Social impacts of IT

P6

Before Information technology had its ‘BOOM’, there were other ways to communicate. We communicated through one to one interaction to start off which is face to face communication, people now days can get lonely because they are losing the interaction due to locking themselves away on consoles etc. We also used letters more because we did not have the internet so written communication was nice to receive one and also postcards were lovely to receive as well. Within the last 10 years lots of social networking sites have been created for example Facebook was created in 2004 and twitter was created in 2006. Fax was created in the late 1990s and then instead of sending letters people could fax them instead, it’s quicker and simpler. It is a machine that allows you to write a message on a piece of paper and place it in the machine and then send it anywhere it is quick and doesn’t cost much to send a message however sending a letter would take a while.

The internet has created threats to the world such as Cyber Bullying which is the use of the internet to harm or harass people, SPAM which is the use of messages to bribe you to open and give your details or something else, PHISHING which is attempting to get information such as surnames, passwords etc., And Denial of services or denial of service attack is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users.

Online banking, now people can participate in online banking however there are good and bad things about it, for example, online banking saves time and easy to transfer your money from one account to another and however if you don’t know how to use it then it can download a virus onto your device and people can get your details, also with online banking you are able to use it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Online shopping is also like online banking, there are good and bad things about it, it is easier and quicker to order your shopping because you can flick through the pages of food, drink etc. and click on what you want and then you can have the shopping delivered to your door and you don’t have to leave your house however there are some disadvantages to online shopping which are that’s orders can get mixed up, bank details can be stolen and they can take more money than they are supposed to also due to online shopping it has effected businesses because businesses that have websites then their business is ok but businesses that don’t have websites, like the small businesses have gone bust. Also another disadvantage to online shopping is that if they don’t have the thing you want in stock they often send a replacement and sometimes the quality of the item is not as good as was expected.

Mobile phones have developed since 1905; we first had the brick mobile which was 0g. it could only ring, then we developed them for texting, since then we have had nokia’s, Motorola’s, iPhones etc. and now we have Samsung watches and now we can use the internet on phones to Skype, social networking and much more and now it is like a mini computer. However there are disadvantages to mobile phones, they are: that they produce radiation and can spread round your body and they can produce viruses.

Computer misuse comes into this because in 1990 the computer misuse act was introduced. The computer misuse act is designed to protect computer users from theft of information; this includes hacking, unauthorised access and damaging software. The internet now uses E-Commerce which is a whole new world of shopping both for the customer and the retailer. In this country and other countries people without access to computers and internet are affected because if they live in the middle of no ware then they can’t access it which means that they are missing out on a lot of things that are available. However now there are a lot of things getting done to change this.