Analyzing the Convergence of the Information Technology Future Scenarios

Reviewing The literature of the Information Technology (IT) future scenarios, four categories of research can be identified: one category is the researches that have studied the change in "people's lifestyle and work" due to the development of Information Technology, the second group has studied "governance changes" under the influence of IT, and the third category deals about the "impact of Information Technology on development". Unlike these three categories, some researches have studied the future of Information Technology affected by social changes. This article, studies and describes different IT future scenarios, and then groups and analyzes them in order to help understand the relationship between them. The research method is a kind of review called meta-analysis (qualitative systematic review) and comparison between IT future scenarios. Analysis of these scenarios shows that although they are influenced by social changes and impressed by the growth of the computational and communication technologies, they affect the social changes as well. From the view of social changes affected by IT, these scenarios are drawn from three points of view including "People", "Government" and "Development Models". These three points of view depict the lifestyles of the people, governance and countries' development path. Probing the scenarios, we found a list of characteristics and impacts of the scenarios. Findings show there is a unity between the uncertainties of the above-mentioned three points of view which leads to building a unit framework through the conformity of the coordinate devices. Comparison of the scenarios in each quarter of this unit coordinate device infers that despite the different actors, the ideal scenarios do coincide seriously in the dimensions and the ideal situation, so that there is a kind of conceptual convergence in their effects.