Through the many inventions and innovations that have been presented by the IT revolution, it has managed to cause so much change in the way we live, that it has become the most transformative revolution of all time. To start, the IT revolution has managed to impact political elections and causes, simply based on the way they campaign themselves, and the way they allow others to support their campaign. If a group or organization does it wrong, and offers free and easy ways to support a cause, like considering likes helpful, they could lose potential donations in time or money to slacktivism, while on the other hand, pointing out something like simply giving a like isn’t going to help the cause, can get people to decide to make more time and money donations. The IT revolution seems to be so transformative, that it is able to both break from the demographic molds, and use the demographic molds, as when explaining the IT revolution’s effects on gender, we are able to present ‘gender neutrality’ through social media, which shows how the IT revolution allows people to break from demographic confines, to simply express what they like, but as human beings we are still always in some way part of these demographics, so the IT revolution’s effects on sociological ideas, shows how our demographics are offered certain things based on what people like or why other people have previously bought, like the situation where target found out a fifteen year old girl was pregnant two weeks before her parents did, all because she bought more vitamins than usual and a handbag which was big enough to carry diapers.
The IT revolution has had a drastic effect on our overall psychology as human beings, as the easy access, long distance communication the revolution has brought through the invention of the cell phone is immense, but the convenience has come at somewhat of a cost. People have grown accustomed to the isolated, but connected feel of text messaging, and creating online posts, to the point where they will take it over face to face communication, to avoid the stress that might come with directly speaking with someone else. On the other hand, the geological effect of the IT revolution and the cell phone is so widespread, even majority of the people in countries which suffer from severe poverty, like Haiti, have cell phones to make calls when they need to, and to use when an emergency situation strikes, like the earthquake back in 2010, where the IT revolution really shined for people inside and outside of Haiti at the time. Inside Haiti, people were able to send out distress signals through their cell phones if they needed help, and people outside the country were able to create open source maps for people trying to navigate around the country to use in order to bring help to the people who needed it.
Finally, the historical impact IT revolution, which in this situation, could also be called the ‘big data revolution,’ which is changing the way history is being made. Thanks to the IT revolution, we have been given the ability to much more efficiently create, combine, and use data. An example of this is how a lawyer was able to find that a water plant in Zanesville, Ohio was selectively providing water to white residents, while denying water to non white residents, simply by combining which houses were occupied by white people, and which houses were being provided with water. This caused the water plant to be forced to pay 10.9 million dollars for selectively providing water to only white residents. Overall the IT revolution has had a lot of different impacts on many different parts of our lives, making it the most transformative revolution of all, up to this point.
Justin Molenda 