The Information Age Task 2

The Information Age


Stage 2 – Life in the Information Age


Working styles –

ICT technologies have a variety available, a large shift in the working styles of the majority of the working population. It has now changed the way people work and where they work. Now using ICT has changed jobs in a vast way because most job roles nowadays require some sort of ICT skills. For example an accountant who would be using pencils, calculators writing in all the money that goes in and out of the business now uses spreadsheet packages. Also more employees working in offices are now expected to use and learn how to word process documents and also use email so it is easy to email people and other employees around the business.
Furthermore people use ICT to make there work more productive and make the presentation up to a quality standard. In many situations the use of ICT gives more freedom and self reliance to some staff that work around in different sorts of business. There are huge amounts of benefits that can be explained, ICT has made life more creative and more efficient, and it has also brought benefit of responsibility. Using ICT allows more people to communicate more efficiently and effectively.
Drawbacks would be that people will not socialise as much, meaning if a person is emailing someone all the time, then they will not actually be speaking to them, and also if there is a video conference to person to person then the people who are taking that call will actually not meet, so it takes away a big part of your social life.


Communication

In the information age has changed in a key focus on communications. Nowadays most businesses and young people has changed very from the way there parents or guardians or maybe even grandparents communicated in the early 1980’s. Communication such as email, instant messaging and any sort of communication that involves using ICT has vastly become the way to communicate. We now communicate more often and much more quickly now, basically the advantage is that we can all now communicate globally with the advantage of ICT with no extra cost.

Email is probably the most popular type of communication all over the world. Email just brings so many benefits towards people and other businesses, basically the biggest benefit of all is the fact that it has relatively low cost to the person that is sending messages to people or businesses. However email is not as free as it is at the moment. The only major drawback is spam and junk mail, mostly 40% of emails are either spam or junk mail, or even advertisements that are not wanted.


Education

Education and ICT put together has had a massive impact, but now it is more destined to grow. Nowadays education is basically became a lifelong activity for everyone because we learn new things every single day. People went to school education and collage from the age of 4 – 18, or maybe then perhaps go onto university where some people stay on for more than 3 years. After having finishes all the education and what they have studied, people are expected to go onto a career, however people were just expected to just have one career in there life, nowadays people can expect at least a couple of careers in there life, demands change so much even with the same career because technology has changed so much that they need to keep learning new skills to use different technology.
Many people that believe that education should take much advantage of the technology that is brought just for education, this is because due to the fact that it will deliver better lessons to students. Having special and advanced projectors for students to watch power point presentations that teachers have created for students to watch can be displayed so the whole class can watch, this is a big advantage for education, because this saves printing out lots of slides for students so it saves paper as well. So in conclusion the use of technology and ICT has helped so many schools, collages and university because it has so many benefits towards education and education has taken advantage of this situation.

Entertainment and Leisure

The junction impact of digital technologies on entertainment has been overly huge and this is still going. Digital technology has been touched by practically every area. Other areas there brings benefits like that create more personal activity and choice, producing music, video, sound, radio, magazines, books and art digitally is now very simple to use and is relatively inexpensive to produce. At a professional and amateur level the entertainment media are frequently stored, transmitted digitally. It has been easier to make and record music now, it has been easy to install soundcards and now it has been easier to record and mix music productively and successfully on a home computer. There are many types of software that people can use that allows people to create stylish and creative backing tracks, create computerised drum kits and machines that will create the solid sort of rhythm and beat. Every one can create a successful recording, and the big advantage is that if a person creates a mistake, using the editing tool means that they can edit bits and take them out or even create a new piece of backing track and put it into the original piece. As well with music, companies can now produce TV and radio programmes, Distributing all over the world and broadcasting.


Civil Rights

There are many data about people, however if there is more technology that people can use to monitor and keep record of will benefit the society and keep the area safe, then the more likely it is that peoples right to privacy and civil rights as a whole are more likely to be compromised. Using compulsory ID cards will make an aspect so contentious, it will be then linked towards the national database, then a great deal of information can be stored onto the database about every individual. As well, this will then be linked with the national insurance numbers, drivers licence number etc. to other databases which will then be put together will then give access to an extraordinary amount of information about every individual. In the coming years in the UK it is ID database is intended to be the foundation of identity management.