essay on role of computers in modern society

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The Role of Computers in Our Life

Introduction, computers and education, computers and personal interaction, computers and business, works cited.

It is true that computers have created a revolution in the life of human beings and have simplified the way in which we live. But is the computer really helping humans or just adding more work? Are humans becoming more addicted to computers?

The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of computers in the daily life of people, especially in areas of business, education, and personal interaction. The paper investigates the dependence of humans and life on the computer and shows that, to some extent, the loss of computers would cause a social breakdown.

The computer is serving as a replacement for almost all traditional technologies that were used by our preceding generation. But are we using the computer in a balanced and efficient manner? The paper points out that in most cases, the computers are believed blindly, leading to severe cases of breakdown when a computer fails to work.

The use of technology and computers in the education system has become a norm in this century. The influence of computers in education is evident right from the primary classes until post-graduate education. “Over the past 20 years, schools have spent millions of dollars to equip themselves with the latest technologies.

Technology is indeed the most impressive development of our age, and each of us, in our own way, is captivated by it.” (Wepner 1). However, there are some primary drawbacks in the way in which we use technology in school or college education. In most cases, the teachers who plan for the class to be taken with the help of computers or the internet takes a lot of things for granted.

The teacher believes that the entire system is failing proof and will run exactly the same way he or she has planned it to run. And in most cases, the teachers are overconfident about their classes using computers and technology. All these can bring about severe failures in the whole plan.

An example from the life of a fourth-grade teacher, John, who prepared a lesson on the Presidential election of the United States. John had decided to take his fourth-grade students to the computer lab to show the website featuring the details on the U.S. Presidential elections.

Prepared to use the internet as a means of teaching, John took his students to the lab to find that the computers in the lab were not supporting internet access. John decided to call the technical assistant but was disappointed as he was on a field trip with another class of students.

Had John pre-checked the computers in the school lab before preparing for the lesson, he would not have faced this difficulty. Even though most reputed hardware vendors promise 24 hours of hardware technical support, it is hardly the practical case.

In order to access the support, in most cases, we should be as proficient as them to untangle the problem in hardware and software skills, or we should wait. It is always best to have somebody with good technical knowledge to be present when using computers for educational purposes.

“With increasing, use of instructional technology come the probability that at some point, the technology will fail, resulting in lost time, student frustration, and perhaps, loss of papers for exams.” (Hitch 2). Another example is quite recent, which had affected a large number of students.

The conductors of the Common Admission Test, the world’s third toughest admission exam to the top management institutions of India, decided to take the test online for the first time. A reputed American software firm was appointed to conduct the test online in over five thousand centers across India and abroad. Several thousands of students take the test every year and are considered a lifeline for many.

On the day of the test this year, several computers just stopped responding after the students started their exams. Another problem that arose was a virus attack on the computers of many exam centers, which manipulated the question paper to ask stupid questions to the students.

More than two thousand students had to stop taking the test and were scheduled. The problem even affected the Ministry and parliament affairs after the students and interesting groups protested.

Had the conductors foreseen the chance of virus attack and system shut down while designing the software for conducting the paper, this would not have happened. “The first step in planning for technology disruptions is a thorough review of existing policies.” (Hitch 5). Using standardized computer systems and networks and taking enough security provisions is a must while conducting online exams of this scale.

The computer’s revolution in changing lifestyle was followed by the advent of the internet and much more sophisticated technology like the use of real-time chats and video and chats over the net.

“The emergence of new digital media in recent years has spurred much popular and scholarly debate on the implications of these new technologies for human interaction and its outcomes.” (Yzer and Southwell 8). It is sure that these new technologies have helped to change our life for the better. But these are not without negative sides.

Shelley B. Wepner, in her paper Technology Run Amok: Top ten Techno Blunders site two personal examples of the effect of computer failure in her personal life.

The first one was while she needed to submit a grant application urgently, her computer suddenly froze. The system failed to respond to anything. As it was the middle of the night, the author could not call for technical help to solve her problem. She had to stop the work.

A second occasion when the author faced technology problem was when she needed to email her fellow committee members about an urgent work which had come up just before she was about to leave home for vacation for a few days. To her dismay, the computer had gone dead. She has quoted in her paper as “The summer 2003 incarnation of a widespread worm had hit my computer.

The hardware company’s technical support team offered me the equivalent of “take two aspirins and call in the morning” by saying, “Go find a technician and call us back in a few hours when you have your data saved.” (Wepner 2).

While we are getting more dependent on this machine, we have to realize that machines have to serviced and replaced at the right time. Using old and outdated computers and software can add problems to solving them. Also, using necessary precautions and methods like the antivirus and spam ware defenders have to be installed and updated to avoid disastrous situations.

Computers and information technology have started taking up a business around the world on behalf of humans. “In fact, by now, the role of computers in business has risen to the point where computer networks, even more than personnel, are synonymous with the corporate entity.” (Hemphill para 4). But this dependency has caused some serious problems when the system break downs.

On November 19, the airline industry in the U.S. faced a four hour shut down and delay of flights across the country. “The Federal Aviation Administration blamed a four-hour software failure for causing airline delays and cancellations across the U.S. in at least the third such disruption since September 2007.” (Hughes and Schlangenstein para 1).

Although technology is far advanced, a simple malfunction in the software caused a literal standstill of some of the busiest airports in the country.

Several tens of thousands of circuits and software had to be replaced to get the airline traffic control into normal. The Inspector-General was quoted saying as “Technical problems are causing unscheduled outages and creating risks to air- traffic control operations.” (Hughes and Schlangenstein para 3).

Another incident was caused by the bank account database of some famous banks around the world. In most developing countries, the banks and their operations are completely computerized. An attack of a virus onto a bank’s database has caused high variations in all the accounts of the bank’s clients, leading to a heavy financial disaster.

