The Information Age

Where the beginning of The Computer Age might be arbitrarily placed with the development of computers as machines "capable of automatically performing (that is without human intervention) sequences of calculations and of choosing between alternate sequences of calculations based on the results of earlier calculations" (Raymond Kurzweil 169) to aid the Allied World War II efforts, the beginning of The Information Age might, arguably, be located in 1982 with the publication of John Naisbitt's Megatrends.

And while the central themes of The Computer Age were variations on computer technology development and utilization beyond the initial concerns of the military industrial complex (for example, the invention and development of the Internet), the central theme of Naisbitt's future scenario involved decentralization and fluidity brought about by the ability to exchange information quickly and easily via computer connectivity. Naisbitt proposed ten Megatrends, or ten major changes, that would, he said, shape The Information Age. They were:
  1. Industrial Society --> to Information Society
  2. Forced Technology --> to High Tech/High Touch (FAXs that can be touched, cut, pasted, colored, etc.)
  3. National Economy --> to World Economy
  4. Short Term --> to Long Term
  5. Centralization --> to Decentralization
  6. Institutional Help --> to Self-Help
  7. Representative Democracy --> to Participatory Democracy
  8. Hierarchies --> to Networking
  9. North --> to South
  10. Either/Or --> to Multiple Option
None of these projections captured the public, government, or industrial imagination, or produced more profound socioeconomic and/or political effects, than the notion that our economy would change from industrial to informational. In an industrial society, manufactured goods and the commodities (the raw materials) needed to make them, forms the center of economic value. In an information society, information stored and transmitted using computer technology assumes central value. Naisbitt contended our economy would mass produce information the way it once turned out automobiles, structural steel, or refrigerators. This production of information would, he said, replace traditional industrial manufacturing, creating a new economy based on the production, distribution, and utilization of information. Naisbitt predicted that we would live and work and play and learn in an information society. The production of this information, Naisbitt contended, was destined to become the principal product of our economic future. Naisbitt even called for a "knowledge theory of value" to replace the current traditional Marxian labor theory of value, saying that, in an information society, value is increased by knowledge.

John Naisbitt employs two buzzwords: information and knowledge, for which Harlan Cleveland provides useful definitions. Cleveland defines information as "the sum total of all the facts and ideas that are available to be known by somebody at a given moment in time" (34), or the result of selecting and organizing knowledge in a way that is useful to somebody at a given moment in time. And wisdom, he says, is integrated knowledge,
information made super-useful by creating theory rooted in disciplined knowledge but crossing disciplinary barriers to weave into an integrated whole something more than the sum of the parts. (34)
Another way of defining these terms, suggests Cleveland, is in order of their complexity. Information is horizontal, knowledge is structured and hierarchical, and wisdom is organic and flexible.

Harlan Cleveland insists that information as a resource is a fundamentally new and diffusive concept. Information, he says, disagreeing with Naisbitt, is not a commodity that can be mass manufactured and, therefore, cannot be managed by concepts developed for the management of things, concepts like property rights, depletion, market economics, class struggle, and top-down leadership. Information, he says, is characterized by special attributes.
  1. Information expands as it is used by more and more people for more and more reasons. Because this expansion is limited only by time, there is the obvious danger of a society that makes its living from information manipulation suffering from information overload. See "The Shocked Age" for more on this.
  2. As it is expandable, information is also compressible. Information can be collected and stored in concentrated forms for easier handling. But, as Cleveland says, "by selecting and compressing information to produce knowledge and wisdom, some information is bound to be lost" (37). What is lost may be trivial, or important. The distinction is largely subjective. The current debate in higher education over what literary texts should be included in the so called "canon" is a case in point.
  3. Information can replace capital, labor, and physical resources. The replacement of factory workers with robots and automation is a good example.
  4. Information is transportable at incredibly high speeds. In just a few seconds, information can be sent around the world. It has taken us most of the 20th Century to move from foot travel to supersonic jets, but only the past two decades to achieve the ability to send and receive information anywhere in the world nearly instantaneously.
  5. Information is diffusive and resists all forms of public secrecy, intellectual property rights, and confidentiality.
  6. Where things are exchanged and control of them transferred from one person to another, information can only be shared. This fact has profound implications for the kinds of transactions information can be involved in. Cleveland concludes that once information is shared it becomes like a story, retained by both parties and enhanced from the sharing (37).
We are currently trying to decide whether we prefer Harlan Cleveland's notions of information as something fundamentally diffusive or those of John Naisbitt who sees information as a commodity.

Standing at the abyss of the future, straining for insight about what to expect, we turn once again to the futurists for advice. Edith Weiner says The Information Age is ending and that we are moving into a personal economy based on an integration of education, entertainment, and information---all for the purpose of using information to create new, customized products and services. The Information Age, she says, will be followed by The Virtual Age, which will involve more obscure uses of information.

"The Seven Ages of Computer Connectivity" (The Information Age)
by John F. Barber
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