It's easy to forget that IT is essentially non-essential. It does not feed us, clothe us, provide us shelter, guidance or love. However, it does help us provide these things for ourselves and each other. Information and communication technology have been transformative in many industries. It has changed our lives so much that it is seen essential, but is it?
I recently discovered an App to track information relating to newborns. Growth, regular feeding and the like can be logged, compared and shared with other caregivers. A very nice replacement of a paper log, but not transformative, and certainly not a step towards better parenting. This is true for many examples of information technology.
Facebook does not make us better friends, SharePoint does not make us better employees, and iPhones do not make us better communicators. They all do enable us to do what we were doing in novel and often more efficient ways, but these are improvements of quantity rather than quality.
Sometimes I indulge in a Steampunk thought experiment where I try to envisage a world of continued industrialization without transistors and IC's. Of course I would have a different job, knowing all about electron valves and copper instead of about silicon and glass fiber. I'd pop a message to friends of mine by telegraph instead of twitter, read books by gas-light rather than on my iPad and worry more about copper than rare earths.
At the core I would not be all that different. I would have the same core values, the same attitude to life, work and family and the same lessons to learn in my time here. I would be essentially the same without information technology. And that is a comforting thought.
