Social Science Research about the Consequences of Modern Information Technologies

I have been asked to talk about social science research on consequences of information technologies in particular and rather briefly. Information technology poses a special challenge to social science researchp and at the same time confronts it with very specific and rather large problems. The basic reason for this has been roughly described, by implication, in what Mrs. Coates said before. Information technology is linked to one of the very elementary processes of human interaction and human behaviour, i.e. communication and the processing of information. From this it obviously follows that most social processes, institutions, or events have an information and communication aspect and are therefore liable to be affected by this particular technology. This means that more than other technological developments, information technologies pose problems and questions to be answered by social science research. By comparison, in the field of bio-technology the scope for social science research on particular impacts is much narrower