Major changes have occurred within the computer revolution; changes which encompass all aspects of its role. These are not just quantitative in nature, such as exponential increases in processing power and storage capacity, but are more fundamental, pointing not only to the function of computer technology, but its emerging diversity both in terms of its form and place in the world. Computers are now embedded within a huge range of materials and artefacts, and take on roles in almost all aspects of life. People and lifestyles are altering. These changes are sometimes spurred on by technology, but other times work in parallel or provoke technological innovation. There is a global scale of change which is taking place hand in hand with new technologies. This gives rise to tensions between individuals and governments, and between globalisation and cultural diversity. In this Part, we comment on change at all levels, and provide pointers to where we are going in future.
There have been various computer-driven revolutions in the past: the widespread introduction of the personal computer (PC) was one, the invention of the graphical browser was another, and the Internet yet another. There have also been computer eras where one type of computer has dominated, having straightforward implications for whether the computers were shared or personal, and for whether they were specialised commodities or not (see diagram below). But the ways computers have altered our lives, all aspects of our lives, is more comprehensive than, at first blush, recollections of these technological revolutions or eras might suggest.
Computers affect how we undertake the most prosaic of activities – from buying food to paying our bills – and they do so in ways we might not have imagined when the first personal computers arrived on our desks. They have also created wholly new experiences, for example, allowing us to inhabit virtual worlds with people from many different parts of the globe. In between these extremes, from the prosaic to the wholly new, computers have taken over from older technologies in ways that looked merely like substitution at first but which have ended up creating radical change.
Photography, for example, has retained its familiarity despite moving from being chemically-based to being digital. At the point of creation, people still ‘point and shoot’ in much the same way as they used to.
However, what one can do with images when they are digital is quite different. Whereas, before, we may have only printed one or two rolls of film, displaying the photos on the mantelpiece or in an album, digital images are now reproduced many times over, and are often broadcast around the world on websites.
The activities we undertake and the goals we have in mind when we take photos and share them, then, are not at all the same now as they were even five years ago. It is not just in terms of user experiences, such as shopping, games, and picture-taking that the world has changed. Computers have altered our sense of the world at large, letting us see images of far-away places, instantaneously and ubiquitously. The world, now, seems so much smaller than it was even a decade ago. In this section we begin to look at many different aspects of how computing technologies have changed and their impact on our lives.