REACTION PAPER

IN
SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY

Submitted By: Eddie D. Guno

Submitted To: Juanita Z. Sayson

 Reaction Paper on
“What is Information Age? What does Information Age mean?”

Base on the video that I have seen, the Information Age 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.
 Reaction Paper on
“Claude Shannon Father of the Information Age”

On the video Claude Elwood Shannon was born on April 30, 1916 in Petoskey, Michigan.
After attending primary and secondary school in his neighboring hometown of Gaylord, he
earned bachelor’s degrees in both electrical engineering and mathematics from the
University of Michigan. After graduation, Shannon moved to the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) to pursue his graduate studies. While at M.I.T., he worked with Dr.
Vannevar Bush on one of the early calculating machines, the "differential analyzer," which
used a precisely honed system of shafts, gears, wheels and disks to solve equations in
calculus. Though analog computers like this turned out to be little more than footnotes in
the history of the computer, Dr. Shannon quickly made his mark with digital electronics, a
considerably more influential idea. In prize-winning masters thesis completed in the
Department of Mathematics, Shannon proposed a method for applying a mathematical
form of logic called Boolean algebra to the design of relay switching circuits. This
innovation, credited as the advance that transformed circuit design “from an art to a
science,” remains the basis for circuit and chip design to this day. Shannon received both a
master's degree in electrical engineering and his Ph.D. in mathematics from M.I.T. in 1940.
In 1941, Shannon took a position at Bell Labs, where he had spent several prior summers.
His war-time work on secret communication systems was used to build the system over
which Roosevelt and Churchill communicated during the war. When his results were
finally de-classified and published in 1949, they revolutionized the field of cryptography.
Understanding, before almost anyone, the power that springs from encoding information in
a simple language of 1's and 0's, Dr. Shannon as a young scientist at Bell Laboratories
wrote two papers that remain monuments in the fields of computer science and
information theory.

Lesson Learn:
“Whether we like it or not,
the Internet will continue to find
its way into our daily routines.”