The Network World

• Networks and the internet

  • Distance is no longer a barrier to commercial or social contact for those connected to suitable networks
  • Some people may find it difficult to imagine not having access to the information and services that play a crucial part in their daily lives
  • Others may feel they have no part to play in the digital world because their network access is very limited or even non-existent
  • Some simply don't care about the digital world, viewing it perhaps as a waste of time
  • Digital information is flowing constantly around us
• Computer connected to the internet

  Part of a complex system consisting of wires and optical fibres, microwaves and lasers, switches and satellites, that encompasses almost every part of the world
• The oceans are wrapped in more than a quarter of a million miles of fibre-optic network cable with several strands of glass running through it
• Each fibre-optic strand can carry thousands of simultaneous telephone conversations, a few dozen television channels, or any of a range of other forms of digital content (such as web pages)
• Modern communications network


  • Enables use of mobile phones in remote locations
  • Enables watching television in the middle of the Atlantic
  • Enables doing banking on the train
  • Enables playing games with a person on the other side of the world
  • One of the greatest technological achievements of the last thirty years
  • So reliable and omnipresent that we rarely stop to think about what actually happens when we use it
• We tend not to think about the modern communications network until something disrupts it, whether a widespread problem like a power cut or something more localised like slow broadband access or no mobile phone signal
• Information society


  Period of great technological change, often compared to the Industrial Revolution, with correspondingly large social and economic changes
• Network society


  Term used to characterise the social and economic changes happening alongside technological developments
• Knowledge society


  Refers to the way new information systems can transform human societies, including the idea of the learning society
• The pace of change is so rapid nowadays that learning can no longer be confined to our school years and early adulthood - everyone must continue to learn throughout their adult lives in order to benefit from the economic opportunities that rapid development makes possible
• Changes in technology


  • Texting and messaging
  • Unintended uses of emerging technologies
• SMS (short message service)


  Originally a minor feature designed to be used by engineers testing equipment, but became one of the most profitable parts of the mobile phone business in the first decade of the 21st century
• SMS resulted in a whole new method of communication and form of popular culture, different ways of interacting with radio and television, and even a new language form: texting
• Income from SMS messages peaked at around US$104 billion in 2011
• In more recent times, instant messaging (IM) apps used on smartphones, such as WhatsApp, Snapchat and Telegram, have overtaken SMS in popularity
• By 2015, the IM company WhatsApp was handling 30 billion messages every day, compared to the 20 billion SMS messages sent daily
• This difference in usage is partly because there is no extra cost involved in using IM services, while SMS messages can be expensive on some contracts and require a mobile phone signal
• Multimedia messaging services (MMS) allow for text, audio and images to be sent via the mobile phone signal
• The total number of SMS and MMS messages sent in the first three months of 2016 was 24.1 billion, a decrease of 1.8 billion messages (6.8%) compared to a year previously
• These services and applications are blurring the boundaries between texting and online communication