazon.com) and even being your own travel agent (http://www.webjet.com.au); all of which can be done at any place, at any time, where an Internet enabled computing device and connection are available. Inevitably such sweeping changes challenge some accepted ideas of everyday life and there is considerable debate over the anticipated problems and benefits as we shift to a more digitally connected society.

The Internet is an interactive medium that replaces or augments technologies, such as telephony, that preceded it. It is also a mass medium, along the lines of television and radio, that allow people to get lost in vast, overwhelming amounts of information delivered almost anywhere they may be in the planet. This century promises to be one where technologies will have a profound impact of our everyday lives, yet too often such technologies may be seen a universal solution. The Internet is slowly drawing people away from activities that once occupied their lives – for some this is an enriching endeavour that enables them to communicate with family and friends, locally and globally, and for others it has become a more passive and time consuming activity, more so than watching television, and it is stealing people away form families and communities (Lesnard, 2005). It is important to take a step back and begin to consider the ethics and controversies associated to involving technologies in everyday life (Mahfouz, Philaretou, & Theocharous, 2008). For example, as the first generation of post-Internet children reach maturity it is becoming more understood that Internet usage can have surprisingly adverse effects on individuals, negatively influencing social behaviour, habits and abilities (Chang & Man Law, 2008). Further consequences may include loss of sleep (Nlawa & Anand, 2003), social withdrawal, loneliness, depression and poor health (Morahan-Martina & Schumacher, 2000; Chang & Man Law, 2008; Mahfouz, Philaretou, & Theocharous, 2008). Users’ perceptions of time, reality and one’s self can be significantly altered when using the Internet. There is much concern for the adverse effects this may have on adolescents (Nlawa & Anand, 2003) and may be cause for more serious concern when considering that up to sixty per cent of people who use the Internet regularly may exhibit problematic Internet-related behaviour (Morahan-Martina & Schumacher, 2000). And, whilst social media sites can be seen as having many positive effects for people, and are often regarding as an exiting opportunity for young people, there are a number of growing problems arising relating to privacy. There are concerns over who owns online content, and some matters pertain to a negligence of user bases reading the fine print. MySpace have been criticised for claiming copyright ownership of all content uploaded to their website, including music by successful or up-and-coming recording artists. Long time British recording artist Billy Bragg removed music uploaded to the then incredibly popular website after recognising that he would effectively be handing over copyright to the entity (Bragg, 2006). Such concerns seldom bother young people – Livingston (2008) describes young peoples attitudes of social media as having “little sense of privacy and a narcissistic fascination with self-display” (Livingston, 2008, p. 393). Consequently, risks may arise from teenagers’ naïve self display of personal-information as they struggle for Internet literacy whilst fulfilling their need to belong (Livingston, 2008, p. 408).

Perhaps the foremost issue of the impending Information Society, in any global sense, relates to what is described is “the digital divide”. The digital divide essentially describes the gap of people who have adequate access to digital technologies and those who do not. It is a complex and multifaceted issue relating to combinations of region, gender, income and equality, the upshot of which is that least developed countries of the world do not have information infrastructure and access to technologies anywhere nearly as ubiquitously as developed countries; as low as 1.5 per cent compared the 60 per cent, respectively (World Information Society, 2007, pp. 21-2). The extensive populations of such countries and the stagnant rate of inequity within them further compound this. Although the uptake of Internet access around the world steadily increases, less than one quarter of the global population have access to the Internet (MDG Gap Task Force, 2009, p. xii). In a global economy, such gaps are proving to become a significant disadvantage that continues to show little, or no, improvement in many developing countries. There are initiatives and discussions within the UN to consider Internet access, as an enabling tool to towards other rights, to be a fundamental human right in itself (Best, 2004). Best argues this case very passionately, believing that current interpretations of the Internet in relations to human rights are too focussed on the potential problems than the benefits and cites numerous examples providing links between Internet connectivity and economic and cultural development, such as “the level of Internet connectivity is a strong predictor of levels of democratic attainment” (2004, p. 24, citing Kedzie, 1997). There are a number of international efforts to raise awareness of, and combat, the problem of access and equity in developing nations including the United Nations Millennium Development Goal Gap Task Force and the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) (http://www.olpc.com) foundation. ). Unfortunately, many such efforts have unfortunately failed to live up to expectations or stalled due to lack of investment in the wake of the global financial crisis (MDG Gap Task Force, 2009). The revolutionary mission of OLPC is “to ensure that all school-aged children in the developing world are able to engage effectively with their own personal laptop, networked to the world, so that they, their families and their communities can openly learn and learn about learning” (OLPC Foundation). The OLPC Foundation had intended to ship 150 million units annually by 2007, however several factors have seen the project scale back dramatically and, as of June 2009, only 300,000 units had shipped world-wide (Kraemer, Dedrick, & Sharma, 2009, p. 68). Any effort to provide access to such technologies in developing countries is not without merit, and certainly the OLPC scheme has seen increased competitive interest in a previously non-existent market; however, the project does demonstrate the heightened the awareness, and difficulty, of dealing with such issues.

