The Information Age: Civil Rights

The information age has bought many things to the world we live in today and certain things that have been created take up a huge chunk of our lives. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter, is said to be what takes up a lot of our time and the social networks account for 20% of the time spent online by all users of the internet with Facebook owning 95% of the time spent on the social networking sites.

With the use of Facebook and Twitter forever increasing, the amount of things people publish on these social networking sites increases also, whether it be writing about their new favourite television programme or about their latest love affair, it all goes on the internet for all to see. Everything that has been published on these sites can be viewed by any of your friends at any time of the day, and if you have your boss or a work colleague as a friend on these types of sites you have to be careful what you write. A young 16-year-old girl, Kimberley Swann, started letting off steam and began to tell her friends of Facebook of how ‘boring and dull’ her new job was, a few days later, while at work she was called into the office and told that her boss has seen her comments on Facebook and, even though the name of the company was never revealed over the social networking site, that the boss didn’t want to see the company in the eye of the world. The company later revealed that the reason her job was terminated with immediate effect was the fact that the comments on Facebook showed that Kimberley was not happy with and didn’t enjoy her job.

This shows the power of social networking sites like Facebook, and how what you write on these sites can affect your personal life.

Another story that caught my eye was a story about a Swiss woman who lost her job after her employers spotted she was using the Facebook website when she had earlier called in to her work place claiming that she was too ‘ill’ to go into work as her job involved using a computer and it would strain her eyes, she would be unable to do her job properly as she was suffering from a migraine and instead of going into work she needed to stay home and lie in a darkened room. The company said its discovery that she was not suffering as much as she made out as she was able to use the social networking site and by doing this she lost the trust of the company. After being dismissed from her duties, the Swiss woman told of how she had been accessing the social network through the Internet on her smart phone while laying in a dark room while in bed, she also spoke of how she was “disgusted” as she couldn’t believe that the company had created a facebook account of a fictional personnel which became “friends” with the woman, which in turn allowed the company to monitor the online activity at any time of the day, she claimed that after her dismissal the “Facebook friend” suddenly disappeared from her personal Facebook page.

As you can properly tell, these two stories are not the first and, all the time people publish their views to the world wide web, by all means will not be the last time that people lose jobs due to things on the Internet. This questions the civil rights and how people cannot have a private life without it affecting the way in which people value and respect them. Without the information age people wouldn’t be able to write about how “boring and dull” their job is online and then would have no risk of losing their job over something like this.

One of the biggest stories in the United Kingdom in 2011 was easily the London Riots, riots that were prompted by the killing of a man by a police officer, which spiralled out of control and turned into building being burned down and “hoodies” and others looting many shops in and around the country’s capital city. There was a lot of publicity over this huge event and there was much talk of the riots being organised on social networking sites and private messaging services like BlackBerry Messenger, more commonly known as BBM. There were rumours all over the Internet that the messaging service was used to conduct a plan causing the riots as the police were unable to see the messages being sent, as the police do not have the privilege of being able to read all of the message sent from BlackBerry to BlackBerry. During and after the riots people were posting, or “tweeting” on Twitter of how pictures were being released on BBM, the media were then able to get hold of the images as they were being put on Twitter. This once again questions the personal rights of any human being, the fact that the media are able to take personal photos, even if they are seen to be showing actions that are considered bad.

Online Crime and The Information Age

There are many crimes that are committed through the Internet, many of which are committed to make money. With the Internet growing rapidly, so is the rate of crime over the Internet with a whole host of methods that are used by the criminals to steal identities and money.

Computer crime is generally committed by criminals in order to either:

·      Steal money

·      Steal data or information

·      Steal someone’s identity

·      Damage or disrupt someone’s system for revenge

·      Cause general havoc for fun

·      Copy software, films, and music to avoid having to pay for it.

The theft of money is probably the biggest and most common type of Internet crime due to the growth of commerce that is now done through the Internet with the use of credit and debit cards. Theives are able to obtain the credit card details when people use their credit or debit cards on an unsecure website or by sending out emails to large numbers of email addresses ‘phishing’ for the customer to send back their personal information including their credit and debit card details. ‘Phishing’ literally means “way of attempting to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication”.

