IMPACT OF COMPUTERS ON SOCIETY & BUSINESS

The Text (p. 436) refers to technological evolution in the United States, and indicates that the country entered a knowledgebased phase of technological development in the mid1970s, and continues in that phase of development in the 1990s. While the development of the knowledgebased phase began some

time ago, it is, in the early1990s, far from complete, and it is not yet sure just what American society will be like in the early years of the next century, although the next century is less than a decade in the future.

The computer may be the most significant and pervasive technological innovation of the contemporary period. Certainly, the computer is the vehicle that makes a knowledgebased society, sometimes referred to as the postindustrial society, feasible.

The term postindustrial society is often used as opposed to postindustrial economy, because many aspects of life other than the economic will be affected by the changes required to create new forms for the economy and society. Nevertheless, all of the significant changes in the evolution from an industrial to a postindustrial society will either emanate from or be channeled through the economic sector. Obviously, since the early to mid1970s, a dynamic transition from the industrial age to some new and different type of industrial/societal organization has been in progress. Some theorists and observers believe that this transition is between an industri

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the significant impact that knowledge will have on future society is found in the growing size of the knowledge base. Considering its present size, even a significant reduction in the rate of knowledge growth would not preclude a continued significant growth in the absolute level of knowledge. Facilitating the use of the expanding knowledge base are the advances in communications and computer technology. These advances add materially to the accessibility and usability of the knowledge base (Huber, 1984, p. 931). As advanced as both communications and computer technologies appear to be in contemporary society, they are both actually in their infancies. It is, in the early1990s, difficult to speculate the extent that the accessibility and the usability of the knowledge base will be enhanced by further advances in these two technologies by 2000. One thing appears to be certainthe qualitative character of the knowledge base in postindustrial society will differ markedly from that of industrial society (Huber, 1984, p. 931). Economic organizations in postindustrial society will be required to (1) work with far more knowledge, far more efficiently than past organizations have done, and (2) compete with other organizations w
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1739
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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