Social Context of Computing

In the field of Information Technology (IT) and computing, the current social context where IT is
being used and is influencing society is different from the issues it raised years ago, where practically
there is no social media, email only for a handful of people, no World Wide Web and the like.

This module basically will discuss the current social context of computing tracing back the
history of IT that illustrates how the field is rapidly changing. Issues and problems relative to the field
will also be discussed.

Learning Outcomes:

At the end of this lesson, you are expected to:

1. Describe ways in which computer technology alters modes of social interaction at the personal
level.

2. Summarize the social implications of social media on individualism versus collectivism and
culture.

3. Explain how limits on Internet access are used as tools of political and social repression.

4. Explain the implications of context-awareness in ubiquitous computing systems.

Start your lesson here.

In a modern context, the term IT is commonly used to describe computers and networks
within a business environment. It refers to their applications in: generating, manipulating,
storing, regaining, transmitting, handling, exchanging, studying and securing all data or
information in an electronic format. IT is also used as an umbrella term to cover: television,
telecommunication equipment, software, e-commerce and the internet.
IT is a rapidly evolving field thus change is encountered on a regular basis. A brief
review of the history of IT will illustrate how much the field has changed in a relatively short
period.

Brief History of IT

It was not until the 1970s that new information technologies became widely diffused, accelerating
their synergistic development and converging into a new paradigm. These occurred in several stages of
innovation in the three main technological fields: micro-electronics, computers, and telecommunications.
  The transistor made the fast processing of electric impulses in a binary mode possible. This
enabled the coding of logic and communication between machines. Semiconductor processing
devices—integrated circuits or chips—are now made of millions of transistors.
 The comparatively giant leap forward occurred in 1971 when Intel introduced the 4-bit 4004
microprocessors, that is the computer on a chip, and information-processing power could thus be
installed everywhere.
 The observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles approximately
every two years is referred to as Moore’s law (named after Gordon Moore).
 Also, greater miniaturization, further specialization, and the decreasing price of increasingly
powerful chips made it possible to place them in every machine in our everyday life, from
dishwashers and microwave ovens to automobiles.
 In the last two decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st, increasing chip power
resulted in a dramatic enhancement of micro-computing power. Since the mid-1980s,
microcomputers could no longer be conceived of in isolation: they were linked up in networks,
with increasing mobility, on the basis of portable computers (and later mobile phones).
 Into the 2010s, storage capacity was so cheap and computing power increased enough, that the
time of Big Data commenced, where massive amounts of data are analyzed algorithmically to
find patterns.

Recommended Learning Materials and Resources:

To supplement the lesson in this module, you may visit the following links:

1. History of Computers: A Brief Timeline

https://www.livescience.com/20718-computer-history.html
2. A Brief History of IT
https://midshire.co.uk/guides/information-technology-complete-guide/1-brief-history/

