INTRODUCTION
Technology is all about change. Lots of change! These changes tend to enable us to do more things with this technology as the interfaces between the user and the technology becomes more and more user friendly. What is adds up to is an increase in complexity.
It's a hard word to get to grips with, complexity. One thing that many people do not seem to do anymore is use a dictionary. Let's go against this trend and have a look what the dictionaries have to say about the word.
Ouch! Most dictionaries will say something like “the quality or state of being complex”. Fantastic! A great help! Not!
So what is meant by the word complexity in relation to ICT? It could mean difficult but that is not really the point in terms of computers. Certainly, the knowledge of ICT we must have these days is more involved and intricate then ever before and that is where we are getting close to what is meant by the word.
Cast your mind back ten years. If you are a teenager right now, then ask an older person to do so! Can you remember getting your first mobile phone? It was hard to figure out at first, am I right? As for the manual that came with it, it would have made as much sense if it had been written in Martian! Now, think of the ease with which you use your mobile now, the speed at which you can text, the times you use it to connect with the internet, the games you play on it, the Bluetooth technology you use with it, the videos and tunes you download via your mobile.
Now imagine your past self ten years ago. If you had been asked if you could use or even would use all these complicated features, would your answer automatically have been a yes?
What you have done is adapted, over time, to the shift in mobile technology from being a simple tool with which to talk to others, to a multifaceted tool that you can use for all sorts of things.
So, my first message is this. Do not be freaked out by the complexity of ICT. You will adapt! Change happens, things get more complex, but it is something that you should embrace, not run away from.
WHAT THINGS BECOME
Life, eh? Complicated, difficult and often confusing. Most people would agree that out lives have become more complex and this is partly down to technology and the pace of change going on all around us. As we get older, too, we do not respond as well to change as when we were young. Can you remember seeing older people on the phone to a family member in another country and shouting rather than talking? They thought that it would enable the other person to hear them better if they shouted because they were so far away. How we chuckled! What we must try to avoid is loosing our ability to adapt. Change is going to happen however we resist it. Plus, the sheer scale of change over the last 50 years has been enormous. The way that organization work and operate has changed enormously. What organizations produce has also changed with a shift, in the UK at least, from manufacture to service (or even information) economies. How people work has changed, too.
Today, over 300,000 people make a living trading on eBay. Use a time machine and go back twenty years. Ask someone what eBay is. You would get a blank look!
So, change happens and it get more and more complex. You will be expected to adapt to these changes. If you work for an organization for a long time - say twenty years - your experience will be much greater than an employee who has just finished university or college. However, when new technology is introduced, long servers can often get confused by the changes and are quite often regarded by the younger workers as "dinosaurs". It is more important than ever to welcome change, work with it and adapt to it.
ICT could be your downfall. Make sure it's your saviour!
NEXT: The skills you need to use new technology
OMG UVE SAVED ME LOL