According to Lesnard (2005, p. 17) here may be sociologically important aspects of the Web, such as pornography and gambling, that are yet to be extensively investigated. Pornography and gambling represent a large proportion of online commerce (Lesnard, 2005) and there are now companies, such as Party Gaming ( http://www.partygaming.com ) that have floated on the stock exchange and superseded earnings of motoring companies. There are also emerging social pornography websites akin to successful .com start-ups like Yahoo! ( http://www.yahoo.com ), such as Fantastic (http://www.fantasti.cc) whose incomes, although difficult to ascertain, are almost certainly of some degree of significance as increased usage and prevalence of such sites may be cause for concern in the future. Such sites are easily accessibly to children who seek them and there are serious concerns raised over the exposure of pornography to children (Lesnard, 2005), particularly considering the ramifications of childhood and teenage sexual development (Ybarra & Mitchell, 2005). Ybarra & Mitchell’s (2005, p. 474) survey found that more than half of the adults surveyed are concerned the childhood exposure to pornography will encourage them to have sex earlier in life and half believe it will promote a negative attitude towards women. Whilst such concern in itself may not be cause for alarm, and exploration of sexual material may be a naturally curious part of a growing adolescent, there are very few (Lesnard, 2005), if any (Ybarra & Mitchell, 2005), studies investigating potential effects on young children in any real depth.

As worldwide Internet usage continues to grow there are wider concerns and implications on a number of international fronts, relating particularly relating to non-English speaking countries. Internet usage has seen dramatic increase in countries in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East and a problem becoming increasingly prevalent is that the Web is effectively geared to serve English speaking users. Whilst there are somewhat simplified issues relating to the effectiveness and efficiency of multi-lingual search engine support (Chung, 2008) there are certainly wider issues relating to Web being American-based, English-speaking, and Western-focused (Hedley, 1998). Consider, as a simple example, the common QWERTY keyboard as the most standardised keyboard available to many counties and how such an input device prefers Latin, and perhaps specifically English, based character sets. Another simplified problem pertains to the registration of domain names of the Web, which, at present, can only be registered using the standard characters of the English alphabet. This approach undoubtedly favours English speaking languages and American interests. American domains are represented by the broad top level domains (TLDs), such as .com, rather than their own country specific domains, such as .com.au and .co.nz, for example. To its credit, the governing domain name registration body, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), has recently released a proposed final implementation plan for the registration of domain names using non-English characters (ICANN, 2009); although not less than after 15 years of US favoured dominance.

