Chapter 41
Information Technology
Information technology (IT), also known as information and communication technology (ICT), has shaped human life so profoundly that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the word “prehistory” was introduced to classify civilizations that lacked written records and hence could be studied only on the basis of their artifacts. It seems that history begins with the availability of some IT, but the nature of IT has also evolved through history, to the point that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, IT has become so pervasive as to make it difficult to determine its specific nature. In order to clarify in this article what counts as IT, it is useful to concentrate on the three fundamental functions exercised by IT: recording, communicating and elaborating information (Floridi 1999). With some approximation, each of them has characterized a different stage in the evolution of IT.
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