Business institutions have to take extreme care and precaution while implementing computer and technology into business as a small disruption can cause high losses.

By providing examples of the effects of computer disruption on education, personal, and business life, this paper has proved that the increasing dependence of humans on computers is actually creating more problems than solving them. Using computers without proper precautions and alternate solutions may lead to complete failure of objectives. It is always better to control the use of technology and stop being addicted to computers.

Hemphill, Mark. The Role of Computer in Business . MIS for the Information Age. 2004.

Hitch, Leslie P. “Being Prepared for Technology Snow Days.” ECAR Research Bulletin 2002.

Hughes, John and Schlangenstein, Mary. FAA Cites Software Failure in U.S. Flight Disruptions (Update 1). Bloomberg Press . 2009.

Wepner, Shelly B. Technology Run Amok: The Top Ten TechnoBlunders. Reading Online – Electronic Classroom. 2009.

Yzer, Marco C. and Southwell, Brian G. “New Communication Technologies, Old Questions.” American Behavioral Scientist 52. (2008): 8-20. Sage Publications.

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The computer revolution: how it's changed our world over 60 years

The BlueGene/L supercomputer can perform 280.6 trillion operations per second. Image:  REUTERS/KimberlyWhite

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It is a truism that computing continues to change our world. It shapes how objects are designed, what information we receive, how and where we work, and who we meet and do business with. And computing changes our understanding of the world around us and the universe beyond.

For example, while computers were initially used in weather forecasting as no more than an efficient way to assemble observations and do calculations, today our understanding of weather is almost entirely mediated by computational models.

Another example is biology. Where once research was done entirely in the lab (or in the wild) and then captured in a model, it often now begins in a predictive model, which then determines what might be explored in the real world.

The transformation that is due to computation is often described as digital disruption . But an aspect of this transformation that can easily be overlooked is that computing has been disrupting itself.

Evolution and revolution

Each wave of new computational technology has tended to lead to new kinds of systems, new ways of creating tools, new forms of data, and so on, which have often overturned their predecessors. What has seemed to be evolution is, in some ways, a series of revolutions.

But the development of computing technologies is more than a chain of innovation – a process that’s been a hallmark of the physical technologies that shape our world.

For example, there is a chain of inspiration from waterwheel, to steam engine, to internal combustion engine. Underlying this is a process of enablement. The industry of steam engine construction yielded the skills, materials and tools used in construction of the first internal combustion engines.

In computing, something richer is happening where new technologies emerge, not only by replacing predecessors, but also by enveloping them. Computing is creating platforms on which it reinvents itself, reaching up to the next platform.

Getting connected

Arguably, the most dramatic of these innovations is the web. During the 1970s and 1980s, there were independent advances in the availability of cheap, fast computing, of affordable disk storage and of networking.

Compute and storage were taken up in personal computers, which at that stage were standalone, used almost entirely for gaming and word processing. At the same time, networking technologies became pervasive in university computer science departments, where they enabled, for the first time, the collaborative development of software.

This was the emergence of a culture of open-source development, in which widely spread communities not only used common operating systems, programming languages and tools, but collaboratively contributed to them.

As networks spread, tools developed in one place could be rapidly promoted, shared and deployed elsewhere. This dramatically changed the notion of software ownership, of how software was designed and created, and of who controlled the environments we use.

The networks themselves became more uniform and interlinked, creating the global internet, a digital traffic infrastructure. Increases in computing power meant there was spare capacity for providing services remotely.

The falling cost of disk meant that system administrators could set aside storage to host repositories that could be accessed globally. The internet was thus used not just for email and chat forums (known then as news groups) but, increasingly, as an exchange mechanism for data and code.

This was in strong contrast to the systems used in business at that time, which were customised, isolated, and rigid.

With hindsight, the confluence of networking, compute and storage at the start of the 1990s, coupled with the open-source culture of sharing, seems almost miraculous. An environment ready for something remarkable, but without even a hint of what that thing might be.

The ‘superhighway’

It was to enhance this environment that then US Vice President Al Gore proposed in 1992 the “ information superhighway ”, before any major commercial or social uses of the internet had appeared.

Meanwhile, in 1990, researchers at CERN, including Tim Berners-Lee , created a system for storing documents and publishing them to the internet, which they called the world wide web .

As knowledge of this system spread on the internet (transmitted by the new model of open-source software systems), people began using it via increasingly sophisticated browsers. They also began to write documents specifically for online publication – that is, web pages.

As web pages became interactive and resources moved online, the web became a platform that has transformed society. But it also transformed computing.

With the emergence of the web came the decline of the importance of the standalone computer, dependent on local storage.

We all connect

The value of these systems is due to another confluence: the arrival on the web of vast numbers of users. For example, without behaviours to learn from, search engines would not work well, so human actions have become part of the system.

There are (contentious) narratives of ever-improving technology, but also an entirely unarguable narrative of computing itself being transformed by becoming so deeply embedded in our daily lives.

This is, in many ways, the essence of big data. Computing is being fed by human data streams: traffic data, airline trips, banking transactions, social media and so on.

The challenges of the discipline have been dramatically changed by this data, and also by the fact that the products of the data (such as traffic control and targeted marketing) have immediate impacts on people.

Software that runs robustly on a single computer is very different from that with a high degree of rapid interaction with the human world, giving rise to needs for new kinds of technologies and experts, in ways not evenly remotely anticipated by the researchers who created the technologies that led to this transformation.

Decisions that were once made by hand-coded algorithms are now made entirely by learning from data. Whole fields of study may become obsolete.

The discipline does indeed disrupt itself. And as the next wave of technology arrives (immersive environments? digital implants? aware homes?), it will happen again.

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