Theft of data is another common type of Internet crime especially stealing data from big online companies like PayPal and eBay. Data is considered to be one of the most valuable thing a business can hold about customers or about any type of stakeholder the business has, whether it be shareholders or supplier all the data they posses is very important and if it is lost then it can cause various consequences. A consequence could be something as big as having the press print bad publicity about the business in a worldwide newspaper causing the business to lose a lot of respect that they may or many not have built up. Another consequence that may lead to losing customers threw not providing a good service is due to losing data the business would have to gather the information again which would take time, which could cause products or services would be delivered late and could then lead to cash flow problems.

Phishing is one of the biggest types of fraud that is committed over the Internet but there are other types of fraud that are committed. Criminals go through long processes to try and make you hand over your bank account details, generally when a phishing email is sent, it has a link attached to the email that will direct you to a website, a website that will look exactly the same as your bank’s website, before you are able to do anything you will be asked to enter your log on details and once you have done this your log in credentials will be sent to the fraudster who will then be able to find out all of your personal information and bank details to steal money from your accounts. Another way in which criminal commit fraud over the Internet is by guaranteeing customers a ‘get rich quick’ scheme if you pay a large sum of money for a pack containing all the information you would need to succeed in something like this, this type of online crime seems to be generally aimed at elderly people by the fraudsters as they think they would be more liable to buy the fake product.

Cyber bullying is another crime that is committed a lot in today’s society, especially with the introduction of many social networks that bring friends or enemies together on the Internet. With the social networks forever growing and hundreds of new users registering with the social networks daily, the amount of times this type of crime is committed increases as well.

With the information age growing rapidly, so is the ways in which online crime and other types of crime are prevented. One of the biggest changes that the information age has bought to the crime is dealt with, is the use of databases. The police are able to keep a record of any previous convictions of every human being in the country on a computer hard drive, by having it on the computer it reduces the amount of time it takes for the police to search for the person’s record, this helps when taking mandatory checks of teacher’s and people who work with children’s records.

The information age has introduced the invention of CCTV and security cameras and these two things are now massively important to the police and the way the investigate crimes. CCTV, otherwise known as closed circuit television, means the use cameras that capture video footage to transmit to a signal to a specific place on a set of monitors. They were first installed in 1994 after experiments were done in the UK many years before and were deemed successful, at first the video cameras were generally used in areas that need monitoring as crime is very prominent in a specific area, places such as banks, night clubs/pubs, casinos, airports, and convenience stores, as they were thought to be very successful to be helping the police solve crimes better than ever before, the systems were later to be installed to cover most city centres over the UK, many train and bus stations, car-parks and estates.

Another piece of high technological equipment that has helped the police in preventing crime is the introduction of security tags in retail stores and other places. The security tags are attached to all products in the store and when the customers purchase an item the employee would remove the tag as if the tag were not removed then when the customer leaves the shop, an alarm would sound, as sensors will have sensed that there are tags on the product. This helps prevent theft from retail stores as if a thief runs out of the store with an item with a tag on it, the alarm will sound alerting employees and other members of the public that something is being stolen. Another feature to the security tags is that even if the product is stolen then there is now ‘inked security tags’ which, when removed, spills ink over the product leaving it either broken or unable to use, this ink cannot be washed out either.

Overall, prevention of crime has become much easier with the introduction of pieces of advanced technology including such things as security tags and CCTV hardware.

Entertainment and the Information Age

Many people around the world have many key features to their life and being entertained is one of the biggest. The entertainment industry thrives in the fact that people want or need to be entertained, whether it’s from television programmes, movies, books/e-books and even things like video games people find comfort in the stories behind the entertainment. Ever since this type of entertainment was introduced it has been growing rapidly and due to the information age, many new things have been introduced including things such as e-books and, a HD version of DVDs, Blu-Ray.

Games

Games and gaming platforms are one of the most popular things to do with the topic of entertainment with many people around the world using a gaming system in one way or another. There are three main competitors for the gaming market those being the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo Wii with all three bringing in an exceptional 202.5 million units sold as of September 2011, with the Nintendo Wii leading with 89.4 million sold, Xbox 360 in second with 57.6 million sold and the PlayStation 3 trailing behind with 55.5 million units sold.

