What Is Information Technology?

What is the difference between Information Technology and General Technology?

• The college I'm currently applying for doesn't offer Information Technology but it has general technology.

• Answer:

  Information Systems is a large umbrella referring to systems designed to create, store, manipulate, or disseminate information. Example of an information system is a pencil and a piece of paper. The two objects themselves are just tools, but together they create a system for writing (information). The term Information systems has been around a lot longer than the computer, or the term information technology. These days the two are sometimes thought to be synonymous, but that, in most cases, is a misconception. Information technology falls under the information systems umbrella, but has nothing to do with systems per say. IT deals with the technology involved in the systems themselves, e.g. an information system like wiki.answers.com contains many information technologies. Servers, server operating systems, web-server software (IIS, Apache, et al), and code written for the web-server software (PHP, C#, VB, PERL, Ruby, et al). Even your computer and browser make up part of this information system. Like the pencil and paper example, each one of the mentioned parts of this information system in itself is an information technology.