The vast computing infrastructure we now take for granted is the result of the pooled resources of huge numbers of people. It's inconceivable that a single individual could mine and refine the raw materials and craft anything resembling a modern computer. Even if this were possible, much of the value we associate with modern computing equipment is that it is connected to millions of other users. Computers couldn't exist without society.
On the other hand, many of the features of modern society are the direct result of computers. Computers have an impact on work, leisure, privacy, education, and democracy, as well as other social conditions. It may be difficult to sort out which effects are due to technology itself, and which are due to powerful social forces that are independent of computers. A technological determinist will claim that the driving force is technology: "you can't stop progress," or "information just wants for be free," whereas a techno-skeptic will want to know which corporation stands to gain from the latest cool gadget being marketed to the world.
It is unlikely that you will find a source of information on computers and society that is not partisan, that is committed to a particular point-of-view on technology. Partisan is not synonymous with inaccurate, however you should try to be aware of which point-of-view you are being exposed to at a given point, and to do some sampling of various viewpoints before deciding where you stand on issues.
The availability of increasingly inexpensive computers has been used, in the past half-century, to automate many jobs that formerly required human beings. This isn't the first dramatic shift in the way humans work, since there were similarly dramatic shifts from hunter-gatherer to agricultural humans, and the shift from production based on human and animal muscle and individual crafts to manufacturing (the Industrial Revolution). Although there aren't many records of the shift from hunting/gathering to agriculture, some of the experience from the Industrial Revolution may foreshadow some of the paradoxical changes we are experiencing with computer-based automation of work. On the one hand, the amount of textiles and metal goods that could be produced in a day increased dramatically during the Industrial Revolution, due to both the use of power (first steam, and later oil, and electricity), and division of labour. On the other hand, the land and resources used for older forms of production were taken over (in some cases by military force, e.g. the enclosures in Scotland), first in Europe and then throughout the world. Increasing production required ever-expanding markets, and those who produced goods using older forms of production were thrown out of work. Some of them (for example, traditional weavers in the north of England) responded by smashing the machinery that deprived them of a livelihood. Those who did gain employment with the new machinery (often children) were often pushed to work 12, 14, or even longer shifts each day. If you use the word "Luddite" as a short-hand for an ignorant technophobe, you may want to look into the social movement associated with the (possibly apocryphal) Ned Ludd, and the machine-smashing that was associated with it [Luddites]. Interestingly, some researchers report that productivity grew very slowly during the first decades of the Industrial Revolution.
There has been a similar paradox in the integration of computers into the modern workplace. Over the past half-century productivity (by some measures) has doubled in North America. In the late 1940s, it took 35 hours on an assembly line to produce a car, whereas currently it takes 19, and there are similar gains in other industries. In the mid-1990s hard-drive space cost about a dollar/megabyte, today it costs about a dollar/gigabyte --- a thousand-fold drop in price. Spot welding, precision machining, and other jobs that formerly required skilled workers are often performed by robots guided by microprocessors. Many sorts of drudgery --- adding columns of numbers by hand, or hand typing large quantities of text --- are no longer required. Measures of personal wealth (the number of square feet of housing, cars, or the amount of food, per capita) have similarly increased. Entirely new categories of jobs (e.g. webmaster) have been created, as well as new ways of working (telecommuting).
Early in the era of automation there were both dire and rosy predictions: some predicted overwhelming unemployment and social dislocation, while others predicted a utopia with plenty of wealth and leisure time. Neither has come to pass (yet). Although my parents' generation won the 40-hour work week, my generation is passing the 50-hour-plus work week to our kids. With a doubling of productivity, we could now be working 20-hour weeks for the same standard of living as was enjoyed in the 1940s and 1950s (ironically, 20 hours/week, 4 hours/day is what the current estimate of hunter/gatherer life was like). Millions of blue- and white-collar jobs have disappeared, and those still working often accept overwork for fear of losing their jobs. During some periods, such as the 1980s and 1990s, median household income dropped at the same time as productivity increased. So the utopian prediction hasn't panned out. Some argue that we have traded more stuff for less time: the average home has more floor space and more cars parked in front of it than half a century ago, and the price is that we have to work more hours, or perhaps a second job [see working hours].
