Insight Plus - Part 10 – Information society | Текст песни

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• Insight Plus
• Part 10 – Information society

Группа Learning Engllish. Транскрипт:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/webcast/scripts/insight/tae_insight_10_03bs_080925.pdf

Gary: [from Covent Garden in London] I’ve chosen one of the hottest days of the
year to take a short stroll from our BBC studios to nearby Covent Garden. I’m
visiting Hakim Kahtan, who’s manager of Global Tele-Call. This part of
London’s always popular with local office workers and with tourists. And
whether you’re in central London or Hong Kong (that’s where I first visited an
internet café), telephone and internet centres like this one are always busy.
They’re a powerful symbol of a revolution that’s taken place in the world of
technology.
Hakim, what facilities do you have here?
Clip
We have computers with a hard drive, we have scanners, we have international phone calls…
[full transcript is not available]
Gary: Who comes here - and why? What do they do?
Clip
Well, being in the city, we have different kind of visitors … [full transcript is not available]
Gary: You say people come from all over the world and they come to you to
communicate with their families. How do they do that?
Clip
Through the internet … [full transcript is not available]
Gary: Thank you very much.
[studio] In this series, we’re considering the major themes that appear in BBC
World Service news programmes. Today’s “big story” is the Information
Society. We’ll focus on some of the issues and, of course, the language behind
the topic. “Information and communications technology”, the “information
society”, the “digital divide” – these terms have become buzz words in the
modern world. But what do they all mean? Alf Hermida is technology editor
for BBC News Online, and I asked him for some definitions -- starting with the
“information society” itself.
Clip Alf Hermida, BBC News Online, Technology Editor
This is a way of looking how society has changed. If we look back to a hundred years ago, we
were talking about the Industrial Revolution – countries becoming economic powers,
developing their businesses through the use of machines. Now the emphasis has shifted to
information, and technology is a tool by which people can gain that information - be it through
computers, on the Internet, or maybe over a mobile phone. And that’s what we’re talking
about here: using technology as a tool to get access to information, to find out what’s
happening in the world.
Gary: And why is this such an important area? Why does it feature in the list ofWS Big
stories, do you think?
Alf: In industrialised countries, we have well-stocked libraries, we have computers in most
offices, we have access to the Internet. So a lot of the information we need to do business, to
better ourselves through improving our careers is relatively available. In developing countries,
that’s much more of a problem. Say you are a farmer in Senegal, and you want to find out
what the price is for the mangos or the pineapples that you’re growing. When you come to
sell them to the trader, you don’t know what the price of that pineapple is in the capital. You
have to take, at face value, what you’re offered for it. But say you had a mobile phone, and
that on that mobile phone, you could find out what the price of pineapples was in the capital,
that would put you in a much stronger position when it came to selling your goods, and you
would get a much better price for your crops. That would make a very big difference to how
much money you earned every month.
Gary: So let’s say we’re talking about telephones and computers as you’ve suggested, what
do we mean when we say there’s a “digital divide”?
Alf: This all comes down to having access to information – being able to find information
about crop prices, about the latest research, even news about what’s happening in your country
or in your part of the world easily. In industrialised countries it’s all around us.
...