The Impact of ICT on Society

The Impact of ICT on Society

I will talk about how ICT has effected people from all walks of life,

how it has effected jobs and living conditions.

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The impact of ICT on society is great. As more and more people begin

to work from home, or jobs become de-skilled, computer based, the

social implications are going to be very serious.

The most important issue is increased leisure time, and as more work

is done in less time, the result should mean more leisure time. In

some rare cases this does happen. Take for example small businesses,

or larger teleworker companies where people are allowed to work from

home. Leisure time does not always increase, the managers and the

companies require the workers the same amount of time spent on the

job, so people should become more productive and a lot more work will

be done. A bonus of this would be that as leisure time increases, the

leisure industry will grow, and more people would use the leisure

time, which would improve the workers morale.

Another effect of ICT on the society is the introduction of home

shopping over the Internet, this aspect could possibly result in

people never leaving their homes, doing everything from home, possibly

resulting in house bound individuals who could not leave their houses

even if they wanted to.

Continuing on this vein, talking about working at home, the amount of

required offices may be reduced. This would both result in fewer

buildings in the city centre and reduce traffic pollution from people

who are no longer required to commute to work.

There are definite upsides to home shopping however, people who

cannot currently leave their houses, the physically disabled people or

people who are too busy to do anything to do shopping, who currently

rely on other people to do their shopping, near-free internet shopping

could allow people to be more independent and less reliant on other

people.

Returning to teleworkers and working from home, people may feel that