Unit 14: Computers In Society

Steve Roberts, Technomad

In 1983 Steve Roberts realized he wasn't happy chained to his desk and his debts. So, he hit the road on Winnebiko, a custom recumbent bike equipped with a tiny Radio Shack Model 100 laptop and a small 5-watt solar panel. He connected each day to the CompuServe network through pay phones, transmitting magazine articles and book chapters.

Roberts later replaced Winnebiko with more powerful vehicles, and now mixes bicycling with "high-speed relocation" to accommodate consulting and speaking engagements, all the while connected electronically to the support facilities in his laboratory.

Computer technology has changed the way millions of people work by providing new choices and opportunities. For other, less fortunate workers, technology has taken away choices and opportunities.

Before the twentieth century, humanity experienced two major paradigm shifts; changes in thinking that result in a new way of seeing the world&endash;the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution.

 

Three Monumental Changes

Prehistoric people were mostly nomadic hunters and gatherers.

The Agricultural Economy

The transformation to an agricultural economy took place over several centuries around 10,000 years ago. The result was a society in which most people lived and worked on farms, exchanging goods and services in nearby towns.

The Industrial Economy

By the end of the nineteenth century, the world was dominated by an industrial economy in which more people worked in urban factories than on farms. Increasingly more wealth was in the hands of fewer people. As towns grew into cities, crime, pollution, and other urban problems grew with them.

The Information Economy

Twentieth-century information technology produced what's been called a second industrial revolution, as people turned from factory work to information-related work. In today's information economy (sometimes called a postindustrial economy), clerical workers outnumber factory workers, and most people earn their living working with words, numbers, and ideas. Instead of planting corn or making shoes, most of us shuffle bits in one form or another.

Technology was central to each of these transformations. The agricultural economy grew from the plow, machines sparked the industrial revolution, and the information age is so dependent on computers that it's often called the computer age.

Computers and Change

The impact of information technology on society today falls between the utopian and anti-utopian visions that commonly appear in today's writing.

It's becoming harder all the time to find jobs that haven't been changed in some way by computers. The three computerized workplaces that have attracted the most attention are the automated factory, the automated office, and the electronic cottage.

The Automated Factory

In the modern automated factory, robots are used for painting, welding, and other repetitive assembly-line jobs. Computers also help track inventory, time the delivery of parts, control the quality of the production, monitor wear and tear on machines, and schedule maintenance. As described in Unit 7, engineers use CAD and CAM (computer-aided design and manufacturing) technologies to design new products and the machines that build those products.

• An automated factory is more efficient than a traditional factory for two reasons:
• Automation allows for tighter integration of planning with manufacturing, reducing the time that materials and machines sit idle.
• Automation reduces waste in facilities, raw materials, and labor.

The Automated Office

As the number of factory jobs declines, office work plays a more important role in our economy. Modern offices, like modern factories, have been transformed by computers. Many automated offices have evolved along with their computers.

 

Office Automation Evolution

Office automation goes back to the mainframe era. Early computer systems were faster and more accurate than the manual systems they replaced but were rigid and difficult to use. This kind of centralized computing placed computer-related decisions in the hands of central data processing managers.

Personal computers changed all that. In many organizations, power struggles erupted between mainframe advocates and PC enthusiasts.

Enterprise Computing

Today most organizations recognize the importance of PCs. Some companies have abandoned mainframes altogether; others still use them for their biggest data processing tasks.

In the age of networks, the challenge for a company's information systems manager (sometimes called an IS manager, information technology manager, or IT manager) is to integrate all kinds of computers into a single, seamless system.

This approach, often called distributed computing (or sometimes enterprise computing), allows PCs, workstations, minicomputers, and mainframes to coexist peacefully and complement each other.

Workgroup Computing

New classes of multiuser software, or groupware, allow groups of users to share calendars, send messages, access data, and work on documents simultaneously. Many groupware applications focus on the concept of workflow&endash;the path of information as it flows through a workgroup. With groupware and telecommunication, workgroups don't need to be in the same room&endash;or even in the same time zone.

The advent of the World Wide Web changed the workgroup landscape. Corporations started installing intranets using HTML, Web browsers, and other Internet technologies. And because these intranets were built on standardized protocols, corporations could open up their intranets to strategic partners and customers, creating extranets.

The Paperless Office

Experts have also predicted the paperless office&endash;an office of the future in which magnetic and optical archives will replace paper documents.

