A survey of the implications of information technology runs two risks. First, it may degenerate into a long and tedious list of the ways in which the use of IT bears upon our lives. Second, in seeking to fill the gaps left by enthusiastic advocates it may suggest that the consequences are wholly bad. In this book, beneficial effects are largely taken for granted, for those who design and introduce IT systems are rarely reticent about merits; attention is less often drawn to blemishes. But, we must not forget that adverse consequences could follow from failing to use IT. The intricate pattern of economic and governmental activities that underpins daily life in industrialized countries now depends critically on rapid and effective exchanges of data: without IT that pattern could unravel into chaos. We have already reached the stage where even a temporary failure of a major IT system can have undesirable social and economic repercussions.

When faced with changes we neither understand nor like, we are tempted to choose a scapegoat to bear the blame, and IT has been singled out as the cause of unwelcome social and economic developments that would have happened anyway. Some of these have certainly been accelerated or intensified, but it would be dangerously blinkered and wholely naive to see IT as the principal agent of change. Life is rarely as simple as we suppose.