Today, humanity has come to a qualitatively new stage of its social evolution. The sphere of technological and industrial achievements is developing regularly, so human activity has become non-functional without the products of technological progress. Information technology affects society much more than it did at the beginning of the millennium.
In today’s world, there is no one human who could do without information technology in the home and professional activities. In this article, we would like to tell you about the pros and cons of information technology and learn some general factors of their influence on human activities.
Information technology: strengths and weaknesses
Modern society has long become a complex organized system. However, it has become part of the world’s information and communication technology space. As a result, humanity has a new type of social organization.
Information technology has become a significant vector in the development of society. Thanks to them, people have the opportunity to exchange information quickly and efficiently, as well as to transform it into a form of new knowledge. At the same time, thanks to informatization, many objects, ways, and methods of information processing have become equal, and new types of communication between people have appeared.
Anyway, there are inefficient vectors in the development of modern information technology, too. For example, many countries have a level of computerization that still lags behind that of some pure states.
Today, global informatization gives humanity more than just increased productivity and innovation in producing goods and services. In the course of IT development, our society receives new dangers and risks, too. The stability of society and the internal unity of humanity are being disturbed, so social and inter-ethnic tensions remain a pressing problem in the modern world.
Informatization brings many dangers to our world. Let’s take a look at a few of them:
- the appearance of virtual reality, which distorts the material world;
- controlling social consciousness and behavior of social groups;
- replacing values and traditions with new standards that do not always benefit society.
There is one main problem that came into society as a result of the development of information technology. We mean the so-called information intervention. That is the capture of the cultural, economic and educational space of one nation or society by another. Thus, the risks of information warfare have increased. Also, there is now an information weapon that criminals can use against states, their control apparatus, society, and social groups or individuals.
Increasing the status of information owners is another threat to the information society. Today, that person has the power to have information. Among those are confidential information and valuable data. Such a phenomenon increases the dispersion of crimes based on blackmail and psychological violence. In addition, it creates new ways to falsify information. This is typical for an era of political wars to the maximum.
Conclusion
Public progress has gained many new opportunities. This would not have been possible without the intensive development of information and communication technologies. Today, they have infiltrated all the fields of our activity and helped society follow a better path for its progress.
Many information technology pros and cons verify it. However, we are sure that humanity is still far from the perfect information community, so it will overcome many years of scientific progress in the future.