Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the world. They may be unfamiliar with your accent, your locality, your
culture or even the country where you are domiciled and you may have
trouble understanding each other.
Let us review Sackman's predictions (1967). One was that computers
would free us from drudgery. And indeed there are now many digital tools
available to relieve us of tedious chores in the workplace and in the home.
The awesome 'number crunching' power of computers has freed us from
the chores of mathematical calculation; word processing programmes and
electronic publishing facilities make producing and manipulating text
based documents a relatively simple task, compared to preparing them in
the traditional way. Spell checking, formatting and reformatting, grammar
checking, changing one word for another - all can be done with a few key
presses. Optical character recognition can even remove the need to type a
document.
Table 2.1.
Sackman's vision and the reality of digital developments
Vision
Reality
Benefits include:
Drawbacks include:
Freedom from drudgery
data processing
'instant' printing and
publishing
background processing
neo-Taylorism
loss of control
tedious security proce-
dures
Enhanced creativity and
greater leisure time
tools for creativity
office and factory automation
mobile working
not everyone wants the
extra work
job losses
work-life boundaries
blurred
Augmented human
capabilities, 'human -
computer symbiosis
microtechnology
immersive environments
pervasive computing
concerns about
security and privacy
authority
control
We no longer have to develop photographs using wet chemicals - we
can simply slot the memory card from our digital cameras into the com-
puter and print them at home. We can have computer programmes running
in the background, with no need for supervision - to perform tasks like
searching for signals from radio telescopes for signs of extra terrestrial in-
telligence, or (more mundanely) to print out a document, while we get on
with more important or interesting things. But this same technology has
also enabled the creation of call centers, which are growing all around the
world and which are employing increasing numbers of people. Here often
the jobs of workers are highly routinized with little or no scope for varia-
tion, imagination or learning, counter to well-researched principles of good
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