Social Implications of Computing in a Networked World

Some people, such as Castells, claim that a new form of society has arisen through a number of
major concurrent social, technological, economic, and cultural transformations. This change is at a global
scale, but this does not entail that everyone is participating equally in it: many segments of the population
of the planet are excluded from the global networks that accumulate knowledge, wealth, and power.
A particular feature of the recent (past 20 years) transformation has been the radical changes in
the ways people communicate. The top-down mass media mode has been augmented with, and to some
extent replaced by, horizontal digital communication between peers and by what has been called citizen
journalism. This brought with it a reduced amount of power by the gatekeepers of the mass media and
empowered individual citizens to distribute information—or disinformation (‘fake news’, propaganda,
etc.), as the case may be for either mode of communication. In addition, wireless communication can now
reach users in most places on earth, albeit at various speeds and various cost.
 Also, the changes that have taken place have affected the generations in different ways. For
instance, now there are WhatsApp parent groups at schools, or classes have such groups themselves for
student communication, and people are used to such instant communication. Compare this with the
‘telephone trees’ for distribution of information that was functional for many years before: a
parent/student was called with a message (e.g., by the teacher), who called two other parents/students and
so forth until the class was covered.
Transformation of Communication
The Internet is old by computing standards—having started 1969—but it only diffused on a large
scale twenty years later, because of several factors:
 regulatory changes & privatization in the 1990s;
 open source software & open protocols;
 greater bandwidth in telecommunications and switching capacity;
 diffusion of personal computers and local networks;
 user-friendly software programs that made it easy to upload, access, and communicate content:
beginning with the World Wide Web server and browser designed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN
in 1990;
 rapidly growing social demand for the networking of everything, arising from both the needs of
the business world and the public’s desire to build its own communication networks. The number
of Internet users on the planet grew from under 40 million in 1995 to about 1.5 billion in 2009
and is estimated at 4.3 billion in March 20192.
A few examples of changes in communication are, among others, text-based communication
rather than making a phone call, writing an email instead of walking over to a colleague’s desk or writing
letters, posting holiday pictures on social media rather than sending postcards to friends and family, and
being contactable almost anywhere compared to being ‘disconnected’ when one is travelling.
It is not only social media users who understand the power of Internet with respect to voicing
community issues and engaging citizens. Democratic governments throughout the world have been using
ICTs for improving their services. Governments make use of ICT for communication. There are three
basic areas where ICT is used, which are access to information, transaction services, and citizen
participation. These three are examples of the 3 categories of benefits of digital governance.
Repressive governments are also aware of the power of the Internet in mobilizing community
support, especially for a political issue. Dependence of the Internet to express dissent in repressive
governments may not be the best approach, since governments (alongside private companies) control the
infrastructure. This means that governments can prevent people from using the Internet as a medium.
Worldwide Mobile Revolution
Since the 1990s, there has been an explosion of increasing capacity of connectivity and
bandwidth in successive generations of mobile phones. This has been the fastest diffusing technology in
the history of communication. In 1991, there were about 16 million wireless phone subscriptions in the
world. By July 2008, subscriptions had surpassed 3.4 billion and is currently estimated at around 4.5-5
billion mobile phone subscriptions. Such numbers have to be considered with caution before assuming
2/3 of the population has wireless access: some people have more than one subscription (e.g., one SIM
card for data and one for airtime) and others share their phone with friends and family.
Digital Convergence
In the 2000s, an increasing technological convergence between the Internet, wireless
communication, and multiple applications for communicating over wireless networks have been
witnessed. This has multiplied the points of access to the Internet. This communication network can
exchange anything that can be digitized: texts, audios, videos, software.
Digital Convergence refers to the fact that we no longer need separate communications channels
for different media (such as voice, video, text, etc.) because they are all digitized and can share the same
connections and platforms.
There has also been a price reduction in the production of certain electronics thus leading to the
ubiquity of certain sensors. This has resulted in what is called the Internet of Things. This the ability to
have devices such fridges, stoves, etc. and traditional machines such as computers to be able to share data.
This means that individuals are able to have “smart” houses where one can remotely turn their lights on
and off, check whether they turned off the stove, etc.
Work and Employment Transformed
Fourth Industrial Revolution
Automatization at the workplace can be beneficial to the workers. For instance, not
having to do dangerous work anymore and therewith there will be fewer injuries on the job. It
contributes to capital and could make a loss-making company profitable, so that the people who
work there can keep their jobs. Yet, automatization typically has the consequence of firing
employees.
These changes—both the general drive toward automating manual tasks in software, like
your online registration process at the university as compared to filling in a paper form and
handing it over to a human to process it, and by robots—are expected to very profound in the
upcoming years to the extent that it has been dubbed the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution, or, less glamorous, industry 4.0, is said to be driven
by a set of technologies, notably including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of
Things (IoT). The use of IoT in industry generates lots of data, which is then analyzed with AI
techniques to try to make sense out of the generated data. This combination then is expected to
make “intelligent” cyber-physical systems that can configure themselves based on the input it
receives, adjust its configuration accordingly, and, finally, optimize its operations autonomously
as well.
This extends also into agriculture, where it is known as precision agriculture to
automate farming: sensors collect data about the environment, such as the temperature, humidity,
and any pest infestation, and make decisions based on that to manage the plants (e.g., to spray
pesticides and to increase or decrease irrigation). Likewise, it is being extended into smart cities
for, among others, better traffic monitoring and pollution control. This would enable, among
others, the adjustment of the timing that a traffic light is on green based on the amount of traffic
at, or nearing, each particular crossroads.
 Overall, this means that a lot of jobs are set to disappear. While this is a fairly common
process, it is unclear where new ones will be created, if they required the skills that people have
that were made redundant (probably not), and whether that will be a similar amount of jobs that
are expected to disappear in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Robots
Robots speak to the imagination and fear that humans have, and have featured
prominently in popular culture. The idea of trying to constrain their use can, perhaps, be traced
back best to Asimov’s laws of robotics, which have been debated widely, extended, and made fun
of ever since.
Three laws of robotics
The Three laws of robotics were formulated by science fiction write Isaac Asimov, in an
attempt to control humanoid robots in his science fiction novels. They are:
 A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come
to harm.
 A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would
conflict with the First Law.
 A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with
the First or Second Laws.
A recent variant is the so-called “sharing economy”, such as Uber and Grab for a cab
ride, where software is used for matchmaking between clients and service providers. Put
differently: there is a software platform to support peer-to-peer economic activity, where a
percentage of the proceeds goes to the company that developed the software.
Finally, entrepreneurship and innovation continue to thrive on the margins of the
corporate sectors of the economy, increasing the numbers of self-employed as technology allows
self-reliance in the control of the means of production of knowledge-based services.

