In 2009 we as a species can easily define our current era as the information age with the way we handle large amounts of information, transfer information, the speed at which we transfer information but most of this is reliant on computers and technology in general. A personal observation is that humans in this era are also able to comprehend and negotiate more information and transfer that information faster and faster, perhaps trained or conditioned by the day to day use of our evolving technology.
A proper example would be typing; where one starts out slow and unsteady, learning the movements and the location of the keys. As time goes on you begin to type faster until eventually you can type faster than you can write freehand, thus the information must flow quicker, either from the brain or through the brain from a source.
It doesn’t take a look into our future to see that we are in a faster paced world, it is here now and people are adapting to it, learning to process information in many different forms and in many different ways, aided by our technology.
But is this really a proper definition of the information age? I am of the opinion that it does not properly define this era and is not exclusive to any age for many thousands of years. The age or the era should be relative to the way information is processed and packaged at the time.
The Dark Ages were dark fundamentally as a result of the way the information was being processed and used. After the fall of Rome it is noted that there was an “era of recovery and learning.” Learning.
The Industrial Age is about production of goods divided by time. Much like a gear on a clock, the information is held on the spacing of the tines, the speed at which it revolves, and the energy used to produce it. As the industrial age comes to a close in most areas it for so long dominated, the tines on the gear now turn into 1s and 0s. 1 equals a tine where 0 equals the absence of a tine, or the space between them. On and off.
The information we use now is no different than it was 2,000 years ago. Information today is vital, important, priority, protected, expedited, coded, secure, just like it has always been since symbol hit papyrus or the first mark was made for any purpose.
Information at its base form is the very building block of every single thing in existence, from sub-atomic particles to the largest galaxy in space.
What man has done is learn to wrap a package around information and give it a definition, which is then left to interpretation since the package itself is there to preserve the information throughout time. This is media.
The first media is the same as the last media, also just as linear throughout time as information itself. The first book is exactly the same as the first blog. The first scratch on the wall is the exact same thing as the first Twitter post. The first painting of a bust is the same as the first MySpace post.
To this I say that the information age has been and always will be. Whatever package or definition we’d like to wrap around it may change it, but by appearances only.
The source of our information when presented as I have above, makes information and the way we as a species deal with it, somewhat natural, fluid, unending. If there was a way to define this age based on the level of information transferred, the speed, and the processing, and/or the goals and levels at which we wish to deal with information - this would be the Instant Age.