To reduce the flow of paper, a growing number of organizations are turning to document imaging systems that can scan, store, retrieve, and route bit-mapped images of paper documents. Interactions between these devices and networked workstations are generally handled by an image server&endash;a computer dedicated to the single task of image management. In the near future we may see a less-paper office, but a paperless office seems unlikely.

The Electronic Cottage

Electronic commerce has been around for years in its most basic form&endash;buying and selling products through a computer network.

Today's telecommunications technology opens up new possibilities for modern workers to return home for their livelihood. Telecommuting by modem replaces hours of commuting by car in rush-hour traffic.

Futurist Alvin Toffler popularized the term electronic cottage to describe a home where modern technology allows a person to work at home. There are many strong arguments for telecommuting:

• Telecommuting reduces the number of automobile commuters, thus saving energy, reducing pollution, and decreasing congestion of highways, streets, and parking lots.
• Telecommuting saves time.
• Telecommuting allows for a more flexible schedule.
• Telecommuting can increase productivity.

Telecommuting isn't for everybody. So far, telecommuting has been slower to catch on than many experts predicted. Some analysts suggest that as multimedia teleconferencing systems become affordable, telecommuting will become more popular with both workers and management.

In the meantime, several variations on the electronic cottage are taking hold. Many enterprising families use home computers to help them run small businesses from their home offices. A growing number of corporations and government organizations are establishing satellite offices and shared regional work centers outside of major urban centers that allow workers to commute to smaller offices closer to their neighborhoods. High-powered portable computers allow people to take their offices with them wherever they travel.

Computers today have become indispensable tools for managers.

 

Management Information Systems

Modern managers use management information systems (MISs) to help them with planning, organizing, staffing, directing, and controlling their organizations. The term management information system (which is often shortened to simply information system) means different things to different people. More commonly, a management information system is defined as a computerized system that includes, among other things, procedures for collecting data, a database for storing data, and software tools for analyzing data and producing a variety of reports for different levels of management.

A top-level manager uses a MIS to examine long-term trends and relationships between departments. Middle-level managers use the same MIS to produce departmental summary reports. Low-level managers focus on day-to-day operations with detailed reports from the MIS.

The MIS can produce regularly scheduled periodic reports, but it can also help managers deal with unusual situations by producing reports on demand.

Decision Support Systems

For nonroutine decision making, many managers use another type of system called a decision support system (DSS). As the name implies, a DSS is a computer system that supports managers in decision-making tasks.

Other Management Tools

Project management software helps coordinate, schedule, and track complex work projects. Expert systems (see Chapter 12) can provide expert advice in limited areas. Spreadsheets (see Chapter 6) can manage budgets, make financial projections, and perform a variety of other useful functions. On-line information services (see Chapter 9) can provide instant information from sources all over the world.

Some managers complain that information systems provide too much information&endash;too many reports, too many printouts, too many summaries, too many details. This malady, known as information overload, is a hazard of the automated office.

This section explores several controversies and issues resulting from the automation of the workplace.

Productivity and Profit

Studies suggest that computerization has, at best, increased the productivity of North American office workers only slightly. Part of the problem may lie in the difficulty of making large software systems work reliably.

Productivity and PCs

The productivity problem isn't limited to large systems; there's no hard evidence that PCs increase office productivity the way managers hoped they would. Several factors may be involved:

 

• Distractions. For some people, personal computers offer too many options.
• Reliability. Many workers lose productive time working around software bugs and recovering data from system crashes.
• Rapid changes. For many organizations, technological progress is the culprit.

Productivity and People

The biggest productivity problems may be related more to people than to machines.

Many analysts argue that the most successful computer systems are human-centered, designed to retain and enhance human skills and control rather than take them away. Many experts believe that this human-centered approach is a key to increasing overall productivity.

De-skilling and Up-skilling

When a job is automated, it may be de-skilled; that is, it may be transformed so that it requires less skill.

In sharp contrast to those whose jobs are de-skilled into electronic drudgery, many workers find their jobs up-skilled by automation.

Monitoring and Surveillance

Another controversial aspect of office automation is computer monitoring&endash;using computer technology to track, record, and evaluate worker performance, often without the knowledge of the worker.

For a manager worried about worker productivity, computer monitoring can serve as a valuable source of information. But computer monitoring brings with it several problems:

• Loss of privacy
• Loss of morale
• Devalued skills
• Loss of quality

The Electronic Sweatshop

Computer monitoring is common practice in data-entry offices. Many data-entry workers experience headaches, backaches, serious wrist injuries, stress, anxiety, and other health problems.

