THE

INFORMATION
AGE
Group 1
The Information Age

■ The Information Age 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”
■ Information Age is also called Digital Age and the New
Media Age because it is associated with the development
of computers.
■ According to 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.
History
EVENT
YEAR

3000 BC Sumerian writing system used

pictograph to represent words
2900 BC Beginnings of Egyptian Hieroglyphic
writing
1300 BC Tortoise shell and oracle bone
writing were used
500 BC Papyrus roll was used

220 BC Chinese small seal writing was

developed
100 AD Book (parchment codex)

105 AD Woodblock printing and paper was

invented by the Chinese
1455 Johannes Gutenberg Invented
the printing press using
movable metal type
1755 Samuel Johnson’s dictionary
standardized English
Speaking
1802 The Library of Congress was
established
Invention of the carbon arc
lamp

1824 Research on persistence of

vision published
1830’s First viable design for a
digital computer.
Augusta Lady Byron writes
the world’s first computer

1837 Program Invention of the

telegraph in Great Britain
and the United
States

1861 Motion pictures were

projected onto a screen
1876 Dewey Decimal system was
introduced.

1877 Eadweard Muybridge

demonstrated high-speed
photography
1899 First magnetic recordings
were released

1902 Motion picture special

effects were used

1906

Lee DeForest invented the

electronic amplifying tube
(triode).
1923 Television camera tube was
invented by Zvorkyn.

1926 First practical sound movie

1939 Regularly scheduled

television broadcasting
began in the US
1940’s Beginnings of information
science as a discipline

1945 Vannevar Bush foresaw the

invention of hypertext
1946 ENIAC computer was
developed

1948 Birth of field-of-information

theory proposed by Claude
E. Shannon
1957 Planar transistor was
developed by Jean Hoerni

1958 First integrated circuit

1960’s Library of Congress

developed LC MARC
(machine- readable code)
1969 UNIX operating system
was developed, which
could handle
multitasking.
1971 Intel introduced the first
microprocessor chip
1972 Optical laserdisc was
developed by Philips and
MC.

1974 MCA and Philips agreed

on a standard videodisc
encoding format
1975 Altair Microcomputer Kit
was released: first
personal computer for
the public

1977 RadioShack introduced

the first complete
personal computer

1984 Apple Macintosh

computer was
introduced
Mid 1980’s

Artificial intelligence was

separated from information

1987 Hypercard was developed by

Bill Atkinson recipe box
Metaphor
 1991 Four hundred fifty complete
works of literature on one
CD- ROM was released

January 1997

RSA (encryption and network

security software) Internet
security code cracked for a
48-bit number
■ As man evolved, information and it’s
dissemination has also evolved in many ways. It
started to grow at a rate we were unprepared to
handle.
■ It was difficult to collect and manage information
starting in the 1960’s and 1970’s because of its
abundance
■ In the 1990’s information became the currency in
the business world.
Detailed facts on the
Information Age
Information
Article must
“Truths of the compete.
information Age”

■ Newer is equated with truer.

■ Selection is a viewpoint.
■ The media sells what the culture buys.
■ The early word gets the perm.
■ You are what you eat and so is your brain.
■ Anything in great demand will be counterfeited.
Detailed facts on the
Information Age
Article “Truths of the information Age”
Ideas are seen as controversial.
Undead information walks ever on.
■ Media Presence creates the story.
■ The medium selects the message.
■ The whole truth is a pursuit.
Computer

■ Computer are among the most important

contributors of advances in the information age to
society.
■ A computer is an electronic device that stores and
process data. It runs on a program that contains
the exact, step-by-step directions to solve a
problem.
Types of Computer
■ Computers are associated with numerous terms and
descriptions.