The use of video gaming is becoming more and more popular by the day with the average percent of United States households that now play video games rising to 65% and 40% of gamers being female, leaving the other 60% to be male, also the average time that is spent playing video games per week is now 18 hours.

Typically the stereotypical gamer would be seen as a young 13 – 21 year old but this is a false accusation as actually the average age of a video gamer is actually 32 years old, the reason for this being that when gaming on PCs and older gaming consoles, such as the Sony PlayStation 2 that sold over 138 million units making it the best selling console ever, were first introduced they were very popular to the elder teenagers and as the information age has developed so have the older teenagers. The teenagers of yesterday have grown up with gaming consoles and haven’t seen the need to discard the systems and as more consoles are being introduced the teenagers of yesterday and the teenagers of today are buying the consoles bringing the average age of a gamer to a median age of 32. 

With the introduction of smart phones gaming on a mobile phone has never been so easy, but it has not always been applications like the worldwide phenomenon ‘Angry Birds’ with the graphics in High Definition, in fact the first ever game introduced onto a mobile phone was in 1994 and pre-installed, unlike the games of today that have to be paid for and installed, the game was Tetris and was on a black and white device. Years later and a new pre-installed game was starting to appear on the new phones of 1997, this game was called Snake. Snake and other versions of the game, has now become the most played video game on the planet and is currently installed on over 350 million devices across the world.

MP3 Players

Digital audio players, or MP3 players, are an electronics device that is capable of storing music and other digital media such as images and videos. To be able to use MP3 players the user has to be able to connect the media-playing device to a PC or laptop to upload media from, this would then sync the files to the storage in the device making it able to use on the go. The first portable MP3 player was first introduced to customers in 1996; it was the Audio Highway Listen Up, and it went on to win awards for innovations at an electronics show in early 1997. The MP3 player never really picked up pace from then on in, up until October 23, 2001 when the Apple iPod was first introduced.

The iPod is a line of 4 different iPods including the iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano, iPod Classic and the iPod Touch. The iPod is an advanced digital portable music player and includes the same features plus many more. The first iPod was developed in less than a year by Apple Inc. and was announced to be able to put ‘1,000 songs in your pocket’, at the time this was much more than any other device would allow as they quite simply did not have to memory to be able to store any more. All iPods use a flash memory, apart the iPod Classic that uses an Internal hard drive, this flash memory allows iPods to be regularly changed, as it is a non-volatile computer storage chip that can be electronically erased and reprogrammed.

DVD and Blu-Ray

A DVD is a disc storage media format that was invented in the 1995s. The development of Compact Discs led into the creation of DVDs as they offer much higher storage capacity than was ever possible on a Compact Disc. Every movie that is written onto a DVD is now written onto a Blu-Ray disc as well. A Blu-Ray disc is a High Definition disc that allows customers to view the media that is uploaded to it in a better definition than they would be able to view on a DVD, the picture that would be projected from the Blu-Ray disc would be a sharper image than possible on a DVD disc as the Blu-Ray disc is able to hold much more data than a low definition DVD.

 

Electronic Book

An electronic book, more commonly known as an e-Book or a Digital Book, is a book length publication that is in a digital form. Being digital it makes reading a book much easier than ever before as readers will not have to carry around 1 heavy duty book but 1 light weight e-book reader.

The most popular e-book reader is the Amazon Kindle. The Kindle was developed by the most popular online site Amazon.com and uses a wireless connection that allows users to shop for e-books, magazine, newspapers and other digital media. The Kindle, like many other e-books readers that have been produced since  the launch of the Kindle, use an E Ink electronic paper that displays in 16 different shades of grey. The popularity of the Amazon Kindle has shown and due to this the Kindle software has been made available for use on various devices and platforms including windows, iOS, BlackBerry, Mac OS X, this means that the software is available for use on iPod Touch and iPads.

I personally have the software on my iPod and it really does help a lot, I probably read around 6 – 7 books a month and now am able to buy the books online and read them on my iPod which means I do not need to carry around the books but have all the books stored on my iPod.

Education and the Information Age

Education is a very important key to success in any time or era, and, due to the information age, has been made much easier than ever before. The introduction of technology has made learning much more convenient for teachers and pupils while also making it easier for teachers to teach and pupils to learn.

