Social impacts of IT

A social impact of IT is individuals and communities being able to enhance social and economic well-being, this enables them to participate more actively within society, internationally not just within their own community. People are now connected all over the world; you can connect socially using sites such as twitter.com, this allows you to connect with people all over the world.

Another social impact of IT is employability; people can now look for jobs online, this means people can find and apply for jobs all over the country, not just locally. People who are searching for jobs have more chance online since they can apply for hundreds of jobs at a time by submitting their CV. The disadvantage of this is most people are now applying online which means when applying for a job , it may be difficult too actually get a job since most people now send their CVS and send applications online as opposed to actually going into the work place and handing it in. With more people being able to apply for jobs online they now have less chance of getting the job since there may be other applicants with better qualifications, but they live far away but found out about the job because it is advertised on the internet.

More social impacts include banking, now that IT has advanced you can simply use a card to withdraw your money, account details are also saved to a mainframe computer, this means your records and bank account balance will always be accurate. A disadvantage is money can be taken from your account, people can steal your details online by phishing your details. Your account details can also be sold on to other people and used for fraud. Some people prefer face to face meetings rather then trusting a machine to do the work, when people have face to face meetings, this ensures the customers details are safe, because they have spoken to an accountant, which means they have a witness if anything suspicious is happening with their account. This also brings me to the employment side of banking. If a machine isdoing all the work then there is no need for the bank to hire any employers, they would rather save money in the long run by letting a machine do the work for them.

Along with the benefits of I.T there is also downsides, for example, people are meeting in chat rooms and on social networking sites and have no idea who they're actually talking too, people can hide their identity behind a computer,  more extreme cases are women meeting up with people they spoke too on the internet and not being who they say, this can lead to all sorts of criminal activity e.g rape,  social networking is also a prime target for paedophiles, these people will claim to be somebody totally different in order to get nude pictures of young girls.

Paedophiles also have their own rings where they will share their pictures and videos with other paedophiles, without I.T paedophiles would be easier to catch because they can't hide behind a proxy or computer screen, they would actually have to physically find their victims.