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.

Download Services

In ICT there are many different things that can now be downloaded through being connected to the Internet. Every year the list increases as every year lots of new things are either being created or already existing things are being made available to download through the world of the Internet, this is more commonly known as 'File Sharing'.

There have been many different programs that can be downloaded through the Internet giving users the chance to use a service such as P2P, Peer to Peer System, this allows users to share files between all users. NAPSTER is one of the most known programs to offer this service, when it was first made it was an illegal site that mainly offered music but since then it has expanded and is no longer illegal and in fact legal.

SOFTWARE

Software is a collection of data that, together, provide instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it. In contrast to hardware (physical devices), software is intangible, meaning it cannot be touched.  There are many different types of software available to download on the Internet, the software maybe available to download for free or you may have to pay a fee for it. Some of the most known and used pieces of software is the Microsoft Office range. Microsoft Office is a commercial office of related desktop applications available to use on both Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. The range, when first introduced in the year of 1989, only included three of the six now available applications, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint, since then the range has increased and now includes Microsoft Publisher, Microsoft Outlook/Entourage and Microsoft Access.

All of these products are now available to buy over the Internet making it easier for the consumer to download while also cutting down on useful resources that could be used for other things. By downloading it over the Internet it also eliminates the risk of losing the disk that would hold the software had you bought it physically from a shop.

You can also download 'System Software' over the Internet now as well as 'Application Software'. 'System Software' includes things such as Device Drivers. A device driver is a computer program that allows higher-level computer programs to interact with a hardware device.  The purpose of a device driver is to simplify programming by acting as translator between a hardware device and the applications or operating systems that use it. Programmers can write the higher-level application code independently to work with the hardware device that is being used.

PATCHES

A patch is software that has been specifically designed to fix problems with a computer program or its supporting data; it also is sometimes used to update a computer program or its supporting data. There are now more patches than ever as companies are finding that when they launch a new piece of software because there is so much going on inside the software, something goes wrong or they have missed something out meaning it does not work correctly meaning they have to send out another update or patch to fix the problem or problems. Recently Apple released a software update for their massively popular products the iPhone and iPad, it was available to every user of an iPod, iPad and iPhone when they connected it to their computer and then iTunes, the update was not an update to fix a problem it was mainly for making the software easier to use on the devices and to install new software for the users to use making it a more enjoyable experience when using the devices.  I personally think updates are very useful as after you have paid the initial price for the product, you do not have to pay for the updates that may follow on from the starting software, by doing this companies can advertise that they continually update software making it top of the range to the software is always the latest and newest it can be, this makes customers feel more incline to buy a product as they know that even a year after they buy the product, the software will still be up to date and top of the range.  

PDF Files

A portable document format, a PDF, is an open standard file. This type of file was created by the Adobe Systems in 1993 and is used for representing documents of application software and hardware and operating systems. A PDF file is a very useful format to use when publishing documents on the Internet for people to download as it has very few restrictions. This type of format can be shared with other users of a computer who may not have the same software installed on their computer, it also can share files who use a different system platform, an example of this would be the creator of the document creating the document on a Windows PC and the person downloading the document from the internet downloading it onto an Apple Mac system.  Along with this advantage, when transferring it from one platform to another or one piece of software to another it will still look the same when on the screen and once it is printed, that means all of the pictures will still be there, the layout will be the same and all the fonts will be the same.

I personally have downloaded many PDF files that I have downloaded for a specific reason; including recently I downloaded a user manual for a video game. This year the people that make FIFA realised that, in previous years, many people did not need the multiple paged user manual that was included in every box when the game was bought, so instead, this year they made an electronic user manual that users could download and print if they wanted to. This saves a lot of paper, which of course helps the environment.

Online Banking

Online banking is becoming a very prominent way of banking in today’s world. Many people use it for many different reasons including setting up direct debits, transferring money from one account to another or simply just checking their personal balance for as many accounts as they have. This generally offers a much easier way to bank than doing it physically, it allows users to do it when ever they like any time of the day, and this makes it easier as they are not restricted to banking during the opening hours of a bank.  