Many years ago pupils would arrive in school and be greeted by teachers ticking their name off on a register on many pieces of paper, most different lessons comes with a different teacher and the pupils would then have to register again for lessons to make sure they are in school, once again this would have been done on paper. In 1984 came the release of what would turn out to be something that would be used in over 21,000 schools across 150 local authorities in the United Kingdom, School Information Management System otherwise known as SIMS.

SIMS allows schools to manage every to do with the students profile whether it be the student’s personal details, timetable, behaviour record, attendance record, academic record, it also holds things such as medical records. Another feature of SIMS that makes it such a success across thousands of schools, leading to an 80% market share, is the SIMS Learning Gateway, this feature allows parents of students with a required login username and password to browse through there child’s data from home to make sure that the child is attending school and how they are getting on at school academically and behaviour wise.

Education over the last few years has come a long way due to new technology being introduced. One of the most used pieces of technology that have recently been introduced is the Interactive Whiteboard. An interactive whiteboard is a large interactive display board that allows users to interact with the computer. The computer is connected to a projector which, in turn, projects the image seen on the computer onto the board’s surface where users control the computer by using a pen/stylus or just simply their own finger.  The idea that they are so popular in both primary and secondary schools was made fact when a survey taken by The Becta Harnessing Technology Schools in 2007 showed that 100% of primary schools had interactive whiteboards while secondary schools had a near perfect percentage of 98%.

The uses of interactive whiteboards include such things as running software that is loaded onto the computer such as the internet and things such as Microsoft Word etc. Another key use of the whiteboards is the fact that a teacher is able to save notes that have been written on the whiteboard maybe by students to the computer that is connected to the board. The interactive whiteboard has replaced traditional flipcharts and normal whiteboards, and, if you want to go back even further, blackboards. Another feature that is very clever but is also in the early stages of development is a piece of software that enables the notes that have been written on an interactive whiteboard to be converted into text in a word processing document.

In the last 10 years laptops have become a huge part of the technology industry and have been introduced to education in the same way the computers where. A laptop is seen as a portable computer as it processes in the same way a computer would and due to its simplicity of the laptop there have been many calls from schools across the United Kingdom and the United States of America to introduce a system into school where there is a laptop for every student to use on a day to day basis, at school or at home, to complete work and learn through the laptop itself. Many schools have introduced this system into their curriculum and have seen a great improvement in their student’s behaviour; their activity towards learning and the outcome has been seen to improve dramatically.

One of the biggest advantages to this system, in which every student and teacher have their own laptop, is the fact that students from an early age are able to develop skills that are going to be required of them in the future, it allows students and teachers to interact with each other like never before as they are able to virtually send work to each other over an email service. Another advantage would be that if a student or students are not able to get to school on a certain day or the school is closed then this, before introduction of laptops, would mean that no work would be able to be completed that day, but with the introduction of laptops for each student means that teachers are able send the work over an email server directly to the student who is at home.

                 

Everything I have written about so a far in this blog post are advantages to technology being introduced to education but there are a few things that are disadvantages to this technology. One of the main disadvantages being that from an early age when at school, children may be taught only through means of a computer and may not learn how to analyses text books and actually physically write something down a piece of paper as it may all be done on the computer. With social networks becoming a huge importance in 12 - 18 year olds across the globe it just makes things worse as there is a so called ‘text chat’ where words are shortened and abbreviated to make typing quicker and easier, if children are using these types of words on the internet and computers they would start to use this language in everyday life which as a results could cause wrong impressions of people to be made.

To conclude, education has greatly benefited from the information age as things that were never available to be accomplished before are now able to be achieved through the art of technology, new systems have been created to benefit both students, in the sense it improves learning efficiency, and teachers, in the sense that life is made easier for them. 

Life in The Information Age - How Offices Have Changed

An office is a perfect example of how far the world has come in the last 40 years, especially in the technological state.

When looking at pictures of a 1960’s office you can see how different it is compared to a modern office of today. You can see that there are no computers and there are a lot of papers and files stacked all over the office. You can also see that there are basic calculators in the background that are much bigger than the typical scientific calculators that you would see today.