It is conceivable, and perhaps naïve to deny, that the most interesting outcomes of an information society are still yet to be discovered. In 2003 Lyman & Varian(Lyman & Varian, 2003) estimated that there was around 800 megabytes of information produced for every person on Earth, and that, whilst much of this data is mundane, some of the data is of much interest. There have been considerable attempts by organisations and governments to digitise, and make available, large amounts of information that would otherwise have been inaccessible. The expanding user base of data and the growing ubiquity of its availability offer researchers and developers exciting opportunities to transform raw information into meaningful and practical representations. The Australian Government has recently joined the growing trend of releasing large sets of publically available data (http://data.australia.gov.au/) and to encourage participation, the Government has supported IT focussed events, such as the recent Gov Hack event in Canberra (http://www.govhack.org) to promote the creation of “mash-ups”. Mash-ups involve interplay between raw data and a meaningful, or entertaining, representation of that data, often from two or more sources. Whilst many current start-up mash-up initiatives may have limited real-world appeal they certainly represent a burgeoning application of data representation that allows creative individuals and organisations to provide innovative and potentially useful implementation of raw information. Hellerstein, et al., (2009) believe that database usage in research is at a historical turning point driven by the explosion of data availability and improvements of hardware systems and interoperability of remote data-stores with local systems. Not unlike mash-ups, data management will gradually move away from single database systems into services that can interconnect with one-another in more meaningful ways than previously possible.

Further to digitising and making available large repositories of information, Google Books (http://books.google.com) is an initiative to make publically available searchable repository of millions of international works from across the ages. Hailed as a “culmination of a democratization of knowledge” (Herwig, 2007), the collection has already scanned over 10 million books and is now working with libraries across the world to preserve, and make available, the collective works of the 20th century (Brin, 2009). Problems, at least in developed countries, no longer relate to technical issues, they are social, legal and economic (Varian, 2005, p. 65). Socially, almost 800 million adults in the world may be illiterate, with two thirds of these adults being women(OECD, 2006). Economically it becomes difficult to determine payment models for authors and respective owners of works. However, the most difficult immediate hurdle, one that Google Books is experiencing the most criticism over, are the legal problems relating to digitising such works mainly pertain to acquiring permission from the copyright holder of the works. Copyright laws in the United States have limited capacity for dealing with orphaned works (Varian, 2005, p. 66), where the copyright owner for works is nearly impossible to find and digitising such works without the consent becomes a complex legal issue – one of many examples in which laws have been unable to catch up to the rate of technological advances.

Given the ease of online communication that supports and empowers users to create content and collaborate online, it is foreseeable that the Web may give unprecedented power to consumers and the general public. The Internet may be one of the most powerful mediums ever actualise consumer power and consumers have already made effective use if online technologies to do so. Whether to boycott international brands of, such as Pepsi or Nike products for exploiting undeveloped economies, or uncovering leaked corporate and government documents, such as Wikileaks (http://wikileaks.org), the ease of reaching a sustainable global audience and joining a cause has never been easier. Boycotts can be an effective tool to shape government and corporate policies (Zureik & Mowshowitz, 2005, p. 48) and as “consumers are increasingly called upon to join the anti-consumerism bandwagon” (Zureik & Mowshowitz, 2005, p. 49) the Web is a powerful too able to offer a means to determine and reach an appropriate target audience. Moreover, the political world is gaining its own advantages from online communities – it can only be inferred that the rigorous online YouTube (http://www.youtube.com) presence of Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd (http://www.kevinpm.com.au) in 2007 and American president Barrack Obama (http://www.barackobama.com) in 2008 were significantly advantageous in their campaigns. But, perhaps more importantly, as discussed earlier, the correlation of democratisation and Internet access is anecdotally demonstrated in media oppressed regions, such as the Middle East, where YouTube videos and Twitter (http://www.twitter.com) streams are reaching a worldwide audience fuelling discussion and concern on the state and stability of some nations.

