Skip to content
Skip to main content

About this free course

Download this course

Share this free course

Introducing computing and IT
Introducing computing and IT

Start this free course now. Just create an account and sign in. Enrol and complete the course for a free statement of participation or digital badge if available.

2 Some aspects of our information society

Timing

This section of the course should take you around three hours to complete. If you don’t have time to work through it all at once, there are break points where you can stop and return later.

Section 1 introduced the concept of a digital world. This section will outline some key aspects of such a world. You will look at how it affects business, information, entertainment, public services and communication.

One of the things you will notice while studying computing and IT is the speed of change. Some of the examples you read about in this course may no longer exist, or are nothing like as important as when this material was written in 2019. This is inevitable, but you shouldn’t be concerned by it; your focus should be on the general principles, which remain valid. For example, some companies you read about may cease to exist, and some may be more or less prominent. Yet the likelihood is that, although companies come and go, there are still ways to share photos (as Flickr and Instagram allow at the moment), to edit documents online (as is possible with Microsoft Office Live and Google Docs), to store files online (as file-hosting services such as Dropbox allow), and so on.