Towards the 1980’s, computers were invited into the office and were seen as one of the biggest luxuries any office could have. Although they were seen as a luxury, they still had nothing on the computers of today, they had CRT monitors without decent software like Windows, instead they would have MS-DOS software, and they did have hard drives but they still did not have a lot on memory to store lots of things on the computers so lots of paper would still have to be used. As the 1980’s went on the software on computers was forever growing and creating advanced graphics for users to enjoy the experience of using a computer much more, another feature that was introduced was the growth of the memory that was included with new and improved computers.

During the 1990’s the world of computers in the office were at an all time high and with the memory included increasing it was helping files to be stored electronically on the computers and reduce the amount of paper having to be used around the office. In the year of 1995 was the introduction of both the Windows operating software and Internet Explorer proving that the growth of the computers and software used in the office was really beginning to be a great help and making some jobs much easier.

Ever since the 1990’s the use of computers in the office has grown massively with the introduction of smart phones and devices being used to do the majority of things that some computers are able to do. The introductions of Windows 7 and Windows Vista have proved how far things have come from the introduction of Windows 95 in the 1990’s.

It obviously is a massive advantage for everyone and offices across the world but it does come with its disadvantages such as causing loss of jobs due to technology being able to do such jobs more efficiently that humans. 

Life in The Infomation Age

Since computers were invented, every year that goes by something new in the information age is introduced into the world we know.

What is information? Information is the idea of computing and telecommunications, the more information something holds the more powerful it is. 

Without information we would never be in the same technological state we are at this present time, we would have no such things as computers, telephones, Internet, nor would we have things that allow people to travel either near or far, things such as cars, boats and planes, the list of things that we would not have and not be able to do without information is endless.

Information has changed the world that we live in today, it has changed things that wouldn’t be expected to change, things like culture and language in the sense that now we can learn things about different cultures online and find out more information that may change the way people think about culture. Information has generally changed the thinking process of people and how they use different technology to go about their lives.

Working Styles:

Working styles have changed dramatically due to the information age and generally more information and technology being invented making jobs and facilities much easier to use and more convenient to work in. One of the most notable places of work that have changed due technology and the information age would be offices.

Before technology there were many more jobs in places such as offices, factories and banks. Office jobs have been lost such as many typists losing their jobs due to word processing technology who only needs one person controlling it, payroll clerks have lost jobs due to the one person that is needed to input the data into a spreadsheet and calculating the payroll that way, and many clerks that would, before technology, sort out the files in filing cabinets and other such things can now be replaced by one person using a database on a computer system.

Jobs in factories have been lost due to the skilled technicians and machinists being replaced by computer controlled robots which can work faster, longer and more consistently than the workers could, many monitoring jobs have been lost due to data logging equipment that use sensors being invented and many quality control jobs that would have involved things such as routine sampling have been lost due to being replaced by automatic machines.

This is a obvious disadvantage to the information age but it does also create jobs as well, jobs such as engineers are in high demand to build and maintain the quality of the machines and more skilled workers are needed to operate the systems and the new computerised machinery.  

Online Entertainment

In today’s modern society, there are many services in which entertainment is offered to the users of the World Wide Web. There are services such as online gaming, music download services, live streaming and many more.

TV Catch Up

There are many television channels that have recently discovered the world of the internet and decided to produce website that are associated to there television channels. They has designed these websites to be able to broadcast programmes that have already aired on television, many people use it to ‘catch up’ with programmes they have missed or forgotten about the programme and have not watched it. There are two methods in which people are able to watch television on there computers, they can either watch it by streaming it straight to a media player or by downloading it straight to their computer. With online TV catch up services becoming ever more prominent, it is essentials for all of the major television broadcasters to have a feature like this, BBC have the BBC iPlayer which is able to be downloaded as an application on both Windows and Mac operating systems; they were also the first major broadcasters to allow users to download an application on their mobile devices. Following BBC doing this many of the other major broadcasters followed in the footsteps of the BBC by creating TV catch up services and producing mobile device applications.

