The purpose of this book is to evaluate the questions: Is civilization developing for the benefit of humankind? What is civilization's future? To answer these questions, we must investigate the role of information and communication (under the form of information-communication technology [ICT]) in civilization's development, because it is information and communication that decide how human organization, knowledge, and wisdom are applied in decisions impacting human survival.
This book is written for a broad audience of academics, students, professionals, and those people who are interested in how information and communication and, later, information-communication technology (ICT) played a role in the development of civilization and what is its current state and future. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the ICT professionals are the main developers of civilization, which has been transforming from developing to developed or even overdeveloped in some regions. Therefore, it is very important, particularly for ICT professionals, to be aware how and why to develop certain ICT systems in order to avoid harm to individuals, society and civilization. Also users, managers/executives and politicians should be aware of the same issues in respect to their environments and in the broader context of civilization.
A concept of information has many dimensions, which are addressed in this book; however, one can state that from the users' points of view, they deal with information as the end product. But this end product is shaped by different kinds of information technology, for example, such ones as alphabet, books, newspapers, journals, files, databases, data warehouses and data retrieval and mining, with either by manual effort or recently with the help of computers. The latter is called in the U.S. "information technology" (IT) and in Europe "informatics" (automated information). Furthermore, with the intensive...