CHAPTER

THE INFORMATION AGE (GUTENBERG TO

7 SOCIAL MEDIA)

OBJECTIVES:

At the end of the chapter, the students shall be able to:

1. Linked learned concepts to the development of the information age and its impact on
society
2. Illustrate how social media and the information age have impacted our lives

PRE-ASSESSMENT ACTIVITY: SITUATION

Imagine that you are at lost in the wilderness and there is a substitution cypher (a
method of encrypting message in which the letters of the original text are systematically
replaced by different alphabet) that you need to answer to solve your dilemma.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R

Hint: This is the first thing that you will be doing when you are at lost

Encrypted word: AFXGJESLAGF KWSJUZAFY

Answer: __________________________________

PRESENTATION OF CONTENTS
Information Age
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.
Figure 1. The Gutenberg Press
(www.pinterest.com)

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 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 on print
permanently reformed the structure of society. Political and religious authorities who took
pride in being learned and threatened by the sudden rise of literacy among people. With the
rise of the printing press, the printing press made the mass production of books possible
which made books accessible not only in 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, (US,
Canada, Britain, France, USSR, Australia, etc.), countries that opposed the Axis powers
(Germany, Japan, Italy, Hungary Romania, and Bulgaria), were challenge with the 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.

Figure 2. “Enigma M4” Cypher Machine

(justcollecting.com)

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
Figure 3. Alan Turing
that enabled the British to decipher

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encrypted messages of the German shortened the war by two years
Enigma machine. This contribution of (Munro,2012).
Turing along with other cryptologists

In his paper On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,

first published in 1937, Turing presented a theoretical machine called Turing machine that can
solve any problem from simple instructions encoded on a paper tape. He also demonstrated
the simulation of Turing machine to construct a single Universal Machine. This became the
foundation of computer science and the invention of a machine later called a computer, that
can solve any problem by performing any task from q written program (DeHaan,2012).
In the 1970s, the generation who witnessed the dawn of the computer age was
prescribed as the generation with “electronic brains”. The people of this generation were the
first to be introduced to personal computers (PCs). Back then, Homebrew Computer Club, an
early computer hobbyist group, gathered regularly to trade parts of computer and 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 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 jump started their career ass founders of Apple
Inc.

Figure 4. Apple I, also called Apple-1 or Apple Computer 1

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.

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 ACTIVITY 7
Name: __________________________________ Date: _________________
Course/Yr./Block: ________________________ Score: _________________

1. Fake News

Problems on fake news have surfaced different multimedia platform, with these, users
must be knowledgeable on how to verify the authenticity of a source. Create a checklist on
how to check on the reliability and authenticity of information found in websites and journals.

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