1) In what ways do Information System negatively affect the environment? Are there positive affect as well? If so what are there?
Information systems is the study of complementary networks of hardware and software that people and organizations use to collect, filter, process, create and distribute the data. Information systems aims to support operations, management and decision making. In a broad sense, the term is used to refer not only to the information and communication technology that an organization uses, but also to the way in which people interact with this technology in support of business process. With this, it can also hugely affects the environment whether in a positive way or negative.
By automating activities that were previously performed by people, information systems may eliminate jobs. Peoples in this world is increasing in term of numbers. They need to feed themselves in order survives. Thus they need money and to get money they need a job. But if there is no job for people to survive peoples will suffer from it. On the other hand, information systems is really good for our society because it can assist people to do their work efficiently. For example in automotive factory, robot is needed to support the workload of the workers because human strength has a limitation while robot is not. So it’s easy to used information systems in order to reduce the workload for workers.
Next is information systems may allow organizations to collect personal details about people. Everybody have their own secret that they need to keep. In order for them to keep their secret, they make it private on what they do or what they want to do. But with the existence of hackers and cyber-crime, the privacy can be violated because the hackers can track our credit cards, bank numbers and many more from just stealing the data. On the other hand, information system is good for people who are intended to violate the rules of organization. If they want to betray the company by stealing the company stock or whatsoever, they can be caught by tracing back what they do using technology given now.
Lastly, information systems are used in so many aspects of everyday life that system outage can cause shutdown of businesses or transportations. For example, when there is system outage occur in organization (e.g. NASA) the private and confidential data that they stored can be easily stole and conquer without even need to bypass firewall or security because that the state of nature of what information systems is. But on the other hand, using IS, it is easy for people to collect and combine the data to become an information. For example, there are compiles of wreckage papers that has been ripped off, but in that paper contain an evidence of records which can prove who is the murderer of the cases. Using the information system technology, that piece of paper can be repair back digitally using all variables which has been collected and tested before. Thus it can assist polices in investigating certain cases.
In a nutshell, information system affects the environment in a balanced way. It has a pro and cons in this domain field. But in order for it to maintain or improve, peoples intelligence is needed because information system can only be created by peoples and it cannot created itself just like human being.