This is the third volume in Springer’s “e-Citizens: Being Human in the Digital Age” series. The first volume focuses on the information and communications technologies (ICT) that ushered in the current digital age [1]. The second volume covers the effect of ICT on democracy [2]. And this third volume examines the impact of these technologies on four human services: health, learning and education, cultural heritage, and journalism and media.

Any new technology that offers improvement over existing human capabilities can induce a radical societal transformation if the technology makes life better for citizens. For example, the automobile offered an order change in travel speed over traditional modes of transportation. As such, it changed the residential living structure from the city to the suburbs, triggered the development of the highway infrastructure, transformed commerce, and even revised the notion of leisure.

Because the digital technologies of today are six orders faster than traditional information processing capabilities, they have the potential to improve human lives radically. However, the development and diffusion of an innovation requires joint inventions of other things, for example, societal values and vision, feasible economic models, and appropriate policies. This volume looks at the evolution, use, and potential future of e-health, e-learning, e-culture, and e-journalism.

Each chapter begins with a brief history of the evolution of tools and applications in that area. These evolution stories are not exemplar applications; instead, they show that needs drive use, and a transformative future requires imaginative use of technology that is in alignment with other forces such as commerce and political leadership. Although citizens are superficially aware that the benefits of technology are riddled with risks and misuse, the scope and impacts of these risks and misuse are not well understood. This book discusses these and presents protection guidelines.

The early applications in the evolutionary cycle of digital technologies are simply online versions of existing practices, such as patient medical records in the area of e-health, syllabi and courseware in e-learning, pictures of museum artifacts in e-culture, and paper-based newspapers in e-journalism. Services that the user community needs are added next. For example, what patients and doctors need from patient medical records is added in e-health applications, online coaching that students need is added in e-learning applications, virtual walks through museums are incorporated in e-culture applications, and rich media and interactive structures are embedded in online news.

Over time, these applications evolve where information-consuming customers also become information and knowledge contributors. When these applications evolve to become bidirectional and, thus, more useful, ethical issues arise, such as who will have access to patient information, copyright laws applying to courseware in e-learning applications, and whose responsibility it is to ensure trustworthiness of online news.

Further, because the health priorities and needs of different countries vary, the e-health applications of ICT are dissimilar. For example, an e-health application on Chinese traditional medicine is radically different from a Western medicine e-health application. Similarly, because the learning and education needs of different countries vary, the e-learning applications vary in different countries.

This book provides a good overview of how ICT applications in the areas of health, education, and journalism are evolving globally, and what challenges and hurdles they need to address if they are to succeed in making a positive impact on society. The e-culture chapter is more Eurocentric, but it provides new insights into virtual reality applications that support cultural travel to archeological sites, museums, ruins, and so on.

This is not an academic book because it does not focus on current research in any of the four areas. It is a thought-provoking read for the layperson who wishes to understand how the areas of e-health, e-learning, e-culture, and e-journalism are evolving, and what it would take for applications to make true transformative improvements in the lives of citizens.