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Joe Andrieu wrote an interesting post recently about how the end of the Information Age seems to be upon us. What effect has the Information Age had on our everyday lives? Well, he describes it like this:

…the Information Age has radically changed the modern lifestyle. Computers and networks and telecommunications have profoundly disrupted and re-invented some of the most important elements of our society. How we buy and sell. How we communicate. How we socialize. How we commit crimes and how we enforce our laws. Even how we sin and how we fall in love. Without doubt the Information Age is one of the Great Ages, affecting the lives of almost everyone fortunate enough to be living in the first world.

I think that there is more to it than that. The Industrial Age was responsible for an enormous transition in the cultures of the Western world, and took place over decades, even generations. The effects of Industrialization were so large that it took a very long time to be fully implemented. In addition, these kinds of sweeping changes did not take place at a uniform rate around the world. The same is true of the Information Age. As William Gibson says, “the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

Information Infrastructure

The transition from Industrial society to Information society has taken quite a while, and I would submit that it isn’t over, not by a long shot. True, there are countries that have seemingly moved straight from the Agriculture society to an Information society, without the painful Industrial transition. Yet, none of the societies of the modern world have really figured out how to use the new infrastructure of the Knowledge-worker economy to its fullest. Another quote from Andrieu:

We move from one great age to another when, as a Society, we let go of the trappings of the previous age and begin to define ourselves in new terms, absent the defining elements of yesteryear. We no longer think of ourselves as farmers or factory workers… the Information Age has knowledge workers, and we largely define ourselves by the information accessories in our lifestyle: our iPod, our MySpace page, our blog, when in previous ages it may have been our car, our company, or our home town, livestock or crop.

But aren’t these defining accessories Information Age artifacts? Yep. And while they may seem hot today, their days are already numbered. I don’t know how to see the future to what the next Great Age is going to be…

Personally, I believe that the next “wave” of cultural change is going to be due to a generation (or two) of low-grade global warfare. (But that is a topic for a different blog.) I believe that the generations of young people in Junior- and Senior-High Schools around the world right now are going to be the ones who witness the end of the Information Age. In fact, they are the ones who will usher it in, as they leave their childhood homes and move out to make their own way in the world.

New Connections

The youngest of today’s technology users will not remember a time when no one had a cell phone. A time when, if your car broke down and you could not get to a pay phone you could be stranded for hours or days. I have heard young teens mock older TV shows and movies because the entire premise of a comical or dangerous situation is based on this kind of un-connectedness. And young people cannot imagine not being connected. I am baffled myself when I call someone during the course of my job, and they do not have voice mail.

With applications like Twitter and Myspace available to expose every part of their lives to their friends and family, privacy has a completely different meaning for them that it does (or did) for me and my parents. It does not take too great a stretch of imagination to realize that this transparency will have major implications on how, where, and why the next generation of workers choose to do their work.

“Networking” used to mean getting together somewhere with the other members of the Chamber of Commerce and drinking some wine, eating some cheese, and passing around business cards. Today, your blog is your business card and resume, and the people that you share with are on every continent. To use myself as an example, I have more e-mail interactions with my fellow bloggers in Europe and the Pacific Rim than I do with my own family here in the US.

Does this mean that we are on the verge of something new and equally transfomative? Andrieu thinks so:

…we, as a society, are starting to realize that perhaps we have too much information at hand. That instead, what we need is better, more meaningful information. As more and more of us define ourselves as something more than the information we consume and create, we are accelerating the end of the Information Age and clearing the ground for something new.

I suspect that it is simpler than that. A better analogy might be along the lines of the transition, during the Industrial Age, from steam power to electricity.

Henry Ford and Google

The moving assembly line was not introduced until 1913, over 100 years after the basic idea of an assembly line was introduced. Search engines are undergoing a similar transformation now. There is an awful (and I do mean awful) lot of information out there on the internets, too much for anyone to realistically ingest and produce anything meaningful. I have written about this before, in an article about new ways of looking at what we know. Will the transformation take 100 years? Definitely not.

Just as Henry Ford revolutionized the auto industry, Google has revolutionized how we find data in the information industry. The next big step (and it’s just around the corner) will be truly expert systems that can find real meaning and extract the proper context from that data. I would not call this the end of the Information Age, I would call this the fulfillment of it. The end of the Information Age will likely be as painful and disruptive as the end of the Age of Agriculture. I only pray that it is not this.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5odjrz. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen