Module 9
INFORMATION AGE
OBJECTIVES
1. Trace the development of the information age from the introduction of Gutenberg’s
press up to the era of social media;
2. Determine the impacts of the information age to society; and
3. Analyze the way in which the information age and social media influence human
lives.
INTRODUCTION
This section traces the development of the information age and discusses its impact on
society. Tackles the various ways the information age and social media have influenced
society and human lives.
CONTENTS
The Gutenberg Press
German goldsmith, Johannes Gutenberg, invented the printing press around
1440. This invention was a result of finding a way to improve the manual, tedious, and
slow printing methods. A printing press is a device that applies pressure to an inked
surface lying on a print medium, such as cloth or paper, to transfer ink. Gutenberg’s
hand mould printing press led to the creation of metal movable type. Later, the two
inventions were combined to make printing methods faster and they drastically reduced
the costs of printing documents.
The beginnings of mass communication can be traced back to the invention of
the printing press. The development of a fast and easy way of disseminating information
in print permanently reformed the structure of society. Political and religious authorities
who took pride in being learned were threatened by the sudden rise of literacy among
people. With the rise of the printing press, the printing revolution occurred which
illustrated the tremendous social change brought by the wide circulation of information.
The printing press made the mass production of books possible which made books
accessible not only to the upper class.
As years progressed, calculations became involved in communication due to the
rapid developments in the trade sector. Back then, people who compiled actuarial tables
and did engineering calculations served as “computers.” During World War II, the Allies
(U.S., Australia, etc.), countries that opposed the Axis powers (Germany, Japan, Italy,
Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria), were challenged with a serious shortage of human
computers for military calculations. When soldiers left for war, the shortage got worse,
so the United States addressed the problem by creating the Harvard Mark 1, a general
purpose electromechanical computer that was 50 feet long and capable of doing
calculations in seconds that usually took people hours. At the same time, Britain needed
mathematicians to crack the German Navy’s Enigma code. The Enigma was an
enciphering machine that the German armed forces used to securely send messages.
Turing Machine (Enigma M4 Cypher Machine)
Alan Turing, an English mathematician, was hired in 1936 by the British top-
secret Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park to break the Enigma
code. His code-breaking methods became an industrial process having 12,000 people
working 24/7.
To counteract this, the Nazis made the Enigma more complicated having
approximately 10114 possible permutations of every encrypted message. Turing, working
on the side of the Allies, invented Bombe, an electromechanical machine that enabled
the British to decipher encrypted messages of the German Enigma machine. This
contribution of Turing along with other cryptologists shortened the war by two years
(Munro, 2012).
In his paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the
Entscheidungsproblem, first published in1937, Turing presented a theoretical machine
called the Turing machine that can solve any problem from simple instructions encoded
on a paper tape. He also demonstrated the simulation of the Turing machine to
construct a single Universal Machine. This became the foundation of computer science,
0and the invention of a machine later called a computer, that can solve any problem by
performing any task from a written program (DeHaan, 2012).
In the 1970s, the generation who witnessed the dawn of the computer age was
described as the generation with “electronic brains.” The people of this generation were
the first to be introduced to personal computers (PCs). Back then, the Homebrew
Computer Club, an early computer hobbyist group, gathered regularly to trade parts of
computer hardware and talked about how to make computers more accessible to
everyone. Many members of the club ended up being high-profile entrepreneurs,
including the founders of Apple Inc.
Apple I Computer
In 1976 Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Inc., developed the computer that
made him famous: the Apple I. Wozniak designed the operating system, hardware, and
circuit board of the computer all by himself. Steve Jobs, Wozniak’s friend suggested to
sell the Apple I as a fully assembled printed circuit board. This jumpstarted their career
as founders of Apple Inc.
From 1973 onward, social media platforms were introduced from variations of
multi-user chat rooms;
Instant-messaging applications (e.g., AOL, Yahoo messenger, MSN messenger,
Windows messenger);
bulletin board forum systems, (e.g., Facebook, Friendster, Myspace) and
Business-oriented social networking websites (e.g., Xing); messaging, video and
voice calling services (e.g., Viber, Skype);
Blogging platform, image and video and voice calling services (e.g., Flicker);
Discovery and dating-oriented websites (e.g., Tagged, Tinder);
video sharing services (e.g., YouTube);
real-time social media feed aggregator (e.g., FriendFeed);
live-streaming (e.g., [Link], [Link]);
photo-video sharing websites (e.g., Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, Keek, Vine); and
question-and-answer platforms (e.g., Quora).
3B
To date, these social media platforms enable information exchange at its most efficient
level.
The information age, which progressed from the invention of the printing press to
the development of numerous social media platforms, has immensely influenced the
lives of the people. The impact of these innovations can be advantageous or
disadvantageous depending on the use of these technologies.