Information Technology and Society IBM（社会信息技术和IBM）.pdfVIP

Information Technology and Society By: Michael Gutmann Student Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich Ecole Centrale de Paris Spring 2001 Michael Gutmann ugutmann@ee.ethz.ch gutmanm3@cti.ecp.fr 1 Introduction Talking about information technology I will join a huge community of people who have already spoken and written about this vast subject. The term information technology or IT is popular and when I looked for it in todays New York Times, I encountered the term in the sections Business, Technology, Arts, N.Y. Region and Automobiles. However, people often mistake the meaning of often-used terms and seldom know their definitions. For example, when you ask someone for the significance of IT, they will respond, “it has something to do with informatics” or “it is connected with the hardware and software”. A valid definition [1] says: Information technology (abbreviation IT) is the science and activity of storing and sending out information by using computers. As a matter of fact information is a subjective term. In order to put the definition in a more succinctly manner, I would like to replace information with the neutral term data. Using computers answers the question how the data is stored and sent. As computers can differ, I prefer to replace these terms by the more modern computer concept, namely digitalisation. Moreover, to include data processing in this definition, I prefer to say “moving