Writer Barbara Carson calls these worker warehouses electronic sweatshops, because working conditions bring to mind the oppressive factory sweatshops of the nineteenth century. A growing number of electronic sweatshops are located across national borders from corporate headquarters in countries with lax labor laws and low wage scales.

The electronic sweatshop is the dark side of the electronic office. Ironically, computer technology may soon make electronic sweatshops irrelevant. Optical character recognition and voice recognition technologies are rapidly becoming more practical for real-world applications.

Workers Against Machines

In the early nineteenth century, an English labor group called the Luddites smashed new textile machinery; they feared that the machines would take jobs away from skilled craftsmen. Modern workers have been no more successful than their nineteenth-century counterparts in keeping computers and robots out of the workplace.

Technology may be helping to create an unbalanced society with two classes: a growing mass of poor, uneducated people and a shrinking class of affluent, educated people.

Cautiously Optimistic Forecasts

A number of studies suggest that, at least for the next few years, technology will stimulate economic growth. This growth will produce new jobs, but it will also bring long, painful periods of adjustment for many workers. Demand for factory workers, clerical workers, and other semiskilled and unskilled laborers will drop dramatically as their jobs are automated or moved to developing countries where wages are low. At the same time, the demand for professionals&endash;especially engineers and teachers&endash;will rise sharply.

Will We Need a New Economy?

In the long run, education may not be enough. It seems likely that, at some time in the future, machines will be able to do most of the jobs people do today. We may face a future of jobless growth&endash;a time when productivity increases, not because of the work people do, but because of the work of machines.

If productivity isn't tied to employment, we'll have to ask some hard questions about our political, economic, and social system.

• Do governments have an obligation to provide permanent public assistance to the chronically unemployed?
• Should large companies be required to give several months' notice to workers whose jobs are being eliminated? Should they be required to retrain workers for other jobs?
• Should large companies be required to file "employment impact statements" before replacing people with machines, in the same way they're required to file environmental impact statements before implementing policies that might harm the environment?
• If robots and computers are producing most of society's goods and services, should all of the profits from those goods go to a few people who own the machines?
• If a worker is replaced by a robot, should the worker receive a share of the robot's "earnings" through stocks or profit sharing?
• The average work week 150 years ago was 70 hours; for the last 50 years it has been steady at 40. Should government and business encourage job-sharing and other systems that allow for less-than-40-hour jobs?
• What will people do with their time if machines do most of the work? What new leisure activities should be made available?
• How will people define their identities if work becomes less central to their lives?

Rules of Thumb: Considering Computer Careers

If you're interested in a computer-related job, consider the following tips:

• Learn touch-typing.
• Use computers regularly to help you accomplish your immediate goals.
• Don't forsake the basics.
• Combine your passions.
• Ask questions.
• Cultivate community.
• If you can't find your dream job, build it yourself.
• Prepare for change.

Computers in Schools and Homes

Rand and Robyn Miller Build a World

Robyn and his brother Rand Miller created a company called Cyan in a garage-style shop in Spokane, Washington, after combining their programming artistic talents to create hypermedia children's software. Their first program, aimed at adults, was an attempt to create a computer game that could entertain without resorting to violence. The result was Myst, a CD-ROM that defined a new art form and a unique entertainment experience for millions of computer users worldwide. Myst was the first smash hit CD-ROM; its sales passed the million dollar mark while most of the world was still trying to figure out what interactive multimedia was.

The American educational system was developed more than a century ago to teach students the basic facts and survival skills they would need for jobs in industry and agriculture.

This industrial-age system has been described as a factory model for three reasons.

• It assumes that all students learn the same way and that all students should learn the same things.
• The teacher's job is to "pour" facts into students, occasionally checking the level of knowledge in each student.
• Students are expected to work individually, absorb facts, sit quietly in straight rows, and speak only on command.

Information-Age Education

What should education provide students in the information age? Research and experience suggest several answers:

•  
• Technological Familiarity. Many of today's older workers are having trouble adjusting to the information age because of technophobia&endash;the fear of technology. To prepare for this world, students need to learn how to work comfortably with all kinds of knowledge tools.
• Literacy. It's more important than ever that today's students graduate with the ability to read and write.
• Mathematics. To survive in a high-tech world, students need to be able to see the mathematical systems in the world around them and apply math concepts to solve problems.
• Culture. Liberal arts and social studies help us recognize the interconnections that turn information into knowledge.
• Communication. Modern jobs involve interactions&endash;between people and machines and between people and people.
• Learning How to Learn. Experts have predicted that 80% of the jobs that will exist in ten years do not exist today, and that most of those new jobs will require education past the high-school level.

