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1. What are traditional and new sources for the Net study?
2. What branches of science are to be backed up by the Net study?
Exercise 2. Topic for discussion.
Give your standpoint of the importance of the Net for future scientific researches.
TEXT 7
SUPPLEMENTARY READING
Read the text and supply it with a title.
Over the last five years, the revolution in information technology (IT) has
resulted in innovations that are having increasingly visible effects on the life of the
average American. These developments affect not only how people work, but where
they work, how much they work, or with whom they interact face-to-face or
electronically. Will future workers continue to share physical proximity with their
colleagues, or work largely alone wedded to digital devices with occasional
electronic mail or voice communication? What will these changes mean for social
trust and social life beyond the family? Will the growing trend of working at home
with the aid of IT help strengthen the family or add to the intrusion of the workplace
into the home? Will it reduce the hours people work, or increase them by infusing
work into every sphere of life, devouring leisure time and family life? And how will
the Internet affect the role and use of the traditional media?
These same IT innovations are revolutionizing information and entertainment
delivery, affecting their production and consumption, transforming social life and
behavior, even political institutions and the role of citizens within them. Some argue
that the new technology of email, online discussions, on-demand information, and
web-powered information diffusion and interest aggregation will lead to a more
informed, engaged, and influential mass public. Will one live in a better informed and
connected, more engaged and participatory society or in a society of lonely ex-couch
potatoes glued to computer screens, whose human contacts are largely impersonal
and whose political beliefs are easily manipulated, relying on the icons of a wired or
wireless society?
The human meaning of these changes remains unclear at present. Some greet these
developments with euphoria, others warn of dire consequences. The truth is likely to
be somewhere in the middle. Some of the social/political changes will be liberating,
some will have little social effect, but others may be harmful or even socially and
politically explosive; some may even be perverse, and the most critical ones may well
be unanticipated by everyone. For answers to these questions, one must move from
ideological claims to empirical evidence.
Exercise 1. Answer the following questions.
1. To what possible consequences of IT revolution do you agree?
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