'Technology is the interaction between people and machines. 'Information technology' is then, the application of technology for dealing with the production, storage and distribution of information' (Walch, 1999: 7)
'Computers can be connected to one another for exchanging information and sharing resources... Information and Communications Technologies, or ICTs is another term used to denote the new technology. This terms puts a little more emphasis on the distribution of information' (Walch, 1999: 9)
The term ICTs is preferred here, because it moves away from the all-encompassing term IT, which may include all forms of media that convey information. We are really only interested in those forms of media that have some communicative function. In relation to the table below, it is through web-sites that our investigations will be carried out. These are the elements of ICTs, which can be investigated through web sites connected to the Internet. You may want to look at all or only some of these elements in your own research.
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World Wide Web: A program that works through hypertext links to data, allowing a user to explore network resources from multiple entry points. WWW has for may, become synonymous with the hypertext servers connected to one another via the Internet. The WWW is moving rapidly toward web casting with audio and video. |
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Email: Electronic mail is basically one-to-one communication, with a digitalised piece of information sent from one user to another user's mailbox. Copies can be sent to other users' mailboxes. Email technology has expanded so that many-to-many communication is possible through the use of mailing lists. |
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Conferencing: Electronic conferences are thematically indexed folders of communications. The user of a conference can read, reply to topics or write a new topic, depending on the type of conference. Some are read-only, some are open to all for both reading and writing and some are closed, open only to accepted members. Some conferences are moderated, with the moderator letting users in and sometimes editing the material. Newsgroup is another name for an electronic conference. |
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Gopher: This is a tool that creates menus that allows a user to access network resources by moving an on-screen pointer. A gopher can point to text files, sites for linking to another remote computer, and other types of data. |
based on Walch, 1999: 51.