Lancaster, Lewis R. See all items with this value

2003

4

79-86

1530-4108 See all items with this value

The digital age has come upon us, sometimes with great fanfare and other times with imperceptible changes in our lives and methods of doing things. Information Technology is perhaps the defining digital element of our time. While industrialization dominated commerce and society from the middle of the 19th century, the agents of change today are the digital and biological advances. The achievements of molecular biology in particular dominate the field of biology. We are affected by these scientific developments as much as earlier generations were by railroads and the combustion engine. Information technology, that influences us so much, is difficult to study and comprehend because it is often invisible. We cannot see the electrons that store our data in a computer. Even in the biological sphere, the cutting and shifting of strands of DNA are only indirectly observed. We do not have the large smoke stacks, the rail tracks and other material manifestations before us. But visible or not, this technology has entered our lives and our bodies and all of human experience is undergoing change because of it.