Computer-aided Instruction

B. F. Skinner built a teaching machine&endash;a wooden box that used cards, lights, and levers to quiz and reward a student. His machine was based on the principles of behaviorist psychology: When personal computers appeared in classrooms, students started using drill-and-practice software based on the same principles&endash;individualized rate, small steps, and positive feedback.

Pure drill-and-practice programs don't teach new material. They're designed to help students go over material they've already learned, to get it better. Tutorial software provides direct instruction in a clearly specified skill or subject.

Drill-and-practice software and tutorial software are often referred to as computer-aided instruction (CAI) software. Most CAI programs combine tutorial material with drill-and-practice questions, in the same way a math textbook alternates explanations with exercises.

CAI software is the most common type of courseware (educational software) for three reasons:

• It's relatively easy and inexpensive to produce.
• It can easily be combined with more traditional educational techniques.
• It produces clear, demonstrable results.

CAI offers many advantages over precomputer media:

• Individualized learning
• Motivation
• Confidence

Research also suggests that much CAI software is flawed because it gives inappropriate feedback, allows students to practice mistakes, and discourages students from moving into new material. Even the best CAI only works with tightly defined subjects&endash;subjects where every question can have a single, clear, unambiguous answer. CAI presents information in the form of facts and it leaves no room for questioning, creativity, or cooperation.

Programming Tools

With his colleagues at MIT, Seymour Papert developed a computer language called LOGO so kids could program computers, rather than the other way around. LOGO creates environments for learning. The most famous of these LOGO environments allows children to draw pictures using a technique called turtle graphics.

LOGO helps children learn advanced computer science concepts like recursion&endash;the ability of a program or procedure to call, or refer to, itself. Debugging is part of programming, and kids who learn LOGO learn that making mistakes is part of the process.

LOGO has other environments that go beyond geometry and graphics. LEGO LOGO allows kids to use LOGO commands to control motorized machines and robots built out of LEGO building blocks.

Research suggests that LOGO enhances creativity and originality in children, but there's no evidence that it improves their general thinking skills more than other teaching tools.

LOGO, like Pascal and BASIC, is less popular in schools today than it was a decade ago. Today's computer applications make programming seem irrelevant to the average student.

Simulation and Games

Papert based his educational psychology on the work of renowned Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. According to Piaget, children have a natural gift for learning on their own; they learn to talk, get around, and think without formal training.

Many educational simulations today are based on the same idea: Children learn best through exploration and invention, which are provided by these simulations.

It's difficult to prove the effectiveness of simulation games because they generally aren't designed to teach simple, measurable facts.

Productivity Tools

Today the trend in schools is clearly toward teaching children to use computers as tools. Word processors, spreadsheets, databases, graphics programs, and desktop publishing software are the tools students learn to use most often in schools.

Some schools also provide special-purpose tools for classroom use, including:

• laboratory sensing hardware and software that can be used to collect scientific data and convert it into computer data to be analyzed by students
• collaborative writing groupware that allows students to work collectively on creative writing and editing projects
• music synthesizers with sequencing and notation software for teaching music composition

A growing number of teachers are using computer graphics, videodiscs, CD-ROMs, and other digital media to convey information to students in a more dynamic form.

Presentation Aids

From the teacher's point of view, the material can be customized to meet the needs of the class.

Hypermedia and Interactive Multimedia

From the student's point of view, teacher-controlled media presentations are still passive, linear affairs. To get students more involved in the learning process, many teachers use hypermedia and interactive multimedia software that puts students in control.

Authoring by Students

To maximize student involvement, some teachers put multimedia authoring tools in the hands of students. Instead of creating interactive lessons for students, teachers allow the students to create their own multimedia presentations.

This kind of student involvement promotes learning, but it has drawbacks. One problem is economic. The other problem is both social and political: The teacher becomes a supervisor and a mentor rather than a conveyor of information. This is threatening to many administrators, teachers, and parents who are used to the old ways.

Distance Learning: Virtual Schools

For some students the most important application of computers in the schools is distance learning&endash;using technology to extend the educational process beyond the walls of the school.

Telecommunication technology is particularly important for students in remote locations.

Distance learning also offers promise for workers whose jobs are changed or eliminated by a shifting economy.

High Marks

A 1990 report by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), called

Vision: TEST (Technologically Enriched Schools of Tomorrow), summarized the research on computer technology in the classroom like this:

• Students improve problem-solving skills, outscore classmates, and learn more rapidly in a variety of subject areas when using technology as compared to conventional methods of study.
• Students find computer-based instruction to be more motivational, less intimidating, and easier to persist with than traditional instruction.
• In many cases, students' self-esteem was increased when they used computers. This change has been most dramatic in cases of at-risk and handicapped youngsters.
• Using technology encourages cooperative learning, turn taking among young children, peer tutoring, and other valuable social skills.

