Abstract
——Unit One 《What Will Be》
(遥感学院S091班张东映2009202130029)
The author explored many ways which Information Market would affect our society and daily life , so as to indicate the future of the Information Market. When facing the society, the author concluded three discoveries: the first discovery was that this information Marketplace can indeed be built on a technological foundation: the information infrastructure. The second discovery was that the Information Marketplace will dramatically affect people and organizations on a wide scale. Putting all these detailed uses in perspective, it has been realized that they were different faces of two major new forces：electronic bulldozers and electronic proximity. The electronic bulldozers’ effect is primarily economic, increasing human productivity in both our personal lives and the workplace. The third important discovery from these explorations was the power of the Information Marketplace to customize information and information work to different human and organizational needs. The other major force —electronic proximity —will increase by a thousand times the number of people we can easily reach and will bring people together across space and time. However, when facing human emotion and human relationships, the author discovered that they will pass only partially through the Information Marketplace, for many of our most valued actions and decisions involve these forces like trust, love, and fear —the information world will not be a substitute for the physical world. Yet the author saw that we might be able to reduce some of these complexity problems by making the artifacts of the Information Age easier to use —a primary goal for the technologists of the 21th century. At last, it came to a conclusion that the Information Marketplace will transform our society over the next century as significantly as the two industrial revolutions, establishing itself solidly and rightfully as the Third Revolution in modern human history. What’s more, We need not fear it any more or any less than people feared the other revolutions, because it carries similar promises and pitfalls. What we need to do, instead, is to understand it, feel it, and embrace it so as to harness it to steer our future human course.
