Information Age

The Information Age (also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, or New Media Age) is a historical period that began in the mid-20th century, characterized by a rapid epochal shift from the traditional industry established by the Industrial Revolution to an economy primarily based upon information technology.[1][2][3][4] The onset of the Information Age can be associated with the development of transistor technology.[4]

For the album by dead prez, see Information Age (album).
"Digital Age" and "Internet Age" redirect here. For the four-piece American band, see The Digital Age. For the documentary TV series, see The Internet Age.
Computers sharing information are hallmarks of the Information Age
History of technology
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Pre-modern history
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According to the United Nations Public Administration Network, the Information Age was formed by capitalizing on computer microminiaturization advances,[5] which would lead to modernized information and to communication processes upon broader usage within society becoming the driving force of social evolution.[2]

Overview of early developments

Library expansion and Moore's law

Library expansion was calculated in 1945 by Fremont Rider to double in capacity every 16 years were sufficient space made available.[6] He advocated replacing bulky, decaying printed works with miniaturized microform analog photographs, which could be duplicated on-demand for library patrons and other institutions.

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.[7][8]

By the early 1980s, along with improvements in computing power, the proliferation of the smaller and less expensive personal computers allowed for immediate access to information and the ability to share and store such for increasing numbers of workers. Connectivity between computers within organizations enabled employees at different levels to access greater amounts of information.

Information storage and Kryder's law
Main articles: Data storage and Computer data storage


Hilbert & López (2011). The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information. Science, 332(6025), 60–65. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/332/6025/60.full.pdf

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.[9][10] This is the informational equivalent to less than one 730-megabyte (MB) CD-ROM per person in 1986 (539 MB per person); roughly four CD-ROM per person in 1993; twelve CD-ROM per person in the year 2000; and almost sixty-one CD-ROM per person in 2007.[11] It is estimated that the world's capacity to store information has reached 5 zettabytes in 2014,[12] the informational equivalent of 4,500 stacks of printed books from the earth to the sun.

The amount of digital data stored appears to be growing approx. exponentially, reminiscent of Moore's law. As such, Kryder's law prescribes that the amount of storage space available appears to be growing approximately exponentially.[13][14][15][8]

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.[11]

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.[11] 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. Technology was developing so quickly that a computer costing $3000 in 1997 would cost $2000 two years later and $1000 the following year.

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.[11] An article featured in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution reports that, by now:[12]

[Digital technology] has vastly exceeded the cognitive capacity of any single human being and has done so a decade earlier than predicted. In terms of capacity, there are two measures of importance: the number of operations a system can perform and the amount of information that can be stored. The number of synaptic operations per second in a human brain has been estimated to lie between 10^15 and 10^17. While this number is impressive, even in 2007 humanity's general-purpose computers were capable of performing well over 10^18 instructions per second. Estimates suggest that the storage capacity of an individual human brain is about 10^12 bytes. On a per capita basis, this is matched by current digital storage (5x10^21 bytes per 7.2x10^9 people).

Different stage conceptualizations
Three stages of the Information Age

There are different conceptualizations of the Information Age. Some focus on the evolution of information over the ages, distinguishing between the Primary Information Age and the Secondary Information Age. Information in the Primary Information age was handled by newspapers, radio and television. The Secondary Information Age was developed by the Internet, satellite televisions and mobile phones. The Tertiary Information Age was emerged by media of the Primary Information Age interconnected with media of the Secondary Information Age as presently experienced.[16]

Others classify it in terms of the well-established Schumpeterian long waves or Kondratiev waves. Here authors distinguish three different long-term metaparadigms, each with different long waves. 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. It started out with the proliferation of communication and stored data and has now entered the age of algorithms, which aims at creating automated processes to convert the existing information into actionable knowledge.[17]

Economics

Eventually, 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 microcomputers greatly changed many businesses and industries.[18][19] 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.[20] In essence, a copy of a product made of bits can be made cheaply and quickly, then expediently shipped across the country or the world at very low cost.

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. One of the most evident concerns is the replacement of human labor by computers that can do their jobs faster and more effectively, thus creating a situation in which individuals who perform tasks that can easily be automated are forced to find employment where their labor is not as disposable.[21] This especially creates issue for those in industrial cities, where solutions typically involve lowering working time, which is often highly resisted. Thus, 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, consultants), who are able to compete successfully in the world market and receive (relatively) high wages.[22]

Along with automation, jobs traditionally associated with the middle class (e.g. assembly line, data processing, management, and supervision) have also begun to disappear as result of outsourcing.[23] Unable to compete with those in developing countries, production and service workers in post-industrial (i.e. developed) societies either lose their jobs through outsourcing, accept wage cuts, or settle for low-skill, low-wage service jobs.[23] In the past, the economic fate of individuals would be tied to that of their nation's. For example, workers in the United States were once well paid in comparison to those in other countries. With the advent of the Information Age and improvements in communication, this is no longer the case, as workers must now compete in a global job market, whereby wages are less dependent on the success or failure of individual economies.[23]

In effectuating a globalized workforce, the internet has just as well allowed for increased opportunity in developing countries, making it possible for workers in such places to provide in-person services, therefore competing directly with their counterparts in other nations. This competitive advantage translates into increased opportunities and higher wages.[24]

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. In the United States, for 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%.[25]

Although it initially appeared that job loss in the industrial sector might be partially offset by the rapid growth of jobs in information technology, the recession of March 2001 foreshadowed a sharp drop in the number of jobs in the sector. This pattern of decrease in jobs would continue until 2003,[26] and data has shown that, overall, technology creates more jobs than it destroys even in the short run.[27]

Information-intensive industry
Main article: Information 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.

