How have developments in communications and information technology changed the way we live today?

Essay by muselimanUniversity, Bachelor'sA-, April 2004

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It is important to mention that technology has changed not only how we lived today but also how many generations before us lived. Communications and information technology has in fact had an impact of the way we live as far back as the nineteenth century. A number of writers have pointed out, for example, that the world has been linked by steamship lines since the mid nineteenth century, by telegraph wires since the late nineteenth century and by worldwide telephone links since the 1920s and 1930s. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the only form of international communication was through the hand written letter delivered by postal services that relied entirely on horses and ponies on land and sailing ships on water. It took about 5 months to send a letter from England to India. By the end of that century the electric telegraph was already linking many parts of the world by messages sent at the speed of light.

Some historians would even claim that the nineteenth century saw more quickening of international communications and more socially revolutionary implications than anything that has happened in the twentieth or twenty first century.

As for newer technology the internet is the newest and fastest growing of the global information technologies. The internet is vital for globalisation because it is the medium in which the interface between telecommunications as a technology and as a business in itself is developing most rapidly. Other new technologies include the global distribution of satallite and cable TV. This is important in the context of globalisation as it is often the medium that is accused of being at the heart of modern cultural imperialism. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in particular, which dominates the production and marketing of pay TV, is often condemned for beaming the same...