Information Age

Topics: Traces the development of the information age and discusses its impact on society. It tackles the various ways
the information age and social media have influenced society and human lives.

Beginning of Communication
 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”.

Enigma
 During World War II, the Allies (US, Canada, Britain, France, USSR, 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.

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 Nazi’s 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 in
1937, 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 and the invention of a machine later called computer, that can
solve any problem by performing any task from a written program (DeHaan, 2012).

Apple Computer 1
 In the 1970s, the generation who witnessed the drawn of the computer age was described as the generation with
“electronic brains.”
  The people in 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.
 In 1976 Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Inc., developed the computer that made him famous: the Apple 1.
 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 1 as a fully assembled printed circuit board.
 This jumpstarted their career as founders of Apple Inc.

Social Media
 From 1973 onward, social media platforms were introduced from variations of multi-user chat rooms; instant-
messaging applications (AOL, Yahoo messenger, MSN messenger, Windows messenger).
 Bulletin-board forum systems, game-based social networking sites such as facebook, Friendster, myspace, and
business-oriented social networking websites like Xing.
 Messaging, video and voice calling services (Viber, Skype), blogging platform, image and video hosting websites
(Flicker).
 Discovery and dating-oriented websites (Tagged and Tinder), video sharing services (Youtube), real-time social
media feed aggregator (FriendFeed), live-streaming (Justin.tv, Twitch.tv).
 Photo-video sharing websites (Pinterest, Instragram, Snapchat, Keek, Vine) and question –and –answer platforms
(Quora).
 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.