On the other hand, unemployment rates seem to ebb and flow with the business cycle (cyclical recessions and recoveries) rather than showing a massive increase as automation takes jobs from humans. Some jobs lost in certain sectors (typesetting, watchmaking, machining, telephone operators) are regained in others (services, computer-related sectors). There are claims that the economies that have embraced automation and computers the most thoroughly (North America) have lower unemployment rates that those that haven't (Europe), however there are great controversies about how various governments measure unemployment (it's not consistent between jurisdictions). Since the 1980s, unemployment statistics in Canada and the U.S. have changed so that long-term unemployed are no longer counted, and the U.S. unemployment rates are reduced by the large fraction of the population in jail or the army.
Changes in the mode of work have also been dramatic. Increasing numbers of workers spend part, or all, of their day in front of a computer keyboard, and some of them do this from home (telecommute). Telecommuting, in particular, has advocates and detractors. Benefits of telecommuting include flexible work hours (so work may be combined with other responsibilities, such as daycare), lower costs for office infrastructure, and a smaller social impact of commuting (good for the environment. Drawbacks of telecommuting include intrusion into home life (flexible hours are often longer), reduced impact with co-workers, and less "visibility" to superiors.
These days a typical computer is networked, indeed it is probably connected to the internet. We have paradoxical intentions about privacy. On the one hand, we use networked computers because we intend to share: files, devices, web pages. On the other hand, there is a sharp limit to how much we wish to share, and we feel violated if this limit is passed.
It is good to control who has access to your person --- your body, your thoughts, your image. We (mostly) agree that this sort of privacy is a good thing. On the other hand, it's bad if you restrict access to your person to prevent others from interfering when you commit bad acts (perhaps beating a friend behind closed doors, or planning to flood the Bahen Centre). We (mostly, again) agree that some privacy is a bad thing. A balance is needed.
Computers can be used to increase the ways the privacy can be deliberately or inadvertently violated. Anyone who had broadcast their private opinion to an entire mailing list knows about the inadvertent possibilities. You might try to protect yourself against this possibility by never voicing your opinions, and certainly never writing (or typing) them down. That's pretty extreme, and still no protection against talking in your sleep, or an intimate session with a polygraph or MRI. Most of us make judgements about who to share what information with, and we make distinctions between the most sharing (family, friends), and the least (public). Here are a few ways that, aided by computers, information you thought you might be sharing fairly narrowly can be bought, sold, and traded among organizations until it is, effectively, public. You can, no doubt, add to this list.
Not all of these techniques require computers, and there are laws that limit them (for example, the amount and duration of negative credit information about you may be restricted). But computers accelerate the collection and spreading of this information. They also make it possible to combine information from several sources, so that you end up revealing a great deal more than you realized.
As well as information that leaks from private to public, governments are allowed (and required) to openly collect and keep certain information about you: your date of birth, criminal record (or lack thereof), Social Insurance Number, tax records, census information, are examples. There are generally pretty strict rules about who has access to this information, and what purpose they use it for. However, computers can subvert this by speeding up the access, or combining access to independent sources of information [Dr. Latanya Sweeny's page on privacy].
In addition, government agencies covertly collect information on those they suspect of being criminals or politically dangerous. Wiretapping has been around for decades, and computers accelerate it by replacing human ears by computerized speech recognition programs that search for key words. Satellite and radio frequency transmissions are also subject to surveillance. Computers greatly increase the search speed and storage capabilities of these techniques.
On the other side of the question, computers strengthen opportunities for privacy and secret-keeping. A password-protected computer account probably protects its files at least as well as a locked drawer protects its paper files. Somebody with physical access to your computer needs pretty specialized knowledge to work around the password protection, whereas an ordinary pry bar can deal with most locked drawers. Strong encryption of a file is probably more secure than a good safe --- it is believed that a sufficiently long encryption key will resist any known attack for long enough to make the information that is encrypted of no interest.
You can make use of encryption, if you choose, by using Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) or GnuPG? (GPG) encryption. There have been attempts to restrict the use of these algorithms, for example the U.S. tried to declare PGP a munition (weapon) in the 1990s to prevent it from being freely distributed. However, the algorithm PGP was based on was pretty well known by then (I learned it in second-year undergrad), and the attempt to restrict it failed. GPG/PGP Basics: http://aplawrence.com/Basics/gpg.html