Recommended Learning Materials and Resources:

To supplement the lesson in this module, you may visit the following links:

1. The network society

https://www.soas.ac.uk/cedep-demos/000_P523_MKD_K3637-Demo/unit1/page_10.htm
2. Impacts of Information Technology on Society in the New Century
https://www.zurich.ibm.com/pdf/news/Konsbruck.pdf
3. Networked Communication
http://socialimplicationscomp1220uwi.weebly.com/network-communication.html
Impact of Social Media on Individualism, Collectivism and Culture
Internet is a technology of freedom, in the terms coined by Ithiel de Sola Pool in 1973, coming
from a libertarian culture, paradoxically financed by the Pentagon for the benefit of scientists, engineers,
and their students, with no direct military application in mind (Castells 2001). The expansion of the
Internet from the mid-1990s onward resulted from the combination of three main factors:
 The technological discovery of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee and his willingness to
distribute the source code to improve it by the open-source contribution of a global community of
users, in continuity with the openness of the TCP/IP Internet protocols. The web keeps running
under the same principle of open source. And two-thirds of web servers are operated by Apache,
an open-source server program.
 Institutional change in the management of the Internet, keeping it under the loose management of
the global Internet community, privatizing it, and allowing both commercial uses and cooperative
uses.
 Major changes in social structure, culture, and social behavior: networking as a prevalent
organizational form; individuation as the main orientation of social behavior; and the culture of
autonomy as the culture of the network society.
Our society is a network society; that is, a society constructed around personal and organizational
networks powered by digital networks and communicated by the Internet. And because networks are
global and know no boundaries, the network society is a global network society. This historically specific
social structure resulted from the interaction between the emerging technological paradigm based on the
digital revolution and some major sociocultural changes. A primary dimension of these changes is what
has been labeled the rise of the Me-centered society, or, in sociological terms, the process of
individuation, the decline of community understood in terms of space, work, family, and ascription in
general. This is not the end of community, and not the end of place-based interaction, but there is a shift
toward the reconstruction of social relationships, including strong cultural and personal ties that could be
considered a form of community, on the basis of individual interests, values, and projects.
The process of individuation is not just a matter of cultural evolution, it is materially produced by
the new forms of organizing economic activities, and social and political life. It is based on the
transformation of space (metropolitan life), work and economic activity (rise of the networked enterprise
and networked work processes), culture and communication (shift from mass communication based on
mass media to mass self-communication based on the Internet); on the crisis of the patriarchal family,
with increasing autonomy of its individual members; the substitution of media politics for mass party
politics; and globalization as the selective networking of places and processes throughout the planet.
But individuation does not mean isolation, or even less the end of community. Sociability is
reconstructed as networked individualism and community through a quest for like-minded individuals in a
process that combines online interaction with offline interaction, cyberspace and the local space.
Individuation is the key process in constituting subjects (individual or collective), networking is the
organizational form constructed by these subjects.
Academic research has established that the Internet does not isolate people, nor does it reduce
their sociability. The study showed that Internet use empowers people by increasing their feelings of
security, personal freedom, and influence, all feelings that have a positive effect on happiness and
personal well-being. The effect is particularly positive for people with lower income and who are less
qualified, for people in the developing world, and for women. Age does not affect the positive
relationship; it is significant for all ages. Why women? Because they are at the center of the network of
their families, Internet helps them to organize their lives. Also, it helps them to overcome their isolation,
particularly in patriarchal societies. The Internet also contributes to the rise of the culture of autonomy.
The key for the process of individuation is the construction of autonomy by social actors, who
become subjects in the process. They do so by defining their specific projects in interaction with, but not
submission to, the institutions of society. This is the case for a minority of individuals, but because of
their capacity to lead and mobilize they introduce a new culture in every domain of social life: in work
(entrepreneurship), in the media (the active audience), in the Internet (the creative user), in the market
(the informed and proactive consumer), in education (students as informed critical thinkers, making
possible the new frontier of e-learning and m-learning pedagogy), in health (the patient-centered health
management system) in e-government (the informed, participatory citizen), in social movements (cultural
change from the grassroots, as in feminism or environmentalism), and in politics (the independent-minded
citizen able to participate in self-generated political networks).
There is increasing evidence of the direct relationship between the Internet and the rise of social
autonomy. There are identified six major types of autonomy based on projects of individuals according to
their practices:
a) professional development
b) communicative autonomy
c) entrepreneurship
d) autonomy of the body
e) sociopolitical participation
f) personal, individual autonomy
These six types of autonomous practices were statistically independent among themselves. But
each one of them correlated positively with Internet use in statistically significant terms, in a self-
reinforcing loop (time sequence): the more one person was autonomous, the more she/he used the web,
and the more she/he used the web, the more autonomous she/he became (Castells et al. 2007). This is a
major empirical finding. Because if the dominant cultural trend in our society is the search for autonomy,
and if the Internet powers this search, then we are moving toward a society of assertive individuals and
cultural freedom, regardless of the barriers of rigid social organizations inherited from the Industrial Age.
From this Internet-based culture of autonomy have emerged a new kind of sociability, networked
sociability, and a new kind of sociopolitical practice, networked social movements and networked
democracy.

