Impact of computer-based information
systems on society
Preoccupation with information and knowledge as an
individual, organizational, and societal resource is
stronger today than at any other time in history. The
volume of books printed in 16th-century Europe is
estimated to have doubled approximately every seven
years. Interestingly, the same growth rate has been
calculated for global scientific and technical
literature in the 20th century and for business
documents in the United States in the 1980s. If these
estimates are reasonably correct, the growth of recorded
information is a historical phenomenon, not peculiar to
modern times. The present, however, has several new
dimensions relative to the information resource: modern
information systems collect and generate information
automatically; they provide rapid, high-resolution
access to the corpora of information; and they
manipulate information with previously unattainable
versatility and efficiency.
The proliferation of automatic data-logging devices
in scientific laboratories, hospitals, transportation,
and many other areas has created a huge body of primary
data for subsequent analysis. Machines even generate new
information: original musical scores are now produced by
computers, as are graphics and video materials.
Electronic professional workstations can be programmed
to carry out any of a variety of functions. Some of
those that handle word processing not only automatically
look for spelling and punctuation errors but check
grammar, diction, and style as well; they are able to
suggest alternative word usage and rephrase sentences to
improve their readability. Machines produce modified
versions of recorded information and translate documents
into other languages.
Modern information systems also bring new efficiency
to the organization, retrieval, and dissemination of
recorded information. The control of the world's
information store has been truly revolutionized,
revealing its diversity in hitherto unattainable detail.
Information services provide mechanisms to locate
documents nearly instantaneously and to copy and move
many of them electronically. New digital storage
technologies make it economical for some to obtain for
personal possession those collections equivalent to the
holdings of entire libraries and archives. Alternately,
access to information resources on electronic networks
permits the accumulation of highly individualized
personal or corporate collections in analog or digital
form or a combination of both.
As the imprint of technology expands, some of the
fundamental concepts of the field, which often took
centuries to evolve, are strained. For instance,
information technology forces an extension of the
traditional concept of the document as a fixed, printed
object to include bodies of multimedia information.
Because of their digital form, these objects are easy to
manipulate; they are split into parts, recombined with
others, reformatted from one medium to another,
annotated in real time by people or machines, and
readied for display in many different formats on various
devices. Control of these "living" documents,
which mimic human association and processing of ideas
and are expected to become one of the most common units
of the digital information universe, is but one of the
challenges for the emerging virtual library of
humankind.
An equally significant new dimension of modern
information systems lies in their ability to manipulate
information automatically. This capability is the result
of representing symbolic information in digital form. Computer-based
information systems are able to perform calculations,
analyses, classifications, and correlations at levels of
complexity and efficiency far exceeding human
capabilities. They can simulate the performance of
logical and mathematical models of physical processes
and situations under diverse conditions. Information
systems also have begun to mimic human cognitive
processes: deductive inference in expert systems,
contextual analysis in natural-language processing, and
analogical and intuitive reasoning in information
retrieval. Powerful information-transforming
technologies now available or under
development--data/text to graphics, speech to printed
text, one natural language to another--broaden the
availability of information and enhance human
problem-solving capabilities. Computer
visualization is dramatically altering methods of data
interpretation by scientists; geographic information
systems help drivers of the latest automobiles navigate
cities; and interactive applications of networked
multimedia computers may, for some, replace newspapers,
compete with commercial broadcast television, and give
new dimensions to the future of education and training
at all levels of society.
Information systems applications are motivated by a
desire to augment the mental information-processing
functions of humans or to find adequate substitutes for
them. Their effects have already been felt prominently
in three domains: the economy, the governance of
society, and the milieu of individual existence. |