IT is a major force in areas such as finance, transport planning, design and the production of goods, as well as in the press, publishing, music and film production, radio and television. The ever faster development of new information technologies changed libraries and documentation centers, bringing new ways to organize and access data; it cut costs and sped up the production of newspapers and made it possible to form worldwide television networks instantly.
This development also made personal and institutional communication easier and more intense, through word processors, databases and desktop publishing, as well as technologies for sending documents and messages and querying remote computers (over worldwide computer networks such as the internet). The spread of new information technologies also brought dilemmas and problems, mostly about individual privacy and the right to information.
Information technologies are not only machines. There are intellectual technologies for handling the information cycle — classification techniques, for example — that need no machine at all, only a scheme. That scheme can also be built into software, but that does not change the fact that the technique existed independently of the software. Technologies for classifying and organizing information have existed since the first libraries — any book on library organization already contains them!