Growth and Control of the Internet

The Internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, as the electrical engine was the
vector of technological transformation of the Industrial Age. This global network of computer networks,
largely based nowadays on platforms of wireless communication, provides ubiquitous capacity of
multimodal, interactive communication in chosen time, transcending space. The Internet is not really a
new technology: its ancestor, the Arpanet, was first deployed in 1969 (Abbate 1999). But it was in the
1990s when it was privatized and released from the control of the U.S. Department of Commerce that it
diffused around the world at extraordinary speed: in 1996, the first survey of Internet users counted about
40 million; in 2013, they are over 2.5 billion, with China accounting for the largest number of Internet
users. Furthermore, for some time the spread of the Internet was limited by the difficulty to lay out land-
based telecommunications infrastructure in the emerging countries. This has changed with the explosion
of wireless communication in the early twenty-first century. Indeed, in 1991, there were about 16 million
subscribers of wireless devices in the world, in 2013 they are close to 7 billion (in a planet of 7.7 billion
human beings). Counting on the family and village uses of mobile phones, and taking into consideration
the limited use of these devices among children under five years of age, we can say that humankind is
now almost entirely connected, albeit with great levels of inequality in the bandwidth as well as in the
efficiency and price of the service.

Digital Divide
The adoption of the Internet and other ICTs have not been uniform throughout the world. This
inequality is often referred to as the digital divide. By 2009 rates of penetration reached more than 60%
in most rich countries and were increasing at a fast pace in countries with emerging economies. By 2020,
it is about 88% in Europe and North America, with Africa trailing at 42% yet having seen about 12000%
growth since 2000 (see Figure 1 for details). Global Internet penetration in 2008 was still at around one-
fifth of the world’s population and fewer than 10% of Internet users had access to broadband. However,
since 2000, the digital divide, measured in terms of access, has been shrinking.
Digital Divide refers to the disparities in the penetration of the Information Society in terms of
access and use of Information and Communications Technologies. It is the gap between those who have
access to the Information Society and those who are deprived of such access. It mirrors and exacerbates
existing disparities in society:
 gaps in education (for example, illiteracy)
 disability
 location (rural-urban)
 gender
 race
 income level

Indicators of Digital Divide

 Access
 Technology
 HumanWare
  Infrastructure
 Enabling environment

Figure 1: World internet usage and population statistics

Figure 2: Internet
users distribution in the world
Source: https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

According to Internet World Stats, the Philippines has 72.1% penetration rate of Internet users as
of May 31, 2020 and 65.5% penetration rate of Facebook users as of March 31, 2020 (source:
https://www.internetworldstats.com/ stats3.htm#asia).

