Information and communication benefits for society and economy

At all times, humankind has used communication and information as one its basic principles of survival. It is only in our days that the availability of global information access and transfer for everybody asks for an increased sensitivity concerning the positive but also the negative aspects of this development. Even if the title of this paper assumes the beneficial effects of information and communication, we will discuss both sides of the coin. As points of departure, the paper introduces some definitions of information and communication. Benefits and drawbacks are then discussed for the fields of economy and of society. As a basic prerequisite for the access to information, the paper deals with the aspects of usability, of human-system-interaction and of human-process-communication. The paper closes with remarks on the role of information in the information age, on the responsibility of producers and consumers of information as well as of engineers providing information technologies.