Computers and society

Abstract

Since their inception some 25 years ago, computers have become an all pervasive influence in society. Their impact has been felt not only in the sciences and social sciences, but in almost all fields of endeavor where there is a significant amount of information to be taken, stored and manipulated. Their use in the many spheres of business activity has contributed to the creation of a huge computer industry. In recognition of the immense social influences of computers and the concurrent influence of the technocrats who “control” the machines, computer science departments have recently tried to respond to the challenge by giving their students an awareness of these forces. Their response has taken basically 2 forms. The first approach has been to incorporate within existing courses a measure of social awareness and responsibility. This has been accomplished by examining, where appropriate case situations of computer related developments and trying to assess their implications in the social context. Experiments of this type have been reported by [NEI72]. The second approach has been to create a new course, often called Computers and Society, whose main goal is to expose the student to at least a subset of the relevant issues connected with computers. Though called by the same name, these courses often vary widely, and several proposals which describe various formats have appeared in the literature e.g. see [HOR72] and [LEE71]. This paper deals with a variation on this second approach.