1. Personal Computer
2. Desktop Computer
3. Laptops
4. Personal Digital Assistant
5. Server
6. Mainframes
7. Wearable Computers
The World Wide Web
■ Several historians trace the origin of the Internet to
Claude E. Shannon, an American Mathematician 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.
■ Sergey Brin and Larry Page, directors of a Stanford
research project, built a search engine that listed results
to reflect page popularity when they determined that the
most popular result would frequently be the most usable.
After talking with family, friends, and other investors into
contributing $1 million, the researchers launched their
company in 1998. Google is now the world’s most popular
search engine, accepting more than 200 million queries
daily.
■ Critics charged that the Internet created a technological
divide that increased the gap between the members of the
higher class and lower class of society.
■ On one hand, the unregulated and loose nature of the
Internet allowed pornography to be broadcast to millions
of homes.
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 of
information technology to store, organize, and analyze
vast amount of biological data which is available in the
form of sequences and structures of proteins-the building
blocks of organisms and nucleic acids-the information
carrier.
■ The initial databases of protein sequences were
maintained at individual laboratories, the development of
a consolidated formal database, known as SWISS-PROT
protein sequence database, was initiated in 1986. It now
has about 70,000 protein sequences from more than
5,000 model organisms, a small fraction of all known
■ Computers and software tools are widely used for
generating these databases and to identify the
function of proteins, model the structure of
proteins, determine the coding (useful) regions of
nucleic acid sequences, find suitable drug
compounds from a large pool, and optimize the
drug development process by predicting possible
targets.
How to Check the Reliability
of Web Sources
■ The Internet contains a vast collection of highly valuable
information but it may also contain unreliable, biased information
that mislead people. The following guidelines can help us check
the reliability of web sources that we gather. It is noteworthy to
consider and apply the following guidelines to avoid
misinformation.

Guidelines
1. Who is the author of the article/site?
2. Who published the site?
3. What is the main purpose of the site? Why did the
author
4. Who is the intended audience?
5. What is the quality of information provided on the
website?
Examples of Useful and
Reliable Web Sources
1. AFA e-Newsletter (Alzheimer’s Foundation of America
newsletter)
2. American Memory – the Library of Congress historical
digital collection.
3. Bartleby.com Great Books Online – a collection of free
e-books including fictions, nonfictions, references, and
verses.
4. Chronicling America – search and view pages from
American newspapers from 1880-1922.
5. Cyber Bullying – a free collection of e-books from ebrary
plus additional reports and documents to help better
6. Drug information websites:
• National Library of Medicine’s MedlinePlus
• Drugs.com
• PDRhealth
7. Global Gateway: World Culture & Resources (from the Library of
Congress)
8. Google Books
9. Googlescholar.com
10. History sites with primary documents:
• AMDOCS: Documents for the study of American history
• Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy (Yale
Law School)
• Internet Modern History Sourcebook: Colonial Latin America
• Teacher Oz’s Kingdom of History
11. Illinois Digital Archives – the Illinois State Library working
with libraries, museums, and historical societies in Illinois
provides this collection of materials related to Illinois history.

12. Internet Archive- -a digital library of Internet sites and other

cultural artifacts in digital form.

13. Internet Archive for CARLI digitized resources.

14. Internet Public Library

15. ipl2 = a merger of Librarians’ Internet Index and Internet

Public Library. Special interest may include the “Literary
Criticisms” page which can be found after clicking on the
“Special Collections” link.
16. Librarians’ Internet Index

17. Making of America – a digital library of primary

sources in 18. Maps from the University of Texas at
Austin collection in American social history.

18. Maps – from the University of Texas at Austin

collections. Includes historical and thematic maps.
19. NationMaster – a massive central data source and a handy way to
graphically compare nations. It is a vast compilation of data from such
sources as the CIA World Factbook, UN, and OECD.

20. Nursing sites:

•A HRQ (www.ahrq.gov)
• National Guidelines Clearinghouse (www.guideline.gov)
• PubMed (www.nlm.nih.gov)

21. Project Gutenberg – the first and largest single collection of free
electronic books with currently over 20,000 e-books available.