Technology as a Need: Trends in the Evolving Information Society

In this paper, the authors take a broad view on the Information Society and on the Information and Communication Technologies which constitute its technical and, in a sense, social infrastructure. They discuss the fact that today the needs of human beings are strongly influenced by technology, which has become a need in itself. They propose an analysis of how the Industrial Society has left the scene in favor of the Information Society, based on two meta-trends identified as Personalization and Distribution. Using an original biological metaphor, they describe "The DNA of ICT Evolution", which uses the two meta-trends as filaments and ten trends as bases: ideal performance, ubiquity, flexibility, complexity, cognitivity, opportunism, cooperation, security, miniaturization, convergence.