Social Impacts of IT - P6

Effects on local communities
Social network's connect communities through many online websites. It connects neighbours who would not communicate face to face, but would online via email, Instant Messaging and social networking sites because of chat groups that connect people to those in there geographic locations.  During the 1980's and 1990's young  people spent time watching TV, now young people use the Internet, social networks, Instant messaging and play computer games. Social Impacts have a lot of effects on local communities, Internet offers information , goods and services. The impact on village shops because of IT isn't so good, online feature and services to buy product make village shops no longer viable also there are less diverse shops for people to enjoy.

Economic impacts
Working practices have improved due to IT. IT technology has made it easier for work place users to store imformation and documents safely; before IT technology information and document was stored in folders and cabinates which was not very secure. In the work place IT has made work easier, it has improved communication among workplaces which improve productivity. IT technology also has impact on the  eonomy, compters use electricity; Energy consumption (Burning Energy) has an effect on the climate change.

Legal impacts
With IT technology bring a lot of legal impacts i.e.copyright, plagiarism.Copyright law protect people who produce orgrinal work, music and film are easy to download  but are harder to protect because they can be downloaded from file sharing web services. Plagiarism; verbatim copying or imitation of the language, ideas, or thoughts of another author and representing them as one’s own original work. This is a common problem because it is easy to copy and paste from the web to a document. This is a issue becasue people in eduction can copy and paste from the internet, and use it.

Ethical impacts
IT technology has improved privacy of information, every aspect of life is recored on a computer i.e. medical records, what you buy from in a supermarket, who you call on your telephone and what you search for on google. person privacy has become and issue, personal information  relaiing to living indiviuals held on computers is covered by the data protection Act (1998). In the UK personal information about living individuals is protected by the data protection Act 1998. The law requires any company that keepa personal information about poeple on its  computers, to register with the Data Protection Registrar and to keep the eight Data Potection principles. Click link to see