New faculty member Professor David Levy is interested in issues concerning Information and the Quality of Life. Nearly instantaneous global business transactions have become a fact of life. The human genome has been decoded.
People routinely access library catalogs and source documents from a great distance.
Clearly, the Web and the Internet bode well for knowledge production, for the control and coordination of human activities, and for the emergence of a more connected world. But there is another side to this picture. For all that email, the Web, cell phones, personal organizers, and computers offer us in access, connectivity, and control, they also threaten to overwhelm us with information. It is perhaps a paradox of our current circumstances that the greater connectivity our information technologies afford doesn t fully equate with an enhanced quality of life. While this is surely a worthy concern, it carries the implicit assumption that providing equal access is enough.