The century of ICTs

THE CENTURY OF ICTs

The 21st century was mainly marked by the Information and Communication technologies (ICTs). Those technologies caused and are still causing great changes on our daily lives. From our way to communicate with each other, to trade, to move; every feature of our lifestyle is inevitably linked to those artificial intelligences. All the debates about the necessity and the dangers of this new high tech world make us wonder: What are the improvements brought by the NICT on our lives and which possible drawbacks can occur because of it? In our development, we shall deal with the advantages of new technologies on one hand, then their possible abuse on the other hand.

It is more than normal to affirm that new technologies changed our life positively. First, in the field of economics and trade, the transaction became easier. Nowadays you can buy something online without even seeing the product and be delivered in the best time a good quality production using for instance Amazon. Moreover, the exchanges of capital at a worldwide scale is possible in a few seconds; foreign direct investments are moving everyday creating jobs in new sectors of activities (software programing, electronic card making) in develop countries. Other jobs are also created by outsourcing (move of western firms to countries with cheap labour force and less taxations, those firm are controlled from the main company based in Europe or America thank to ICTs) in developing countries such as Bangladesh or Kenya, reducing poverty and improving the life quality. For instance, for Kvochko (2013): “In the US alone the ICT sector is, and is expected to remain, one of the largest employers. In the US alone, computer and information technology jobs are expected to grow by 22% up to 2020, creating 758,800 new jobs”.  This new market is encouraging investments and competition which leads to low prices, better quality goods and more choices for the customers.

At social and cultural levels, internet, smartphones and social networks, facilitated the access to reliable, an efficient communication and updated information make culture and knowledge more available. Indeed, Google, which is the first motor of research with 78% register more than 3.5 billion researches per day as the average and on 8th of march 2017 from midnight to 8:03 it was a bit more than 4,271,378,332 (Internet Live Stats ,2017)! All those researches are about every fields, and they make people know about what is happening in the world and show them tips to make their life easier. Thanks to social medias such as Facebook, we know how people are living in different countries, their opinions about various subjects; we get more facilities to learn other languages, to immigrate, to share our point of view and it helps fighting stereotypes and create a global union. Then, smartphone substitutes our computers and our laptops. We mean that every year, a new smartphone comes with better tools combine more and more the main function of the phone (phone calls and SMS) with the laptops ones (access to internet, keep heavy documents in terms of capacity, writing essays…) As an example, you can communicate with your loved ones wherever they are as well as you can meet people of other continents. Cultural diversities, social improvement, that is what social media brought us. A better efficiency of moving and traveling (using for instance Google Map, booking a taxi via internet with Uber, booking holiday online via Trivago, high-tech public transportations, cars or planes ... all those services as cheap as possible) are other advantages of new technologies on our lives. As an illustration, Sweney (2013) showed us that 55% of Britons access to new online. This capacity to reach and communicate information results on ICT.

We are now able to support, that ICTs have a great impact on our life, even tough, they give the way to a lot of abuses and drawbacks.

The ICT drawbacks can be felt at many levels. First, at the economical one, ICT generated a globalization of production, but this globalization is much more profitable to rich countries than developing one. Even if it creates jobs, which kinds of jobs does it create? What are the working conditions of those workers? Do the local government make profits of this outsourcing? All the answers to those questions are negative. Indeed, employees in developing countries such as Bangladesh are working in horrible conditions, without any regulation for miserable salaries. They are victims of the competition caused by new technologies: if the prices must be low, the production costs also; that is the reason why multinational companies are abusing this labour force which has no choice. I can take as an example Foxconn, a Chinese factory, main supplier of Apple, where less than 16 years old citizens are employed unlawfully (BBC,2012) for a 11-hour working time per day in unsafe heath conditions with a poor salary (; but this situation happens silently because of the corruptions of the authorities by big companies. For instance, the when workers in the UK are doing conception jobs and gain 9 pounds per hour, they are workers doing packaging or assembling for the same company in countries like India earning 4 dollars a day (World Statistics,2012). At the social and cultural level, we are still observing the western domination. We mean that the most spread on internet and principally social medias, belongs to the American lifestyle: we are talking about Americanisation. It signifies that powerful countries at the edge of technologies, use them to diffuse their ideologies. This diffusion will obviously impact the other cultures then dominate them. We can obviously see our lifestyle moving to the western ones: the hamburger, chips, big brands… things that we use or wear everyday don’t come for our countries anymore because we have been taught trough ICT that the best way of living, eating, talking and so on in the occidental one. Even if the cultural diversity is a profitable and peaceful thing, too much diversity creates the loss of our local cultures less powerful. We can add as drawback isolation and laziness. Nowadays, each person is stock to his phone, listening to music or communicating with people abroad, instead of talking with the one who is just next to her. Smartphones are more dividing than uniting us because It is true that we me people via internet, however, nothing can substitute a real contact, the human warmth but today we are losing these things we can feel and do in real life. In the same optic D. Brown (2000.) avow: “Even the technology that promises to unite us, divides us. Each of us is now electronically connected to the globe, and yet we feel utterly alone.”. The laziness is felt in the abandon of reading despite the availability of book everywhere at any time. Student rely on internet to think and write for them, they no more have this love of researching and effort either in education, social life of sports. Bad Scholar results, obesity and socialization difficulties can be manifestations of those problems. Finally, environmental hazard creating by overproduction, using of sensitives resources (nuclear, fossils) also endanger our planet.

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