Spotify

Spotify is a new music streaming service that allows users to stream selected music straight to there computer. It was launched in October 2008 and in November 2010 it was said to have gathered approximately 10 million users; 1 million of these users were paying ones. Spotify has a clever system where, in which, everybody is able to use the service free of charge as long as they have created an account with Spotify, with this membership, users are able to listen to 20 hours of music, on their computer, throughout a month without having to pay a penny, the only disadvantage to this would be that you can listen to one song only 5 times before you are not able to listen to it anymore. They then have another 2 different types of membership, one that costs £4.99 per month and enables users to listen to unlimited music, on their computer, throughout the month paid month. The final membership, that costs £9.99 per month, allows users to listen to unlimited music on their computer or on their mobile devices as long as they are compatible to Spotify. This is how Spotify make money through the services they offer, and it is all completely legal. Spotify is now available on many different platforms including, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and mobile devices that run iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and many more.

I personally use Spotify quite a lot for listening to music that I may not own on my other music players, I am one of the 9 million non paying members as I do not listen to enough music to benefit from the unlimited side of the memberships.

iTunes

iTunes is a music playing entertainment service which offers many useful things. It allows users to manage their music files all in one place and have them all listed in any order they like, it also allows users to do this with things such as music videos, movies and applications all on a desktop computer or a laptop.

iTunes was launched in January 2001 and since then it is said that over 10 million users have downloaded iTunes.

iTunes is able to connect to the iTunes Store; the iTunes Store enables users to download music, music videos, movies, movie rentals, television programmes, iPhone and iPad programmes, audiobooks, Podcasts. Users are now able to download iPhone, iPod and iPad application software from the App Store.

I personally use iTunes everyday to listen to music and watch movies. I also download music from the store quite frequently and it is very convenient and quick as when I have downloaded from other sites such as Amazon, it takes quite a long time to download a song and then I have to import it into my iTunes library which results in making the process of downloading a music file much longer than it needs to be.

Media Piracy

Media piracy is the copying and distributing of media files over the internet, peer to peer programmes such as Limewire, Frostwire, Napster and iMesh are available to download onto any platform for users to download music, movies and television programmes for no price. The consequence of downloading illegal media is massive, an example of how it is affecting the media industry is that in 1997, 78 million singles were sold in the UK, in 2011, only 8.6 million  were sold, that’s 69.8 million less over the course of 14 years

The consequences if people are caught sharing files through peer to peer applications are massive; you can be given a high priced fine depending on the amount of downloading you may have done, if you are not able to pay the fines you may have your possessions taking away.

Online Gaming

An online game is a game that is played over an Internet network. The way in which online gaming has expanded over the last few years is incredible, its gone from small local networks to the internet and then the obvious growth of the internet making the experience of playing a game online much quicker and more enjoyable for the user.

The idea of online gaming can range from simple text based gaming to complex graphical games to virtual worlds; a great example of a virtual world would be Second Life.

Second Life is a virtual gaming world in which gamers can have a ‘second life’. Users are able to interact with other users over the Internet through their virtual bodies and can explore their second life world. Users, known as residents in the game, are also able to create and trade virtual properties and services with one another. This game, as of 2011, has around 1 million active users, and is available on the majority of platforms including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

There are also lots of online games that are just browser games; sites like miniclip.com offer these types of flash games. It is widely reported that the online gaming market is worth more than 15 billion dollars and the average time spent playing online by gamers is just over 6 hours and 30 minutes weekly.

The benefits of online gaming is that is a fun and safe way for young and old people to interact with each other and play a friendly game, in most cases. The disadvantage to online gaming is that gamers could become to engross in a game, like Second Life that they forget about more important things in real life, there are stories of gamers of Second Life, who do not consider the game to be their second life but actually their first and most important life.

Online Gambling

There are many ways in which people can gamble, through poker, casinos, betting on sports, bingo, lotteries and horse racing to name a few, whether it be small bets or big money bets, it can now be done all through the internet.

During the 1990’s was when online gambling was first introduced to users of the Internet but it was nowhere near the standard of quality that it is now a days.

Online gambling is still in the early stages of its development now and surprisingly is still not yet legal all over the world and may never be legal all over the world as there are laws against it in some countries.

It is estimated that there are around 20,000 online gambling sites for users to visit. Online poker is the most popular way of gambling online and recently it has seen a massive increase in popularity, with Texas Hold’em Poker being the most popular type of poker, as it can be very cheap to be involved in or, people are able to play for real but with pretend money. Social networking sites are the latest sites to be involved with online poker; it has become very popular due to the nature of the games that are free to play in.