The most common features of online banking are transactional, non transactional and management. The services that are used in the transactional category are performing a transaction such an account to another account transfer, paying of many different bills, applying for a loan, setting up a new account and many others. Examples of this are customers transferring money from a customer’s own transactional account to their savings account in which may enhance the possibilities of interest, also payments to third parties, including bill payments, are made much easier by doing it online as it cuts the hassle.

There are many different banks that offer an online service to make it easier for their customers, including NatWest, Santander and HSBC, but one of the main banking online services is www.egg.com. The reason they are so popular is because they offer many different services which other banking websites do not including their ‘Egg Money Manager’. The ‘Egg Money Manager’ allows users of the service to see the balances for their other online bank and building society accounts alongside their Egg balances, and all of this is available on the Egg website, the fact that it can be your credit and store cards, current account, loan and even your mortgage accounts make the whole service even greater. With just one click, will take you straight to your other banks' websites and you won't need to log in again, this is a massive advantage as it saves a lot of time when trying to deal with more than one account, the only disadvantage would be that with some banks you may be asked to provide additional verification, but even with this it is still a massive time saver.

Although used by millions, people still believe that online banking isn’t safe to use as they believe many things could go wrong such as, being scammed, losing their details or making a mistake causing them to lose money, this is why the majority of banking is still done in the actual bank on high streets. Online banking has become very safe and easy to use over the course of it being around, which is why people are now not so worried about using it, they realise that it is a very quick, easy and safe to use. Many organisations that offer online banking have now introduced a way of making online banking more safe for customers to use; places like egg.com have offered an ‘Egg Guarantee’  that means if any money from an egg account is stolen or taken by fraud the organisation will pay it back into the account it was taken from, this makes customers feel safer when they use such services.

HSBC, in the recent years, have introduced a new, inventive way of making sure that all accounts are secure, the ‘HSBC Secure Key’. It is a device that gives you a random number when you enter your code into the device, you then log onto the internet and onto the HSBC website, which will know that you have used the device and ask you to enter your PIN code and the unique random code that the device had given you. This is a very clever way of enforcing security for the website and ensuring that customers will not feel that it is a risk to use the internet to do their banking.

I personally use this service, as, for me, it is very useful for checking a balance before I buy something online, and I know that everyone in my immediate family also use this service. My sister in fact uses the HSBC secure key as when she was first told about online banking she didn’t feel that it would be secure and her details would be stolen and from that her hard earned money. But once the new HSBC Secure Key was introduced she knew that it would be okay and would be safe to use.

ICT in the News

In today’s world news there are many stories concerning IT and recently there have been some big stories within the world of IT that have reached worldwide news.

The biggest of these stories would have to be the breakdown of the BlackBerry network and services. The glitch happened on Monday 10^th October 2011 and was blamed on a server fault at BlackBerry manufacturer Research in Motion. The network, that disabled owners of a BlackBerry device to use services such as email, messaging and web browsing, was down for a number of days before all services could be restored and put back to normal, the main service that customers were complaining about was the collapse of the favored BlackBerry Messenger, more commonly known as BBM, as this, when working, enabled users to send free messages to other BlackBerry devices, the network was reported to be down across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Another huge news story over the last few months was the London riots, and these riots are hugely reported over social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, many people either boasted about how they were involved in the riots, uploaded pictures of themselves in the riots (an example below), invited others to join in with the riots, planned attacks on buildings or simply just commenting on the events that happening over the time of the riots. And, following these social media activities that were carried out, the police and the government have managed to track down many of the people that were involved in the riots. 

E-Government

E-Government is becoming another big part of today's world, it offers many different services that allow people to find information they need or want and take part in things to help to make their Government better and in a whole, make their community better. In this blog, I am going to explain the features of E-Government and why it is good.

E-Petitions

An e-petition is a petition set up on your local council website for members of the community to easily and quickly look through the current petitions and sign them if they agree with them. This allows petitions to be more easily accessed by a much wider audience than ever before, anybody that lives, works or studies in the Kent area can now view and sign these petitions to their own accord.

