ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the specifics of people's current times with regard to the computing social change nexus. In the spirit of Raymond Williams's Key Words they begin with two issues of terminology, one regarding information technology, or IT, and the other about their information society. The following five ways offer more social or socioeconomic analyses: globalization, virtual organization, non-instrumental computing, big data, and the sharing economy. People aim in these critiques is to show how technological determinism and computationalism undermine the value of these analyses, resulting in simplistic, causative accounts of social change. That would mean no second stage, and thus no third or fourth, in the data-information-knowledge-wisdom (DIKW) procedure discussed in. Intellectual capital, developed and held by knowledge workers and encoded in software and smart machines, is the key element of wealth in today's information capitalism. Capitalism has long responded to the need to reproduce itself by extending commoditization to ever more arenas of social life.
