Chapter 11

Information Age

• is the idea that access to and the control of information

• (also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, Silicon Age, or New Media Age)
Historical Period
• Mid-20th century
• Industrial Revolution, to an economy centered on information technology
• linked to the development of the transistor in 1947,
• the optical amplifier in 1957, and
• Unix time, which began on January 1, 1970 and serves as the basis for Coordinated Universal Time and
the Network Time Protocol.
Early Developments
• Library expansion and Moore's Law
• Library expansion was calculated in 1945 by Fremont Rider to double in capacity every 16 years
where sufficient space made available.
• He advocated replacing bulky, decaying printed works with miniaturized microform analog
photographs,
• Rider did not foresee, however, the digital technology that would follow decades later to
replace analog microform with digital imaging, storage, and transmission media, whereby vast
increases in the rapidity of information growth would be made possible through automated,
potentially- lossless digital technologies.
• Accordingly, Moore's Law, formulated around 1965, would calculate that the number of
transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.
• Information storage and Kryder's Law
• The world's technological capacity to store information grew from 2.6 (optimally compressed)
exabytes (EB) in 1986 to 15.8 EB in 1993; over 54.5 EB in 2000; and to 295 (optimally
compressed) EB in 2007.
• The amount of digital data stored appears to be growing approximately exponentially,
reminiscent of Moore's law.
• Kryder's law prescribes that the amount of storage space available appears to be growing
approximately exponentially
• Information transmission
•The world's technological capacity to receive information through one-way broadcast
networks was 432 exabytes of (optimally compressed) information in 1986; 715 (optimally
compressed) exabytes in 1993; 1.2 (optimally compressed) zettabytes in 2000; and 1.9 zettabytes
in 2007, the information equivalent of 174 newspapers per person per day.
• The world's effective capacity to exchange information through two-way telecommunication
networks was 281 petabytes of (optimally compressed) information in 1986; 471 petabytes in
1993; 2.2 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2000; and 65 (optimally compressed) exabytes in
2007, the information equivalent of 6 newspapers per person per day.
• In the 1990s, the spread of the Internet caused a sudden leap in access to and ability to share
information in businesses and homes globally.
• Computation
• The world's technological capacity to compute information with humanly guided general-purpose
computers grew from 3.0 × 108 MIPS in 1986, to 4.4 × 109 MIPS in 1993; to 2.9 × 1011 MIPS in
2000; to 6.4 × 1012 MIPS in 2007.
• Digital technology has vastly exceeded the cognitive capacity of any single human being and has
done so a decade earlier than predicted.
• Genetic information
• Genetic code may also be considered part of the information revolution. Now that sequencing has
been computerized, genome can be rendered and manipulated as data.
• This started with DNA sequencing, invented by Walter Gilbert and Allan Maxam[16] in 1976-1977
and Frederick Sanger in 1977, grew steadily with the Human Genome Project,
• Sequence data in Genbank has grown from the 606 genome sequences registered in December
1982 to the 231 million genomes in August 2021.
• An additional 13 trillion incomplete sequences are registered in the Whole Genome
Shotgun submission database as of August 2021.
Different stage conceptualizations
• Periods of Innovation
• The Neolithic Age,
• Between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago
• humans began to domesticate animals, began to farm grains and to replace stone tools
with ones made of metal.
• augmented by writing as an information tool, laid the groundwork for the advent of
civilization.
• The Scientific Age
• began in the period between Galileo's 1543 proof that the planets orbit the sun
and Newton's publication of the laws of motion and gravity in Principia in 1697
• 18th Century, accelerated by widespread use of the moveable type printing
press by Johannes Gutenberg.
• The Industrial Age
• began in Great Britain in 1760 and continued into the mid-19th Century
• The invention of machines such as the mechanical textile weaver by Edmund Cartwrite,
the rotating shaft steam engine by James Watt and the cotton gin by Eli Whitney, along
with processes for mass manufacturing, came to serve the needs of a growing global
population.
• The Industrial Age harnessed steam and waterpower to reduce the dependence on animal
and human physical labor as the primary means of production.
• The Information Age
• requires electricity to power the global networks of computers that process and store data.
Different stage conceptualizations
• Three stages of the Information Age
• The first focused on the transformation of material, including stone, bronze, and iron.
• The second, often referred to as industrial revolution, was dedicated to the transformation of
energy, including water, steam, electric, and combustion power.
• Finally, the most recent metaparadigm aims at Transforming information.
• started out with the proliferation of communication and stored data and has now entered
the age of algorithms,
• aims at creating automated processes to convert the existing information into actionable
knowledge
Economics
• Information and communication technology (ICT) —
i.e. computers, computerized machinery, fiber optics, communication satellites, the Internet, and other
ICT tools - became a significant part of the world economy,
• as the development of optical networking and microcomputers greatly changed many businesses and
industries
• Nicholas Negroponte captured the essence of these changes in his 1995 book, Being Digital, in which he
discusses the similarities and differences between products made of atoms and products made of bits.
• Jobs and income distribution
• The Information Age has affected the workforce in several ways, such as compelling workers to