I personally have signed a few petitions on these sites, one petition that I signed really took off, and it was a petition to do with bus travel for 16-19 year olds allowing them to pay a reduced one off charge in return for a years worth of travel in and around the Kent area, 12686 people signed this petition and it was so popular, due to the importance of the subject, that it was taken to a full council debate in which a conclusion was made to trial the pass in three areas and depending on the success of the trials the pass will them be available for everyone in Kent between the ages of 16-20.

This shows how important petitions are and shows the effect it can have, this is why the government have made it much easier for people to sign petitions online and in turn saving the government a lot of time and money as they do not have to register all of the petition slips, so by the government creating a website that offers such a service as the petitions it generally helps everyone in the community including employees of the government.

NHS Direct

NHS Direct is an online medical service that offers many different features that may offer help to save you the time and effort of getting your self checked up at a hospital or your local GP. It was introduced to try and solve waiting times at GP clinics and especially in hospitals as the average waiting time at a hospital is well over 3 hours on a weekend.

The service offers a free 24 hour helpline that residents of the UK can call any day of the week, any time of the year to help find out whether their illness or injury is bad enough for them to go into hospital or if they can stay at home and treat themselves with help and advice from the helpline.

How the online service works is it has questionnaires in which people answer interactive questions followed by more questions depending on your answers to the previous questions. Once you have answered these series of questions you will then be told some advice on what to do next and in serious cases you will be told to get yourself straight to the hospital.

The obvious advantages to this service is that by people checking their symptoms online, they may not have to go to hospital therefore cutting down on the waiting times, this can also be an advantage to the doctors and nurses as they then do not have to feel rushed when seeing patients as they have less patients to see so the ones that they are seeing can give have a thorough check to make sure they haven’t missed anything.

But there are obvious disadvantages too, this being that if a patient is checking their symptoms through the interactive questionnaire on the website, they could incorrectly answer one of the questions or click the wrong button therefore giving the client the wrong outcome, meaning that people could end up going to the hospital that do not need to or visa versa.

Taxing

With everything in the modern world being done through the Internet, taxing is another thing to now be being done through online services. There are many types of tax that you are now able to pay for online such as car tax, you can also claim your tax repayment and complete your self-assessment tax return.

Some websites also offer information on whether people would be entitled to benefits, what ever the benefits are, as you may already know there are many benefits that can be offered to people who may not be able to work or are looking for a job.

The advantages to websites that offer this services are that it makes it easier for people to pay taxes and that it can save people a lot of time by giving out a lot of information on the website. The disadvantages are that it could be difficult for some people to understand where they find the information and generally navigating their way around the page and from this they may waste time trying to find something and not actually getting an answer.

Statistics

There are some sites on the World Wide Web that offer services that show statistics concerning your local government and community whether it be the local crime rating in the area or to check the weather report for your area. There is one website, www.police.uk, that provides you with helpful information about crime and policing in your area, all it requires you to do is enter your address, postcode or place name. Once you have searched you area it will show what type of crime in was and where exactly it was in the area, this is a great example of e-government as it is a very advanced service.

The advantages to this service are that it is a very quick, easy and up to date way of finding out information, it is a massive advantage to find out crime rates in a certain area as if someone is thinking of moving house they may want to find out such information to make sure the place they may be moving to is safe for them and has the community that they want to live in.

The disadvantages to this are that websites may be inaccurate therefore giving people the wrong impression of an area; it also can make people find out things that maybe they do not want to know.

In my opinion I think that offering statistics like this on the Internet is a very clever way of giving people information as it is very easy to get hold of and generally very easy to interpret. 

Online Education Services

In the modern era, much of the teaching is either done through the internet, or information that is being taught is found on the internet, there are many websites that let students do work online and look for information online and, in this blog, I am going to discuss such websites.

MyMaths

MyMaths.co.uk is a website that offers an online, interactive maths environment. MyMaths is used all over the world; in fact it is actually used in about 70 countries and by about 4 million students a year. The students can access either on-site (at school), or off-site (at home), this enables the students to revise a lesson or do ‘homework for fun’ to enhance their knowledge of mathematics, and MyMaths have claimed that their website has been proven to raise standards of achievement in the mathematics area of learning. 

