Information Communication Technologies and Society

Americans spends nearly 14 hours of a day on Internet. Around 233 countries surf WWW. There are almost 50,562,886 active domains are attractive crowd to surf. Goggle, Yahoo and MSN dominates search engine market. Once again human has been successful to develop virtual world and no doubts we are greatly fascinated by its effects.

Rather simply calling to shopkeepers and ordering necessity through telephone, we are becoming now habitual to meet shopkeepers or mall sellers online, browsing catalogue and just marking checkbox to select product and pay through credit cards to order checked products. E-commerce and e selling are strongly backed up by supply chain of delivery boys or services like FedEx.

Our society is a collection. It is made of communities, nations, broad groupings based on common traditions, interests, activities, philosophy, race, mythology or religious practice. We have a family, home, friends, opposites and unknown around us. Our life is influenced by fashion, trends, social, political and economical aspects. The foremost I should mention is technology and science.

With growth of science and technology, we are forgetting the fraction. Earlier fraction was the major invention. Alexander Graham Bell, a pioneer in the field of telecommunications invented "Electrical speech machine" in 1876. The same telephone is a fraction to use Dial up Internet. Yet it has not lost its value. However there are set of examples which has lost its value due to rapid changing faces of society. It should not be wrong to say that we are moving slowly to Internet based society.

Learning from history, I would say, technology that supports business or makes business is paid highest attention and driven to growth. Information Technology is from the same disk. The site that has in depth relation with business is mostly visited. However any sites that look for donation for the cause of society benefits need to wait for visitors.

The growth of Information Technology and the growth of business are tightly intermingled. If you talk about IT, you have taste of business somewhere in your tongue. With idea of sharing and improving on knowledge and wealth, it has been possible to do business & commerce over mobile (M-Commerce). We are the witnesses of such an explosive growth in networking and telecommunication industry. According to Forrester Research, worldwide B2B and B2C was expected to grow to an exceptional $6.8trillion by 2004. B2C e-commerce in the United States was expected to reach at $184.5 billion by the same year.

The most successful players in quick running race were Amazon, eBay, Napster, Google, HotMail, Expedia and Yahoo! No doubts Dot Net burst crashed many small companies.
With business Information Technology brought a series of business words e.g. ERP, SCM, CRM, BPM, B2B, B2C, KM, Offshore and many more.

Where it sounds great of hearing e-business with nice cup of tea on mobile, you fail to avoid pornography and music or data piracy on moving cameras or laptops on other hand. Either Internet has become easy medium to commit old crime like fraud, obscenity, incitement to hatred in a new way or it has further facilitate to birth of crimes such as paedophilia and child pornography. Due to digitalization and speed of Information Technology and Communication, privacy has gone in danger. Exchange of materials over Internet like material relating to sex, violence, discrimination, drug addiction and cult worship are some examples proven as harmful, if not illegal. Censorship or blocking or controlling crimes are standing and being very active challenges to society.

The benefit that I cannot really ignore presented to world by ICT (Information and Communication Technology) is covering up distance shorten. Internet Relay Chat is mostly tossed word over Internet. Because of ICT, the establishment of more numbers of virtual societies has been possible. There are millions of people to be heard here.

The fast conversation of paper to electronic forms, we are able to read books, newspapers, magazines and thesis over Internet or Intranet. The knowledge sharing process is speedier now. Conversation through Internet Telephony or data transfer through NET has made virtual office or virtual libraries and e-learning concept possible. We are now enough open to share world’s information making it available and useful universally.

Accepting ICT as one medium of communication, spiritual groups are well establishing their feet on Internet. Thoughts and notes from great religious & spirituals manuscripts or Vedas are available to read on Internet. Video, Sounds and group chats become strong to spread knowledge and messages.

The investment made in Search engines and Internationalization reaps benefits of availability of text, graphics, video or voice over Internet in accepted languages.

It depends on our countries policies & attentions and our intentions to fetch good out of new born & developed society leaving illegal & harmful aspects.