Social Impact of Technology - Essay Example

These very children, who were undernourished, hailed from the underprivileged and sidelined segments of the society and also happened to be pathetically illiterate, were using the internet to have some meaningful peep into the unconcerned world surrounding their dismal existence. This conclusively explains the impact that the computers have on our society. Therein lays the power of computer, the great equalizer. The overall social impact of computer is defined by one word that is 'accessibility'.

While the fall of the Berlin Wall in December 1990 initiated the demise of communism, there exists no doubt pertaining to the fact that the much touted capitalistic societies had dangerously ushered in an unequal distribution of wealth (Friedman, 2006, p.50). Till the advent of computers, there existed an unjust world in which the lucrative data and information were accessible only to a privileged few and thus the underprivileged strata of the society was highly limited in its ability to take advantage of the opportunities for growth and development.

Computers turned out to be great equalizers in the sense that they enhanced the universal accessibility to information like never before. Doing so they ended up empowering the hitherto sidelined sections of the society by offering the requisite information to everybody and anybody located anywhere in the world, at the click of a mouse and that to at a relatively affordable price. It was a British computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, who while working for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research at Switzerland, pioneered the concept of a World Wide Web, which was primarily intended to be a system for creating, organizing and linking documents so as to make them accessible via internet (Friedman, 2006, p. 59). This concept eventually metamorphosed into the invention of easy to install and consumer friendly commercial browsers that served as a media for universal connectivity.

This made possible the interaction of multiple online computers and networks. The scope of these nascent inventions was exponentially multiplied by the advent of new software. Now the computers enabled everybody with a reasonable digital literacy to create and share digitalized information. Infact the concerned computer nerds all around the world are working hard to revolutionize the sharing of data by creating more potent software and uploading them on the internet to be accessed and downloaded by all for free.

This ushering in of the community software is drastically cutting the power of the middlemen and the vested interests in the market for digital technology and all the related commercial and humanitarian frameworks. Computers had an unforeseeable yet salubrious impact on the way economies interact and operate. Computers not only enabled the corporations to take advantage of the resources, capital and the skilled labor