In the classical model, investments in human and financial capital are important predictors of the performance of a new venture.[28] However, as demonstrated by Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, it now seems possible for a group of relatively inexperienced people with limited capital to succeed on a large scale.[29]

Innovations
A visualization of the various routes through a portion of the Internet.

The Information Age was enabled by technology developed in the Digital Revolution, which was itself enabled by building on the developments of the Technological Revolution.

Transistors
Main articles: Transistor, History of the transistor, and MOSFET
Further information: Semiconductor device

The onset of the Information Age can be associated with the development of transistor technology.[4] The concept of a field-effect transistor was first theorized by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in 1925.[30] The first practical transistor was the point-contact transistor, invented by the engineers Walter Houser Brattain and John Bardeen at Bell Labs in 1947. This was a breakthrough that laid the foundations for modern technology.[4] Shockley's research team also invented the bipolar junction transistor in 1952.[31][30]. Another important advances include invention of mos-transistor by Mohamed M. Atalla and Dawon Kahng[32], and the development of CMOS by Wanlass and Sah[33].

Computers
Main articles: Computer and History of computers
Further information: Integrated circuit, Invention of the integrated circuit, Microprocessor, and Moore's law

Before the advent of electronics, mechanical computers, like the Analytical Engine in 1837, were designed to provide routine mathematical calculation and simple decision-making capabilities. Military needs during World War II drove development of the first electronic computers, based on vacuum tubes, including the Z3, the Atanasoff–Berry Computer, Colossus computer, and ENIAC.

The invention of the transistor enabled the era of mainframe computers (1950s–1970s), typified by the IBM 360. These large, 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.

The germanium integrated circuit (IC) was invented by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments in 1958.[34] The silicon integrated circuit was then invented in 1959 by Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor, using the planar process developed by Jean Hoerni, who was in turn building on Mohamed Atalla's silicon surface passivation method developed at Bell Labs in 1957.[35][36] Following the invention of the MOS transistor by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959,[32] the MOS integrated circuit was developed by Fred Heiman and Steven Hofstein at RCA in 1962.[37] The silicon-gate MOS IC was later developed by Federico Faggin at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968.[38] With the advent of the MOS transistor and the MOS IC, transistor technology rapidly improved, and the ratio of computing power to size increased dramatically, giving direct access to computers to ever smaller groups of people.

The first commercial single-chip microprocessor launched in 1971, the Intel 4004, which was developed by Federico Faggin using his silicon-gate MOS IC technology, along with Marcian Hoff, Masatoshi Shima and Stan Mazor.[39][40]

Along with electronic arcade machines and home video game consoles 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
Further information: History of telecommunications, Computer memory, Computer data storage, Data compression, Internet access, and Social media

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. Early information theory and Hamming codes were developed about 1950, but awaited technical innovations in data transmission and storage to be put to full use.

Magnetic-core memory was developed from the research of Frederick W. Viehe in 1947 and An Wang at Harvard University in 1949.[41][42] With the advent of the MOS transistor, MOS semiconductor memory was developed by John Schmidt at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1964.[43][44] In 1967, Dawon Kahng and Simon Sze at Bell Labs described in 1967 how the floating gate of an MOS semiconductor device could be used for the cell of a reprogrammable ROM.[45] Following the invention of flash memory by Fujio Masuoka at Toshiba in 1980,[46][47] Toshiba commercialized NAND flash memory in 1987.[48][49]

While cables transmitting digital data connected computer terminals and peripherals to mainframes were common, and special message-sharing systems leading to email were first developed in the 1960s, independent computer-to-computer networking began with ARPANET in 1969. This expanded to become the Internet (coined in 1974), and then the World Wide Web in 1991.

MOSFET scaling, the rapid miniaturization of MOSFETs at a rate predicted by Moore's law,[50] led to computers becoming smaller and more powerful, to the point where they could be carried. During the 1980s–1990s, laptops were developed as a form of portable computer, and personal digital assistants (PDAs) could be used while standing or walking. Pagers, widely used by the 1980s, were largely replaced by mobile phones beginning in the late 1990s, providing mobile networking features to some computers. Now commonplace, this technology is extended to digital cameras and other wearable devices. Starting in the late 1990s, tablets and then smartphones combined and extended these abilities of computing, mobility, and information sharing.

Internet video was popularized by YouTube, an online video platform founded by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen in 2005, which enabled the video streaming of MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) user-generated content from anywhere on the World Wide Web.[51]

Electronic paper, which has origins in the 1970s, allows digital information to appear as paper documents.

Optics
Further information: Optical communication, Image sensor, and Optical fiber

Optical communication has played an important role in communication networks.[52] Optical communication provided the hardware basis for Internet technology, laying the foundations for the Digital Revolution and Information Age.[53]

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, and subsequently achieved image transmission through a 75 cm long bundle which combined several thousand fibers.[54]

Metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) image sensors, which first began appearing in the late 1960s, led to the transition from analog to digital imaging, and from analog to digital cameras, during the 1980s–1990s. The most common image sensors are the charge-coupled device (CCD) sensor and the CMOS (complementary MOS) active-pixel sensor (CMOS sensor).[55][56]

See also

References
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Further reading
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