Computers in Society
Strayer University
SOC 100 Winter 2012
1/20/2012
Computers in Society
Society doesn’t for the most part classify or even recognize that computers play any role or have any effect on society. Most people define social issues as having a negative or unwanted impact on society. Others believe that social issues are ones that are highly controversial and divide society to one side of the issue or another. Computers are a social issue that gets little to no recognition because of the deep integration in our lives they play.
Computers affect every level of every group of social category. Whether it’s broken down by age, gender, education level, or even social class, computers play a part in everyone’s life.
Computers didn’t use to exist, so everything had to be done manually. Farming, accounting, education, industry, and medical services are just of a few of the major ways of life that were affected with the advent and integration of computers. Let’s take farming for instance, before computers; dairy farms had to milk cows by hand, costing a lot of man hours and time milking each cow. Now it takes just a couple people to milk hundreds of cows in a fraction of the time. Likewise with crops, everything had to be sown, planted, and harvested by hand each season. Now it takes one or two people a matter of two days to harvest hundreds of acres of land. Accounting and financial institutions can now provide services to a much vaster customer base due to computers.
Education has increased exponentially with the introduction of computers and the internet. Information is readily available 24/7 allowing incredible access to information. Medicine has also made leaps and bounds, with computers doing massive amounts of processing and comparisons, they can unlock vaccines and cures for things that scientists would take hundreds of years to research on their own. People are able to be kept alive...