Clase, 7. de Abril

Tecnologías de la información y las comunicaciónes (TIC) y la sociedad (Germán Santos)

This was the first of three lectures about internet and society. The class consisted of themes such as negotiation models, a modular view of web 2.0 meaning e.g. widgets and mashups. Also many old subjects were reassessed such as social networks (myspace, facebook etc.), weblogs and wikies and web OS's (e.g. Google apps). The class ended with a view into how services are offered in Spain and Europe, which was done by reviewing many statistics that are generally used to measure the state of the Information Society. As such, these statistics as well as many of the currently assessed subjects were familiar to me from the ongoing course named Information Society II.

The part that was really interesting about this lecture was the analytical viewpoint into how the service implementation develops in time. A very important part in analysing the success of a certain service or phenomenon is its degree of implementation, which in turn opens up for the possibility of analysing how the service is currently growing or diminishing. Also important is the aspect of what types of cervices were used before and if new web 2.0 types of cervices have superseded these classical services or perhaps supplemented its use. This kind of analytical assesment helps to better understand how electronic services are currently evolving and which technologies may enable for the emergence of new next generation applications and services.

One additional viewpoint in my oppinion and perhaps the most important of all in analysing this evolution is in the thorough understanding of the basic customer needs behind offered services. Next generation eServices are not only oriented towards the needs that the internet has traditionally been used for (such as information retrieval, communication and entertainment) but also for example in supplementing some other types of services such as television and newspapers.