The dawn of the digital age
In 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: By means of electricity the world of matter has become one great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in one breathless point of time. The round globe is a vast brain, endowed with intelligence.
Since then, humanity has not stopped to realize Hawthorne’s vision of a world where human intelligence is interconnected. In the 21st century, global society lives on the frontiers of the digital age. Mass production is absorbed by mass customization. Today’s consumer applies their knowledge, tastes, expectations and specific demands to producers who must be able to satisfy them to be successful. We are in the era of the knowledge-based economy.
The Internet has been around since 1969. British scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 and fully implemented it in 1991, thus the beginning of a global network. It is the current definitive platform to disseminate information worldwide, its growth goes beyond exponential. Is print media as we know it today a thing of yesteryear, pushed into obsolescence?
The I-WAY has created an information society. This has a significant impact in the economic, political, social, cultural, scientific, medical, educational and technological fields. Networked technology introduced the world to digitization. It opens up the creation, distribution, integration, dissemination, use and manipulation of information in many creative and productive ways. The knowledge economy creates wealth through the exploitation of knowledge and understanding. Beniger claims that people who have the means to participate in this form of society are called digital citizens.– one of the many labels that usher in a new phase of society in the 21st century.
The growth of information in society.
There is no defined or universally accepted meaning of what exactly is the information society. Theories bounce around about this transformation in society that began in the 1970s. The Internet is not the only information technology that is widely used. There are specific means and modes of production that influence the changing forms of society.
Technologically mediated information growth has been quantified in different ways, including the technological capacity of society to store information, communicate information, and compute information.
Touraine wrote in 1988 referring to the programmed society-“ this phrase captures its ability to create models of management, production, organization, distribution and consumption, such a society appears at all functional levels, as the product of an action carried out by society itself, not the result of natural laws or cultural specificities. ”
At the dawn of networked technology, information of all kinds becomes digital, reduced to bits stored in computers, racing at the speed of light across global networks. It is a new world of possibilities. The digital whirlwind is taking society by storm. This digital growth is quantified in different ways. It manages how society stores information, communicates and computes data. The technical capacity to store information grew from 2.6 exabytes (optimally compressed) in 1986 to 295 exabytes in 2007. This shows a growth of 60% per year over the last two decades.
Wisegeek explains:
1024 gigabytes is a terabyte and 1024 terabytes is a petabyte.
To put this in perspective, a petabyte is approximately one million gigabytes (1,048,576).
In the late 1980s, a large hard drive was considered 80 megabytes. Today, that amount of space isn’t even enough for a current Windows operating system without running into storage limits. Robust programs, music files, digital versatile discs (DVDs), streaming video, and high-resolution graphics have become memory-hungry beasts that devour real estate bit by byte. It would have been unthinkable in the 1980s that the home computer would one day need tens and even hundreds of gigabytes to store data. Although the petabyte is still well beyond terabyte territory, who’s to say where the home computer will be another two decades from now?
With the influx of computers, CD-ROMs, hard drives, USB flash drives, and other disks, the byte cannot hold larger values. With larger volumes of information, more bytes are needed:
kilobyte -KB- is 1024 bytes, but most relate to 1000 bytes.
Megabyte-MB- is 1,024 kilobytes
Gigabyte -GB- are 1,024 megabytes
Terabyte -TB- is 1,024 gigabytes
Petabyte- PB- is 1,024 terabytes
Exabyte-EB- is 1,024 petabytes
Zettabyte-ZB- 1,024 exabytes
Yottabyte-YB- is 1,024 zettabytes
Note: Many hardware and hard drive manufacturers consider a kilobyte to be equal to 1000 bytes. by Wisegeek
dangers
The automobile changed the world in many ways, economically, physically, and socially. Mechanized agriculture is the only way to farm. The discovery of the printing press was a great event: it facilitated the printing of books, as opposed to the laborious texts written by hand.
Interactive multimedia, once again, is changing the face of the world very quickly. At first, the most popular use of the Internet was email and chat rooms. Then comes social media, telecommuting, blogging and vlogging and more. There is already a dark side in the digital world. There are fears that technology will bring unemployment, mind numbing and invasion of privacy.
In his book Digital Economy, Don Tapscott writes :”The digital world, while offering exciting promise, also has a dark side. Social stratification, massive social dislocation and conflict are dangers facing man with this digitization. Violence and suffering can be seen everywhere the world instantly, not just in poor countries. There are new social, ethical, and governmental issues that will emerge as time goes on.”
What awaits us
Critical academics say that mainstream criticisms of information society, knowledge society, network society, postmodern society, postindustrial society, and other labels tend to create the impression that we are entering an entirely new type of society.
According to Wikipedia, Frank Webster argues that this type of approach emphasizes discontinuity, that contemporary society has nothing in common with the society of 100 or 150 years ago. He argues that these assumptions mean that nothing can be done. Ideologically there is nothing that society can do and you just have to adapt to the existing reality. Webster insists on the continuities that characterize change. He emphasizes the different era of capitalism, that is, the laizzez-faire of the 19th century, corporate capitalism in the 20th century, and informational capitalism for the 21st century.
You society be the judge.
Referee:
Digital Economy by Don Tapscott
wisegeek.com
Wikipedia on Frank Webster