Other studies conducted in the 1990s support these conclusions and suggest others:

• Computer technology can make learning more student-centered and stimulate increased teacher-student interaction.
• Well-designed hypermedia systems can encourage active processing and higher-order thinking.
• Students who create hypermedia reports often learn better than those who learn with more traditional methods.
• Students can become more productive, more fluid writers with computers.
• Positive changes occur gradually as teachers gain experience with the technology.
• Technology can facilitate educational reform.

Room for Improvement

When we compare schools that are successful in implementing technology with less fortunate schools, three issues emerge:

• money
• training
• restructuring

The Classroom of Tomorrow

To give us a head start in building the schools of the future, Apple, IBM, and other companies, along with some state and local governments, have helped create model technology schools in communities around the United States and Canada. Almost without exception, these schools have shown that technology can, in the proper context, have a dramatic effect on education.

The Campus of Tomorrow

What about tomorrow's technology? What kind of personal computers will students be using in the year 2000, and how will they be using them?

In 1987 Apple sponsored Project 2000, a university-level competition to get answers to those questions. The winning entry, Tablet, was designed by a group of students and faculty advisors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The big questions are not whether the technology can happen, but whether social structures and human behavior can change fast enough to keep up with the technology.

Computers have a wide variety of home applications, ranging from business to entertainment.

Household Business

Business Applications at Home

Many of the same applications programs that people use on the job are put to work at home, including:

• Word processors
• Spreadsheets
• Database programs
• Personal information management programs
• Web browsers and e-mail programs
• Accounting and income tax programs

Smart Cards

A smart card looks like a standard credit card, but instead of a magnetic strip it contains an embedded microprocessor and memory. Some smart cards even contain touch-sensitive keypads for entering numbers.

A smart card receives most of its input when it's slipped into a special slot on a computer.

A smart card can contain about three pages of typewritten data, which can be password-protected. There are hundreds of millions of smart cards in Europe, and they're rapidly infiltrating America.

Smart cards are obvious candidates to replace magnetic-strip credit cards. In addition to storing critical ID information, a smart card can automatically record each transaction for later retrieval. But smart cards have other applications, too, such as storing sensitive data on computers, serving as food stamps, paying highway tolls, and unscrambling cable TV broadcasts.

Future smart cards will use pattern recognition techniques to verify signatures on checks or credit slips and help prevent the loss of millions of dollars to fraud and forgery.

Education and Information

Edutainment programs specifically geared toward home markets combine education with entertainment so they can compete with television and electronic games.

Encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases, almanacs, national telephone directories, medical references, and other specialized references now come in low-cost CD-ROM versions&endash;often with multimedia capability.

More up-to-the-minute information is available from the Internet and on-line services. Internet connections also provide electronic mail, discussion groups, and communication options for home users.

As computer technology and communication technology converge on the home market, they'll produce services that will threaten television and newspapers as our main sources of information. Television is a broadcast medium&endash;it transmits news and information to broad audiences. In the future we'll see narrowcasting services&endash;they'll provide custom newscasts aimed at narrow groups or individuals.

Home Entertainment Redefined

People mostly use computers to play games. Most computer games are simulations. Many require strategy and puzzle solving; others depend only on eye-hand coordination.

The biggest changes will come as computers and communication technology converge on the home entertainment industry. A few years ago, software shops stocked a variety of interactive fiction games&endash;stories with primitive natural-language interfaces that gave players some control over plot.

Those nongraphic, not-very-intelligent programs have been squeezed off the software shelves by interactive movies&endash;animated features in which one or more of the characters are controlled by the viewers.

Creativity and Leisure

Interactive movies demand more involvement than television, but they're still a relatively passive pastime. The same technology that mesmerizes us can also unlock our creativity.

authoring tool, computer-aided instruction (CAI), courseware

distance learning, drill-and-practice software, educational simulation, edutainment

interactive fiction, interactive movie, narrowcasting, smart card, technophobia, tutorial software

automated factory, automated office, automation, computer monitoring

decision support system (DSS), de-skilling, distributed computing

electronic commerce, electronic cottage, electronic sweatshop, extranet

groupware, human-centered systems, information economy, information overload, information systems manager

intranet, management information system (MIS), paperless office, paradigm shift, project management software

regional work center, satellite office, telecommuting, up-skilling

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