TOPIC 9 : Information Age

Content Standard: The learners demonstrate an understanding on the development of the

information age and social media discusses the impact on society and
human lives.

Learning Outcomes: The learners will be able to:

1. trace the development of the information age from the introduction of Gutenberg's press
up to the era of social media;
2. determine the impacts of the information age to society; and
3. analyze the ways in which the information age and social media influence human lives.

History of Information Age

The 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.

The beginnings of mass communication can be traced back to the invention of the printing press.
The development of a fast and easy of disseminating information in print permanently reformed
the way 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." During World War II, the Allies (U.S., 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 Nazis made the Enigma more complicated having approximately 10
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 a computer, that can
solve any problem by performing any task from a written program (DeHaan, 2012).

In the 1970s, the generation who witnessed the dawn of the computer age was described as the
generation with "electronic brains." The people of 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 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
jumpstarted their career as founders of Apple Inc.

From 1973 onward, social media platforms were introduced from variations of multi-user chat
rooms; instant-messaging applications (e.g., AOL, Yahoo messenger, MSN messenger, Windows
messenger); bulletin-board forum systems, game-based social networking sites (e.g., Facebook,
Friendster, Myspace) and business-oriented social networking websites (e.g., Xing); messaging,
video and voice calling services (e.g., Viber, Skype); blogging platform, image and video hosting
websites (e.g., Flicker); discovery and dating-oriented websites (e.g., Tagged, Tinder); video
sharing services (e.g., YouTube); real- time social media feed aggregator (e.g., FriendFeed); live-
streaming (e.g., Justin.tv, Twitch.tv); photo-video sharing websites (e.g., Pinterest. Instagram,
Snapchat, Keek, Vine); and question-and-answer platforms (e.g., 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.

References:

Quinto, E. J. M., & Nieva, A. D. (2019). Science, Technology and Society Outcome Based Module.
(B. C. Ofalia, Ed.) (First). C & E Publishing Inc.