compete in a global job market.
• replacement of human labor by computers that can do their jobs faster and more effectively
• creates issue for those in industrial cities, where solutions typically involve lowering working
time, which is often highly resisted.
• individuals who lose their jobs may be pressed to move up into joining "mind workers"
(e.g. engineers, doctors, lawyers, teachers, professors, scientists, executives, journalists, consultan
ts), who are able to compete successfully in the world market and receive (relatively) high wages.
• Automation, productivity, and job gain
• The Information Age has affected the workforce in that automation and computerization have
resulted in higher productivity coupled with net job loss in manufacturing.
• example, from January 1972 to August 2010, the number of people employed in manufacturing
jobs fell from 17,500,000 to 11,500,000 while manufacturing value rose 270%.
 • job loss in the industrial sector might be partially offset by the rapid growth of jobs in information
technology,
• Information-intensive industry
• Industry has become more information-intensive while less labor- and capital-intensive.
• This has left important implications for the workforce, as workers have become increasingly
productive as the value of their labor decreases.
• For the system of capitalism itself, the value of labor decreases, the value of capital increases.
Innovations
• Transistors
•The onset of the Information Age can be associated with the development
of transistor technology.
• The concept of a field-effect transistor was first theorized by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in 1925.
• The first practical transistor was the point-contact transistor, invented by the engineers Walter
Houser Brattain and John Bardeen while working for William Shockley at Bell Labs in 1947.
• Shockley's research team also invented the bipolar junction transistor in 1952.
• The most widely used type of transistor is the metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect
transistor (MOSFET), invented by Mohamed M. Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1960.
• Computers
• The invention of the transistor enabled the era of mainframe computers (1950s–1970s), typified
by the IBM 360.
• room-sized computers provided data calculation and manipulation that was much faster than
humanly possible
• but were expensive to buy and maintain, so were initially limited to a few scientific institutions,
large corporations, and government agencies.
• Along with electronic arcade machines and home video game consoles pioneered by Nolan
Bushnell in the 1970s, the development of personal computers like the Commodore
PET and Apple II (both in 1977) gave individuals access to the computer.
• But data sharing between individual computers was either non-existent or largely manual, at first
using punched cards and magnetic tape, and later floppy disks.
• Data
• The first developments for storing data were initially based on photographs, starting
with microphotography in 1851 and then microform in the 1920s, with the ability to store
documents on film, making them much more compact.
• Magnetic-core memory was developed from the research of Frederick W. Viehe in 1947 and An
Wang at Harvard University in 1949.[44][45] With the advent of the MOS transistor,
MOS semiconductor memory was developed by John Schmidt at Fairchild Semiconductor in
1964.
• Copper wire cables transmitting digital data connected computer terminals and peripherals to
mainframes, and special message-sharing systems leading to email, were first developed in the
1960s.
• Independent computer-to-computer networking began with ARPANET in 1969.
• Access to the Internet improved with the invention of the World Wide Web in 1991.
• Personal computers
• 1976, there were several firms racing to introduce the first truly successful commercial personal
computers.
• Three machines, the Apple II, PET 2001 and TRS-80 were all released in 1977,
• in 1977, Sord Computer Corporation released the Sord M200 Smart Home Computer in Japan.
• Steve Wozniak (known as "Woz"), a regular visitor to Homebrew Computer Club meetings,
designed the single-board Apple I computer
• Woz and his friend Steve Jobs founded Apple Computer.
• Optical networking
• Optical communication plays a crucial role in communication networks.
• Optical communication provides the transmission backbone for the telecommunications and
computer networks that underlie the Internet, the foundation for the Digital Revolution and
Information Age.
• The two core technologies are the optical fiber and light amplification (the optical amplifier).
• In 1953, Bram van Heel demonstrated image transmission through bundles of optical
fibers with a transparent cladding.
 • The same year, Harold Hopkins and Narinder Singh Kapany at Imperial
College succeeded in making image-transmitting bundles with over 10,000 optical fibers,
• Gordon Gould invented the optical amplifier and the laser, and also established the first
optical telecommunications company, Optelecom, to design communication systems.
Economy, society and culture
• Manuel Castells captures the significance of the Information Age in The Information Age: Economy,
Society and Culture
• when he writes of our global interdependence and the new relationships between economy, state
and society, what he calls "a new society-in-the-making.“
• He cautions that just because humans have dominated the material world, does not mean that the
Information Age is the end of history:
• "It is in fact, quite the opposite: history is just beginning, if by history we understand the moment
when, after millennia of a prehistoric battle with Nature, first to survive, then to conquer it, our
species has reached the level of knowledge and social organization that will allow us to live in a
predominantly social world.
• Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote about the dangers of anti-intellectualism in the Information Age in a
piece for The Atlantic.
• Although access to information has never been greater, most information is irrelevant or
insubstantial.