Lesson1

INFORMATION AGE
This section traces the development of the information age and discusses its
impact on society. It tackles the various ways the information age and social media have
influenced society and human lives.

Lesson Outcomes:

At the end of this session, students should be able to:

 Trace the development of the information age from the introduction of

Gutenberg’s press up to the era of social media.
 Determine the impacts of the information age to society; and
 Analyze the ways in which the information age and social media influence human
lives.

Introduction:
The Information Age (also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, or New Media
Age) is a historical period that began in the mid-20th century, characterized by a rapid
epochal shift from the traditional industry established by the Industrial Revolution to an
economy primarily based upon information technology.

Engage

Activity 1.1

Instructions: Answer the question that follow.

__________1. Who invented the printing press?

__________2. When was the printing press invented?

__________3. What device first compiled actuarial tables did engineering calculations,
and served as computers?
__________4. Who is the Father of the Computer Age?

__________5. What electromechanical machine enabled the British to read all daily
German Naval Enigma traffic?
__________6. What machine can solve any problem and perform any task from a written
program?
__________7. Who is the Filipino engineer who created the new silicon chip?

____________8. Who built a simple computer which around 8080 microprocessors that
were hooked up to a keyboard and televisions?
____________9. What did Steve Jobs call the computer described in no.8?
____________10. Who is the creator of Microsoft?

Explore
Activity 1.2
Instructions: Watch the 2018 documentary The Internet Revolution and Digital Future
Technology on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v==V9xZFZO7USA). Then,
write a short story essay of 300-500 words on the topic, “ What is the impact of the
information revolution on my learning in school?”.

The Gutenberg Press

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 mold 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 cost of printing documents.

The beginning 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 in
print permanently reformed the structure of society. Political and religious authority who
took pride of 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 the 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.
Enigma M4 Cypher Machine
 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 Name made the Enigma more

Alan Turing
complicated having approximately 10114 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
contributions of Turing along with other cryptologists shortened the war by two years.

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

Enstcheidungsproblem, first published in 1937, Turing presented a theoretical machine
called Turing machine that can solve any problem from simple instruction 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, 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 enterpreneurs, including
the founders of Apple Inc. In 1976 Steve Wozniak designed the aperating system,
hardware, and circuit board of the computer all by himself. Steve Jobs, Wosniak’s friend,
suggested to sell the Apple I as a fully assembled printed circuit board. This jumpstarted
their carrer 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

Apple I 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 Justine.tv, Twitch.tv); photo-video
sharing websites (e.g. Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, Keek, Vine); and question and
answer platform (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 depending on the
use of these technologies.

Elaborate

Activity 1.3

Instructions: Form groups with five members each. Reearch on the topic that will be
assigned to your group and write your arguments about it. The topics are:

1. People use social media to their advantage.

2. The information revolution has made the world a better place.
3. Facebook should be held accountable for the spread of “fake news”
4. Using social media platforms is a requisite to a person’s meaningful engagement
with the world.
Evaluate

Activity 1.4

Instructions: Watch the full documentary Science, Technology, and Information on the
Modern Battlefield on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUtfXuKQ7us).

Answer the following question:

How does the Information Revolution affect local and global peace and security?”

Cite specific examples to support your answer.