Accessing and Protecting Electronic data
For anyone under the age of twenty-five living in an indus- trialized country, typing term papers on a typewriter or looking up books by flipping through paper index cards in a filing cabinet in the library is a completely foreign concept. Similarly, life without a laptop computer, the internet, a cellphone, or an iPod is incomprehensible. But despite the depth of their penetration into our daily lives, the ubiquity of these communication devices is a very recent phenomenon. the proliferation of the internet and other technological innovations in the 1990s has had a seismic impact on our ability to create, store, and share information. the subse- quent development of social networking, along with the digitization of commerce and government in the following decade, has had an equally profound impact on the ways in which people communicate and go about their daily busi- ness. these changes are particularly stunning given the speed with which they happened. the first digital computer was built in 1939, and in the 1960s information systems were developed to store data. these systems evolved with the introduction of personal computers in the 1980s. it was the development and proliferation of the internet in the 1990s, however, that saw not only the collection and storage of in- creasing amounts of data but also the ability of citizens and consumers to access these data with the click of a mouse. A decade later, the internet ushered in “digital government”1 and “e-commerce,” whereby interactions between the citizen/ consumer and the state/producer began to be mediated by electronic technologies. this was also the era when “digital relationships” came into being, that is, peer-to-peer relation- ships mediated by technology.
By the end of 2010, it was hard to imagine how society had ever functioned without digital communication.