Recommended Learning Materials and Resources:

To supplement the lesson in this module, you may visit the following links:

1. Different aspects of the digital divide:

https://www.manilatimes.net/2020/05/07/opinion/columnists/topanalysis/different-aspects-of-
the-digital-divide/723134/
2. Commentary: Pandemic bares digital divide in Philippine education:
Context-aware Computing
Ever wonder how Google came up with suggestions for you according to your interests? Well, it
is through the use of context. In business, companies put across what the customer needs. However,
many businesses especially in the IT world began to understand that the needs of customers vary and
constantly change — one needs to understand the context of the situation better in order to respond to the
needs of the consumer.
Gartner (2020) defines context-aware computing as a style of computing in which situational
and environmental information about people, places and things is used to anticipate immediate needs and
proactively offer enriched, situation-aware and usable content, functions and experiences.
Context-aware systems are concerned with 3As:

 Acquisition of context (e.g. using sensors to perceive a situation)

 Abstraction and understanding of context (e.g. matching a perceived sensory stimulus to a
context)
 Application based on the recognized context (e.g. triggering actions based on context)
Active Context Awareness: an application automatically adapts to discovered context by
changing the application’s behavior.
Passive context awareness: an application presents the new or updated context to an interested
user or makes the context persistent for the user to retrieve later

Generation Processing Usage

Figure 3: General model of context-awareness

General model of context-awareness

 Generation: contextual information is obtained from UI or sensor
 Processing: change raw data to meaningful information
 Usage: use of contexts and possible reaction as output

Context aware application types

1. Context-aware delivery/presentation of information and services

 Active Badges, ParcTab, Tour guide
2. Context-aware automatic execution of services in physical/cyber environments
 Smart homes (turn off lights, adjust temperature)
 3. Tagging of contextual information to objects/events for later retrieval and use
 Digital camera meta-data (time, location, etc.)
Context-aware computing issues

 Context is most useful in dynamic, mobile environments. But what is the relevant information
in various situations?
 Mobility results in continuous updates of context information. How can we efficiently manage
this?
 How can we share context?
 How do we handle uncertainty of context information?
 How do we ensure privacy control and management of context information?
 How do we reach a common understanding of implications and semantics of (shared) context
information?
 How to effectively use context with resource restrictions?
 How to exploit the past context or context history?
Recommended Learning Materials and Resources

To supplement the lesson in this module, you may visit the following links:

1. Understanding and Using Context

https://jianhua.cis.k.hosei.ac.jp/course/ubi/Dey2001.pdf
2. Context-Aware Computing
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-
interaction-2nd-ed/context-aware-computing-context-awareness-context-aware-user-
interfaces-and-implicit-interaction

3. Context-Aware Technology (Video)

https://vimeo.com/453768973

Flexible Teaching Learning Modality (FTLM) adapted

In this lesson, the online and remote FTLM is adapted using the university’s Learning
Management System called SeDi. For the online modality, the Virtual Classroom of SeDi shall be used
for the purpose of delivering a lecture and allowing a synchronous discussion with the students. For the
remote modality, SeDi shall be used to upload the module and to allow asynchronous discussion with the
students. This will also be used as platform for the submission of the requirements.

Assessment Task:

1. Create a timeline of the history of information technology that covers all the key topics from
3000 B.C. to the present. Categorize the timeline in different ages as shown below. Research
 online to include all the of the technologies in the timeline. Your timeline can be in a form of a
website, powerpoint presentation, brochure, or anything you find it creative.
Ages Year Technology

Pre-mechanical

Mechanical

Electromechanical

Electronic

2. Research articles about latest or new technologies coming out. You will share and discuss the article
through the discussion forum in SeDi. The goal is to have a good understanding of how new
technologies come around and how quickly they spring up. Please note that this will be a monthly
activity.

When choosing articles, you should try to find some that most people might not have heard
of. The more variety of technologies and articles people have, the more the entire class will learn
about emerging technologies. Pay attention to any trends you see in these emerging technologies.
Look at the changes from a current technology to its predecessors and future plans for that
technology. Also take note of how these emerging technologies relate to the Internet, how people
benefit from these technologies and what are the impacts of these technologies to our lives.

References:

Admin (April 7, 2016). Context Aware Computing and its Growing Importance and Impact on
Technology. Retrieved at https://chaione.com/blog/context-aware-computing-and-technology/

Brady, W. and Elkner, J. (2007). History of Information Technology. Retrieved at

https://openbookproject.net/courses/intro2ict/history/history.html

Castells, M. (n.d.) The Impact of the Internet on Society: A Global Perspective. Retrieved at
https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/articles/the-impact-of-the-internet-on-society-a-global-
perspective/

Gartner (2020). Gartner Glossary Retrieved at

https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/context-aware-computing-
2#:~:text=Context%2Daware%20computing%20is%20a,usable%20content%2C%20functions
%20and%20experiences.

(2019). Social Issues and Professional Practice in IT and Computing. Department of Computer Science,
University of Cape Town.