The Information Age is a historic period in the 21st century characterized by the rapid shift from traditional industry that the Industrial Revolution brought through industrialization, to an economy based on information technology. The onset of the Information Age can be associated with the invention of the transistor, particularly the MOSFET (metal-oxide-silicon field-effect transistor), which revolutionized modern technology and became the fundamental building block of digital electronics in the information age.
According to the UN Public Administration Network, the Information Age formed by capitalizing on computer microminiaturization advances.
This evolution of technology in daily life and social organization has
led to the modernization of information and communication processes
becoming the driving force of social evolution.
The Information Age is the idea that access to and the control of
information is the defining characteristic of this current era in human
civilization.
The Information Age, also called the Computer Age, the Digital Age and the New Media Age, is coupled tightly with the advent of personal computers, but many computer historians trace its beginnings to the work of the American mathematician Claude E. Shannon. At age 32 and as a researcher at Bell Laboratories, Shannon published a landmark paper proposing that information can be quantitatively encoded as a series of ones and zeroes. Known as the "father of Information Theory," Shannon showed how all information media, from telephone signals to radio waves to television, could be transmitted without error using this single framework.
By the 1970s, with the development of the Internet by the United States Department of Defense and the subsequent adoption of personal computers a decade later, the Information or Digital Revolution was underway. More technological changes, such as the development of fiber optic cables and faster microprocessors, accelerated the transmission and processing of information.
By the 1970s, with the development of the Internet by the United States Department of Defense and the subsequent adoption of personal computers a decade later, the Information or Digital Revolution was underway. More technological changes, such as the development of fiber optic cables and faster microprocessors, accelerated the transmission and processing of information.
The World Wide Web, used initially by companies as an electronic billboard for their products and services, morphed into an interactive consumer exchange for goods and information. Electronic mail (email ), which permitted near-instant exchange of information, was widely adopted as the primary platform for workplace and personal communications. The digitization of information has had a profound impact on traditional media businesses, such as book publishing, the music industry and more recently the major television and cable networks. As information is increasingly described in digital form, businesses across many industries have sharpened their focus on how to capitalize on the Information Age.
Companies whose businesses are built on digitized information have become valuable and powerful in a relatively short period of time. In "The companies that define the Information Age are the ones that know consumers the best," author Larry Allen of Real Media Group points out that just as land owners held the wealth and wielded power in the Agrarian Age and manufacturers such as Henry Ford and Cyrus McCormick accumulated fortunes in the Industrial Age, the current Information Age has spawned its own breed of wealthy influential brokers, from Microsoft's Bill Gates to Apple's Steve Jobs to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.
Companies whose businesses are built on digitized information have become valuable and powerful in a relatively short period of time. In "The companies that define the Information Age are the ones that know consumers the best," author Larry Allen of Real Media Group points out that just as land owners held the wealth and wielded power in the Agrarian Age and manufacturers such as Henry Ford and Cyrus McCormick accumulated fortunes in the Industrial Age, the current Information Age has spawned its own breed of wealthy influential brokers, from Microsoft's Bill Gates to Apple's Steve Jobs to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.
Library expansion was calculated in 1945 by Fremont Rider to double in capacity every 16 years if sufficient space were made available. He advocated replacing bulky, decaying printed works with miniaturized microform
analog photographs, which could be duplicated on-demand for library
patrons or other institutions. He did not foresee the digital technology
that would follow decades later to replace analog microform with
digital imaging, storage, and transmission media. Automated, potentially
lossless digital technologies allowed vast increases in the rapidity of
information growth. Moore's law,
which was formulated around 1965, calculated that the number of
transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every
two years.
The proliferation of the smaller and less expensive personal
computers and improvements in computing power by the early 1980s
resulted in sudden access to and the ability to share and store
information for increasing numbers of workers. Connectivity between
computers within companies led to the ability of workers at different
levels to access greater amounts of information.
Information storage
The world's technological capacity to store information grew from 2.6 (optimally compressed) exabytes
in 1986 to 15.8 in 1993, over 54.5 in 2000, and to 295 (optimally
compressed) exabytes in 2007. This is the informational equivalent to
less than one 730-MB CD-ROM
per person in 1986 (539 MB per person), roughly 4 CD-ROM per person of
1993, 12 CD-ROM per person in the year 2000, and almost 61 CD-ROM per
person in 2007. It is estimated that the world's capacity to store information has reached 5 zettabytes in 2014. This is the informational equivalent of 4,500 stacks of printed books from the earth to the sun.
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, 2.9 × 1011 MIPS in 2000 to 6.4 × 1012 MIPS in 2007. An article in the recognized Journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution reports that by now 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)".
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