The Information Age

Science, Technology and Society

LESSON OBJECTIVES
At the end of this lesson, the students should be
able to:
• Define information age;
• Discuss the history of information age; and
• Understand the factors that need to be considered
in checking website sources.
INTRODUCTION
• Highly modernized, automated, data-driven, and technologically advanced - these
best describe our society nowadays, as evidenced by how information could be
transferred or shared quickly.

• The information aged is defined as a "period starting in the last quarter of the 20th
century when information became effortlessly accessible through publications and
through the management of information by computers and computer networks."

• The information age is also called the Digital Age and the New Media Age because
it was associated with the development of computers.
 JAMES R. MESSENGER

• who proposed the Theory of Information

Age in 1982, "the Information age is a true
new aged based upon the interconnection
of computers via telecommunications, with
basis. Furthermore, the primary factors
driving this new age forward are
convenience and user friendliness which, in
turn, will create user dependence."
• As man evolved, information and its dissemination has also evolved in
many ways,. Eventually, we no longer kept them to ourselves; instead,
we share them and manage them in different means. Information got
ahead of us. It started to grow at a rate we were unprepared to handle.
Because of the abundance of information, it was difficult to collect and
manage them starting in the 1960s and 1970s.
 RICHARD WURMAN

• CALLED IT "INFORMATION ANXIETY." IN

THE 1990S, INFORMATION BECAME THE
CURRENCY IN THE BUSINESS WORLD.
INFORMATION WAS THE PREFERRED
MEDIUM OF EXCHANGE AND THE
INFORMATION MANAGERS SERVED AS
INFORMATION OFFICERS.
 "TRUTHS OF THE INFORMATION AGE".
ROBERT HARRIS DETAILED SOME FACTS ON THE INFORMATION

1. Information must compete. 7. Anything in great demand

will be counterfeited.
2. Newer is equated with truer.
8. Ideas are seen as
3. Selection is a viewpoint. 4. controversial.
4. The media sells what the 9. Undead information walks
culture busy. ever on.
5. The early word gets the 10. Media presence creates the
perm. 6. story.
6. You are what you eat and so 11. The medium selects the
is your brain. message.
 COMPUTER
• Computer A computer is an
electronic device that stores
and processes data
(information). It runs on a
program that contains the
exact, step-by-step directions
to solve a problem (UShistory
org, 2017)
 TYPES OF COMPUTER

1. PERSONAL COMPUTER (PC)

• It is a single-user instrument, PCs were first known as
microcomputers since they were a complete
computer but built on a smaller scale than the
enormous system operated by most businesses.

2. DESKTOP COMPUTER
• It is described as a PC that is not designed for portability.
The assumption with a desktop is that it will be set up in a
permanent spot. A workstation is simply a desktop
computer that has a more powerful processor, additional
memory, and enhanced capabilities for performing special
group of tasks, such as 3D graphics or game development.
 TYPES OF COMPUTER

3. LAPTOPS
• These are portable computers that integrate the
essentials of a desktop computer in a battery-
powered package, which are somewhat larger than
a typical hardcover book. They are commonly called
notebooks.

4. PERSONAL DIGITAL ASSISTANTS (PDAs)

• These are tightly integrated computers that usually have no

keyboards but rely on a touch screen for user input. PDAs
are typically smaller than a paperback, lightweight, and
battery-powered.
 TYPES OF COMPUTER

5. SERVER 6. MAINFRAMES 7. WEARABLE COMPUTERS

• It refers to a computer that • These are huge computer • They involve materials that are
has been improved to systems that can fill an usually integrated into cell
provide network services to entire room. They are used
other computers, Servers phones, watches and other
usually boast powerful especially by large firms to small objects or places. They
processors, tons of memory, describe the large, perform common computer
and large drives. expensive machines that applications such as databases,
process millions of email, multimedia, and
transactions every day. The schedulers.
term "mainframe" has been
replaced by enterprise
server.
 THE WORLD WIDE WEB (INTERNET)
• Several historians trace the origin of the internet to Claude F.
Shannon, an American Mathematicians who was considered as
the "Father of Information Theory". He worked at Bell
Laboratories and at age 32, he published a paper proposing that
information can be quantitatively encoded as a sequence of ones
and zeroes.
• The internet is a worldwide system of interconnected networks
that facilitate data transmission among innumerable computers.
It was developed during the 1970s by the Department of
Defense. In case of an attack, military advisers suggested the
advantage of being able to operate on one computer from
another terminal.
• In the early days, the Internet was used mainly by scientists to
communicate with other scientists. The Internet remained under
government control until 1984. (Rouse, 2014)
 THE WORLD WIDE WEB (INTERNET)
• One early problem faced by internet users was speed.
Phone lines could only transmit information at a limited
rate. The development of fiber optic cables allowed for
billions of bits of information to be received every minute.
• Sergey Brin and Larry Page, directors of a Stanford
research project, built a research engine that listed results
to reflect page popularity when they determined that the
most popular results to frequently be the most usable.
Google is now the world's most popular search engine,
accepting more than 200 million queries daily.
• Back then, new forms of communication were also
introduced. Electronic mail, or email, was a suitable way to
send a message to fellow workers, business partners, or
friends. Message could be sent and received at the
convenience of the individual.
 THE WORLD WIDE WEB (INTERNET)
• A letter that took several days to arrive could be read in
minutes, Internet service providers like America Online and
CompuServe set up electronic chat rooms. These were open
areas of cyberspace where interested parties could join in a
conversation with perfect strangers. "Surfing the net" became a
pastime in and of itself.
• Consequently, companies whose businesses are built on
digitized information have become valuable and powerful in
relatively short period of time; the current Information Age has
spawned its own breed of wealthy influential brokers from
Microsoft's Bill Gates to Apple's Steve Jobs to Facebook's Mark
Zuckerberg.
• Nowadays, crimes in various forms are rampant because of the
use of social media. Cyber bullying is an issue that poses alarm
worldwide.
 APPLICATIONS OF COMPUTERS IN SCIENCE
AND RESEARCH
• One of the significant applications of computers for science and
research is evident in the field of bioinformatics. Bioinformatics is
the application if information technology to store, organize, and
analyze was amount of biological data which is available in the
forms of sequences and structures of proteins the building blocks
of organisms and nucleic acids - the information carrier.

• The human brain cannot store all the genetic sequences of

organisms and this huge amount of data can only be stored,
analyzes, and be used efficiently with the use of computers.
 APPLICATIONS OF COMPUTERS IN SCIENCE
AND RESEARCH
• SWISS-PROT protein sequence database, was initiated in 1986.
• Some of the software tools which are handy in the analysis include:
• BLAST (used for comparing sequences)
• Annotator (an interactive genome analysis tool)
• GeneFinder (tool to identify coding regions and splice sites)
• The sequence information generated by the human genome
research initiated in 1988, has now been stored as primary
information source for future applications in medicine.
 APPLICATIONS OF COMPUTERS IN SCIENCE
AND RESEARCH
• Moreover, from the pharmaceutical industry's point of view, bioinformatics is
the key to rational drug discovery.

• Molecular modelling, which requires a lot of calculations, has become faster

due to the advances in computer processors and its architecture (Madan,n.d).

• In plant biotechnology, bioinformatics is found to be useful in the areas of

identifying diseases genes and designing plants with high nutrition value
(Madan, n.d.).