The uptake and apparent ubiquity of the Web has not only changed the way in which we can access information but it has radically changed the way we create and publish information. Wikipedia (http://en.wkipedia.org) – “The Free Online Encyclopaedia” represents a radically different ideology to creation and distribution of information. Most current educational models would consider it incredibly dangerous to value unfiltered input in this way, which may create a culture of distrust by perpetuating the idea that you, and others around you, cannot be trusted; arguably a poor model in education. Wikipedia instead creates an environment of trust and instead has processes for dealing with issues as they arise – “which, as it turns out, they mostly don’t” (Wales, 2007). One of the major criticism is that community driven content often contains errors, and, while this is inevitably true, it also turns out to be a valuable assets as content can be updated and corrected much easier and quicker than any other means. The journal Nature (Giles, 2005) compared the accuracy of scientific articles in Wikipedia with articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica by sending the content to specialists in the given field. Of the articles reviewed there were eight serious errors, of which Wikipedia and Britannica had an equal share of four each. Perhaps the most surprising aspect is not that Wikipedia had errors, but that the gold standard, Britannica, had errors also, proving that user generated content can be as credible as traditional content generated by experts. Technologies like the ones outlined above, represent a change of the way in which informational material is developed and distributed; information is produced individually or collaboratively by combinations of experts and the general public, contradictory to the traditional content producers comprised solely of professionals and experts. Furthermore, the resulting information is freely distributed and accessible to a worldwide audience rather than being confined to traditional, and often expensive, textbooks, encyclopaedias and courses. Lastly, the capacity to network with other learners can be said to facilitate deep level learning. Since not all knowledge is individual, a learner’s ability to converse with other learners without the need for face to face contact is a big plus for the technology because it aides socially constructed knowledge accessible at not only within educational institutions and professional organisations but at home and in the workplace.
As ease of available information retrieval and creation may be set to cause and online revolution, the face of education, on a global and local front, is set to embrace an impending learning revolution. Online learning is one of the latest social media adaptations that may augment, or replace, the way in which people learn in a variety of situations. It is already acting a successor to traditional distance education (Hiltz & Turoff, 2004). Learning is set to become a commodity in the post-modern world (Lanshear, Peters, & Knoble, 2000) and consequently there will be shift toward a learning society. It is plausible that such a shift cannot be facilitated exclusively within traditional educational institutions and we may see the role of the physical teacher become less important (Candy, 2004, p. 41). Papert (1998) suggested over a decade ago that schools were already poorly equipped to deal with rising educational demands and the production-line model employed by traditional schooling is already at breaking point. In the face of a collapsing educational system, a paradigm shift that takes opportunities that digital technologies offer is an increasingly important consideration. It is plausible that a continued digression along traditional paths may leave educators forever catching up to a forthcoming digital revolution. As with many Internet implementations, Web technologies use in education may still very much in it’s infancy (Candy, 2004), but once we can break free of many of the underlying ideologies, paradigms and pedagogies we may begin to develop online specific pedagogies that use the web to engage learners in effective constructivist and deep-level learning along the lines of which we haven’t seen since the advent of the printing press.

The Web has undoubtedly become and important and integral aspect of many peoples daily lives throughout the world, particularly in developed nations. On a global scale, the Internet is beginning to offer increasingly exciting opportunities affecting the everyday life of those fortunate to have access. Whilst there are concerns with developed countries monopolising control and use of the Internet, there are suggestions that the Internet will become such an integral part of daily life that it should be considered a human right. There are continuing efforts to connect the other five-sixths of the globe that have yet to be able to gain access – and, rightly so; the Web has been shown to correlate with democracy, facilitate freedom of information, and encourage freedom of speech. The Internet may also prove to be one of the greatest tools ever harnessed for education and may prove to provide serious educational advantages to those with little opportunity. As vast amounts of information around the world become unlocked, the very near future will almost certainly produce exciting research opportunities that may benefit the way we view our world in an unprecedented way. However, developed nations are beginning to see the effects of prolonged use of the Internet, resulting in reduced social contact and potentially putting young people at risk. It is important that the Web is still viewed as a bourgeoning technology to handle carefully and to ensure that problems addresses or avoided as they may arise. As much as the Internet has already infiltrated many of our lives it there is still much reason to believe that, arguably, the most interesting and exciting Web driven benefits and changes to our daily lives are still yet to come.

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