Information and communication
TECHNOLOGY AS A STRATEGIC TOOL
Information technology is not the cause of the changes we are living through. But
without new information and communication technologies none of what is
changing our lives would be possible. Nowadays the entire planet is organized
around telecommunicated networks of computers. The entire human activity depends
on the power of information.
Technology per se does not solve social problems. But the availability and use of
information and communication technologies are a pre-requisite for economic and
social development in our world.
Internet -today used by about 100 million people -is a channel of universal communication where interests and values of all sorts coexist. Certainly, the diffusion of information and communication technology is extremely uneven. Most of Africa is being left in a technological apartheid, and the same could be said of many other regions of the world.
The crucial role of information and communication technologies in stimulating
development is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it allows countries to
leapfrog stages of economic growth by being able to modernize their production
systems and increase their competitiveness faster than in the past. On the other hand, for those economies that are unable to adapt to the new
technological system, their retardation becomes cumulative. Furthermore, the
ability to move into the Information Age depends on the capacity of the whole
society to be educated, and to be able to assimilate and process complex
information.
In this regard, what is happening is that regions and firms that concentrate the most
advanced production and management systems are increasingly attracting talent
from around the world and leave aside a significant fraction of their own
population whose educational level and cultural/technical skills do not fit the
requirements of the new production system. A good example is Silicon Valley, the
most advanced information technology-producing region in the world, which can
only maintain the speed of innovation by recruiting every year thousands of
engineers and scientists from India, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, Israel,
Russia and Western Europe, to jobs that cannot be filled by Americans because
they do not have proper skills.
Thus there is little chance for a country, or region, to develop in the new economy without its
incorporation into the technological system of the information age.
A similar process affects the life chances of individuals. Not everybody should be
a computer programmer or a financial analyst, but only people with enough
education to reprogramme themselves throughout the changes of their
professional lives will be able to enjoy the benefits of the new productivity.
In sum, information and communication technology is the essential tool for
economic development and material well-being in our age; it conditions power,
knowledge and creativity.
Entire, per se, availability, pre-requisite, diffusion, uneven, technological apartheid, cumulative retardation, capacity, advanced, maintain, productivity, to condition
What does human activity depend on nowadays?
What are information and communication technologies important for?
How many people use internet?
What is special about diffusion of information and communication technologies?
What are ICT helpful for?
What problems could ICT cause?
What is common in recruiting for advanced production and management systems?
Why is the process dangerous for a society?
What should individuals do to be able to enjoy the benefits of new productivity?
How important are ICT nowadays?
TOPIC 2
GLOBALIZATION
Although globalization is multidimensional, it can be better understood starting with its
economic dimension. A global economy is an economy whose main activities work
as a unit in real time on a planetary scale. Thus capital markets are interconnected
worldwide, so that savings and investment in all countries depend on the evolution and behaviour of global financial markets.
In the early 1990s multinational corporations employed directly “only” about 70
million workers, but these workers produced one third of the world’s total private
output. Therefore multinational corporations, in manufacturing, services, and
finance form the core of the world economy.
Furthermore in the United States, Western Europe and Japan. Russian, Indian and Chinese
engineers, usually of very high quality, when they reach a certain level of scientific
development, can only pursue their research by linking up with these centres. Thus
highly skilled labour is also increasingly globalized, with talent being hired around
the globe when firms and governments really need the talent, and are ready to pay for it.
At the same time, the significant proportion of jobs, and thus of people, are not
global. In fact, they are local and regional. But their fate, their jobs, their living
standards ultimately depend on the globalized sector of the national economy, or
on the direct connection of their economic units to global networks of capital,
production and trade. This global economy is historically new, for the simple
reason that only in the last two decades we have produced the technological
infrastructure required for it to function as a unit on a planetary scale:
telecommunications, information systems, microelectronic-based manufacturing
and processing, information-based air transportation, container cargo transport, high speed trains, and international business services located around the world.
Though, the new global economy reaches out to encompass the entire planet, most people and most lands are
excluded, switched off, either as producers, or consumers, or both.
Similar processes of selective, segmented globalization characterize other areas of our society, including the media, science, culture and information at large.
In sum, globalization is a new historical reality, the one
involved in processes of capitalist restructuring, innovation and competition, and
launched through the new information and communication
technologies.
Multidimensional, savings, interconnected, private output, core of economy, to pursue, economic units, container cargo transport, to reach out, to launch
TOPIC 3
NETWORKING
No major historical transformation has taken place in technology, or in the
economy, without organizational transformation. In the information
age, the critical organizational form is networking. A network is simply a set of
interconnected nodes. It may have a hierarchy, but it has no centre. Relationships
between nodes are asymmetrical, but they are all necessary for the functioning of
the network -for the circulation of money, information, technology, images,
goods, services, or people throughout the network. The most critical distinction in
this organizational logic is to be or not to be-in the network. Be in the network,
and you can share and increase your chances. Be out of the network, or
become switched off, and your chances vanish since everything that counts is
organized around a worldwide web of interacting networks.
Networks are the appropriate organization for the flexibility that is required by an interconnected, global economy- by changing economic demand and constantly innovating technology, and by the
multiple strategies (individual, cultural, political),
which create an unstable social system at an increasing level of complexity. To be
sure, networks have always existed in human organization. The strength of
networks is their flexibility, their decentralizing capacity, their variable geometry,
adapting to new tasks and demands without destroying their basic organizational
rules or changing their goals. Nevertheless their fundamental
weakness has been the difficulty of co-ordination towards a focused purpose, that requires concentration of resources in space and time within large organizations, like armies, bureaucracies,
large factories, vertically organized corporations.
Each element of these networks is usually a part of other networks, some of them formed by small and medium businesses; other networks link up with other large
corporations, around specific projects and tasks, with specific time and spatial
frames.
Because of this level of unpredictability and complexity, the networks in which all firms, large or
small, are organized, move along, readapt, form and reform, in an endless variation.
Firms and organizations that do not follow the networking logic (be it in business,
in media, or in politics) are wiped out by competition, since they are not equipped
to handle the new model of management.
So, ultimately, networks- all networks- come out ahead by restructuring, even if
they change their composition, their membership, and even their tasks. The
problem is that people, and territories, whose livelihood and fate depend on their
positioning in these networks, cannot adapt so easily.
The human matter on which the network was living cannot so easily mutate. It becomes trapped or wasted. And this could lead to social underdevelopment.
interconnected nodes, vanish, interacting networks, flexibility, unstable social system, complexity, bureaucracy, spatial frames, to wipe out, to handle
TOPIC 4