Blackwell Reference Online

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Information technology (IT) is generally taken to be a technical system for storing, transmitting, or processing information. As such it could refer to the paper documents and files of a bureaucratic organization, or even to hieroglyphs on rocks in the ancient world. While such broad meanings remind us of the larger context of human interaction with information, in the twenty-first century IT usually refers to electronically based systems that draw upon a combination of computing power and telecommunications. Indeed, IT is now central to many systems that are increasingly integrated, producing a fusion of what was once referred to separately as electronic media and information and communication technologies. IT may be thought of by some computer scientists as a merely technical matter, but in fact a very good case can be made that such are relatively trivial. In the real world IT is the product of economic, political, social, and cultural contexts and choices, as well as technical knowledge, that shape its development and use. In these contexts the shaping and consequences of IT are far from trivial. The changes that occurred in IT production and use between the start and the close of the twentieth century are nothing short of astonishing. While paper-based bureaucracies dominated the means of organizational practice at the start of the century, digital ones dominated them by the ... log in or subscribe to read full text