The lessons that they offer include many things to make the lesson more interesting, things such as games, interactive lessons and interactive worksheets just generally making the whole experience of having to do homework or class work more fun and for some students capable. This online service is also very useful for teachers as it gives them an easier way of setting homework and allows them to teach in a fun, different way while also making it much easier for them to track their students progress.  

So the advantages of MyMaths would be that it makes it much more fun for the students to do work, it helps the teachers teach and allows them to track progress much easier than ever before and it offers games to keep students entertained while also teaching. Along with the advantages there are also disadvantages, these would be that some students may get side tracked by the games and may not get the work done and schools may have to pay fees for joining sites like this. I personally think these types of websites are brilliant as they offer lots of information and display in a fun and interactive way, and, for some people, it makes homework something to look forward to.

Virtual Learning Environments

Virtual Learning Environments, or more commonly known as VLEs are internet servers that allow you to access all of your work maybe from school or work from the comfort of your own desk at home. It requires you to sign into your account you have saved the work on and download it to your home computer and either print off your work or carry on with it. This is very helpful and time saving as it means you do not need to carry a pen drive or memory stick around with you, which can be a hassle as it is easily lost, and you do not need to bother with sending it home via email as it will all be stored on this easy to use VLE.

The many advantages to this service are that it gives you a lot of flexibility around your work and where you can access it from, it gives you the opportunity to gain extra information, and is a general time saver giving people the possibility of working for longer periods of time as they do not have worry about the hassle of saving it to a memory stick or sending it home through an email server.  But there are also some disadvantages with it being quite expensive to install and set up, and there is also the possibility of losing or forgetting passwords and usernames, which can be solved but does cause hassle none the less.

My previous experiences of a VLE is that they are very useful and generally are a great help, but you are leaving the reliability of your work in the hands of the internet, so to speak. If your internet was down for example you would not be able to access your work that you may need to use urgently, by saving a back up copy onto an offline device such as a memory stick, it cancels out an advantages in cutting down time, but then at least you know you will have access to your work whatever the situation.

BBC Bitesize

There are many revision sites that offer students a quick and in depth analysis of a subject or specific topic that they want to revise maybe for an up coming exam or to help with homework. One of the biggest revision sites would be BBC Bitesize, it offers 20 topics to choose from in the GCSE area of learning with many different videos and interactive activities in every subject to give students a broader choice of how they revising, this helps students choose the best way of learning for them as it does offer written things like revision notes and then a miniature test. I personally have used this site many times in the past; especially when revising for my GCSE examination, it gave me a better understanding of some subjects and generally helped me revise.

The advantages of these sites are that they are easy to use, enables the student to revise in a way that may possibly be better or easier for them, but there disadvantages, a user may get distracted from revising and just play the games on the site or do something else on the internet, the information given on the site may be from a different syllabus to the one your actually using for your subjects at school.

Online Resources

The Internet is now one of the main ways to get information on anything, it is so simple anyone who has a basic knowledge of the Internet or computing can easily find anything they want on the web. There are many search engines that if you type something into the search bar, it will return with millions of results, for example, if I typed into ‘football’ it comes up with 1,350,000,000 results, as you can see there is bound to be the information you are looking for on the topic of football throughout the results returned, but then that is a very broad search, if I search a more specific query I will get less results but would still more than likely be returned with enough information to find what I was looking for.

Finding this many results is an obvious advantage if you know what your looking for, if you do not know what you are looking for you could be faced with a problem to try and find genuine information and may use false information for something like work or important documents, this could then turn into being a disadvantage.

School Email

School email is a very useful thing; it is basically just an email server that is just used for a specific network of people throughout the school. Once set up correctly it allows students to type in a teachers name with out an actual email address and send them an email directly. It is just an easier way of using email throughout a school.  The advantages would be that it is very quick and easy to use, allowing users to send an email in an instant as long as the server is set up correctly. The disadvantages would be that the server could crash leaving the students, which may have been relying on this service, without a way to contact the teachers. 

Copyright

A copyright is a set of rights granted to you, as the creator of something you made or created that is original, for a period of time. An example of something that has been copyrighted and is well known to be copyrighted is the iPhone, the iPhone have been copyrighted to make it special among mobile phones and especially touch screen mobile phones.