Technology as a Need: Trends in the Evolving Information Society

In this paper, we take a broad view on the Information Society and on the Information and Communication Technologies which constitute its technical and, in a sense, social infrastructure. We discuss the fact that today the needs of human beings are strongly influenced by technology, which has become a need in itself. We propose an analysis of how the Industrial Society has left the scene in favor of the Information Society, based on two meta-trends identified as Personalization and Distribution. Using an original biological metaphor, we describe “The DNA of ICT Evolution”, which uses the two meta-trends as filaments and ten trends as bases: ideal performance, ubiquity, flexibility, complexity, cognitivity, opportunism, cooperation, security, miniaturization, convergence. We then move on to a social analysis of the impact of the Information Society on nations and individuals, describing the Information Divide, composed by the Digital Divide and the Psychological Divide. We conclude the paper by arguing that a new skill will be needed by individuals to cope with all the above, which is the skill of disciplined creative thinking.